THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON:  CONSTANTINE’S GREATEST CON OR THE WORK OF GOD?

 

By:  Moses Flores

 

 

            Finally, we come to the most dangerous of all the doctrinal assertions of The Da Vinci Code:  that the Bible is product of men and not ultimately of God.  Here are some of the quotes, again, from Leigh Teabing:

 

“The Bible did not arrive by fax from Heaven…The Bible is a product of man, my dear.  Not of God.  The Bible did not magically fall from the clouds.  Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions.  History has never had a definitive version of the book.[1]”

           

            Also,

 

“More than eighty  gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.[2]”

 

“…Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after  Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man.  To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke.  From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history…Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike.  The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned…Fortunately for historians, some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive.  The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950’s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.  And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi…these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms…the scrolls highlight glaring historical discrepancies and fabrications, clearly confirming that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda – to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.”[3]

 

            Statements like these raise many questions for Christians about how we got the Bible.  Did Constantine determine the New Testament Canon of Scripture? What about the other Gospels mentioned in The Da Vinci Code?  Should they have been part of the New Testament?  Is the New Testament “false testimony”?  Dan Brown’s claims are clearly intended to undermine the authority of the New Testament.  Lets examine the evidence in order to see who is being honest.

 

Constantine, the Canon and the Council of Nicaea

 

            In regards to the first assertions, concerning the origin of Scripture, Sir Leigh Teabing teases that the Bible did not arrive by a fax from heaven.  His point being that the Bible did not simply fall out of the sky nor did a “divine table of contents” appear anywhere.  Of this assertion, there are no qualms.  It is acknowledged by historical Christianity that the Bible was written by men, and did come together over a period of time.  However, this is not to assert that Constantine gave us the Bible, particularly the New Testament, as we know it at the Council of Nicaea.  For a moment, we journey back to the Council of Nicaea.

            Recall the issue of the Council of Nicaea.  At issue is the relationship of the divinity of Christ to the divinity of the Father.  On topic was never the Canon of Scripture.  But let us suppose that it was.  How would that have faired in history if Constantine had proposed to not only “upgrade” the status of Christ but to also re-invent the canon of the New Testament Scriptures.  To answer this question, let us consider those who were in attendance at the Council.

            The early 4^th century marked a turning point in Christian history.  For the first time in history, the emperor of Rome was himself a Christian and showed a positive favor toward Christians and ceased permanently the persecution of Christians.  The Council of Nicaea was also the first time in Christian history that Christians could gather, under the sanction of the government to hammer out doctrinal disputes.  For the first time, in history, it was actually “safe” to be a Christian and not worry about hiding from the government. 

            But this did not come without a price.  Indeed, many Christians not long before this peace were sacrificing their very lives for the name of Christ.  Giving of the depths of their very souls – their body parts, their lives.  Some of these who had seen the persecutions of Rome were still living at the Council of Nicaea and were bishops and deacons in attendance.  Historian Phillip Schaff notes,

 

“Among the fathers of the council, besides a great number of obscure mediocrities, there were several distinguished and venerable men…Some, as confessors, still bore in their body the marks of Christ from the times of persecution:  Paphnutius of the Upper Thebaid, Potamon of Heraklea, whose right eye had been put out, and Paul of Neo-Caesarea, who had been tortured with red hot iron under Licinious, and crippled in both his hands.[4]”

 

            Here were men who had already given of themselves and probably would have given their lives for what they knew Christianity to be and who they believed Christ was. 

           

            It is Dan Brown’s assertion, through Leigh Teabing, that Constantine, a new convert to Christianity, simply commanded and proposed a different Christ and a different Bible than had been believed and used before.  Are we really going to believe that men who had already given of their own bodies and had fresh memories of friends lost to Roman cruelty, were simply going to allow that to happen?  Are we going to believe that these men simply went, “Sure Mr. Constantine!  I don’t care that you are going to change everything that I have believed and given myself for to be true about Christ so you can fulfill your political agenda.” 

            It is difficult to believe that these men, among the others who we assume were willing to give their lives since they were Christians and knew that at any moment they could be taken away or killed for their faith, were just going to roll over and re-structure their faith at the command of the office which had formerly persecuted them.  This is hardly likely at all. 

            But did Constantine have anything to do with the Bible?  History records that the only thing Constantine had to do with the Bible at the Council of Nicaea was to provide imperial funds in order to produce fifty copies of the Bible which was already in use in order to be given to the Churches who didn’t have one[5].  That is all Constantine did.  He did not re-invent the New Testament in any way. 

 

The Formation of the New Testament Canon

 

            Long before Constantine, the New Testament Church already had a functioning body of New Testament Scriptures which were of equal authority with the Word of God revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures.  The way these works came together was a historical process that took the Church centuries to finally come to any universal decisions.  This functional body of Scripture came together without the approval of any external authority like a council or synod; Rather, the Church had the inward testimony of the Spirit of God to know which works were of God and which ones were not. 

            In a very general way, it was believed by the Church that the closest and most personal followers of Christ were appointed to authoritively declare the person and work of Jesus Christ.  Thus, anything that came from an apostle or with apostolic authority, “whether by letter or by word of mouth” was to be received as the “Word of God” (cf.  1 Thess. 2:13).  This seemed to be the case with the letters written in the New Testament.

            Beginning with the testimony of the apostles, Peter offers some evidence in his writings that the Apostle Paul’s letters were already included within the Canon of New Testament Scripture.  He says in 2 Peter 3:15-16,

 

“…and consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation- as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures.”

 

            When Peter says that Paul’s word are twisted with the “rest of the Scriptures”, Peter is showing that he counts Paul’s writings to be on par with what was known to be the Word of God at that time, the Old Testament.  One commentator writes:  “That Paul’s writings should be considered ‘Scripture’- authorative writing – is not surprising, for from the moment of composition they had the authority of the commands of the Lord through his apostle (Romans 1:1; I Cor. 14:37; Gal. 1:1).[6]” 

            But Peter is not the only one who acknowledges another’s works to be included in the Canon of Scripture.  Paul, while writing to Timothy sometime between 62-64 A.D. quotes the work of a fellow worker as Scripture.  In his first letter to Timothy, Paul instructs the Church there to “honor” the elders who labor in Word and doctrine.  He substantiates his exhortation by appealing to Scripture, following the example of the Lord Jesus Christ.  In 5:18 He says,

 

“For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,’ and ‘the laborer is worthy of his wages.’”

 

            The first quote is recognizable from Deuteronomy 25:4 while the second quote comes from the Gospel according to Luke 10:7.  Here is internal evidence from the New Testament letters of the apostle Paul that the Gospel of Luke, as early as 62-64 A.D. was already functioning as Scripture along with the Old Testament! 

             While the apostles were alive, it was easy for the Church to recognize any works that were of apostolic origin.  However, with the passing of the last apostle John in the late first century, and since the letters of the New Testament Church were spread out across the area of the known Roman empire, it became difficult to have a complete collection of the New Testament canon immediately and even to be able to recognize the apostolic authority.  The Church needed a way to recognize or “test” writings that would be proposed as authorative for doctrine.  This became necessary as false teachers began writing so called “Gospels” bearing the names of the apostles who had since been deceased. 

            The process did not happen immediately since getting text to new locations took time.  It is important that we keep in mind that text were scattered.   The way a text would be introduced to a new location was that a believer from another city, or congregation, would visit a Church that had writings of apostle.  Realizing that they didn’t have some of those writings, they would copy the text and take it to their respective congregations.  This process took time.  Because it did, there were some believers who were not familiar with the late works of the Apostles like Revelation, or Second Peter, or Hebrews, or Jude,etc… John until much later after they were written and the believers took their time to study them and to understand them and “test” them to see if they were indeed the Word of God. 

           

            Eventually, the “recognition test” came down to three tests.  First, the writings had to bear apostolic authority.  This could be either through authorship or through the endorsement of the writing by an apostle.  For instance, the author of the Gospel according to Mark is known to have been the Apostle Peter’s secretary.  Hence, his work would have had an apostolic approval on it.  Secondly, the teachings contained therein had to be consistent with the previous revelation of God, namely the Old Testament. Much of the false literature roaming around despised the God of the Old Testament and rejected that revelation.  But the Church of God knew that the God of the Old Testament was the God of Christ and of the Church, and that God was always consistent in His truth.  Thus, to them it would have made no sense for God to say one thing in the past and then contradict Himself later.  Thirdly and finally, the work needed to be generally accepted by Christians everywhere.  In this way, one could know that their approval or canonical recognition of a work was not an isolated instance, but was something that the Spirit of God had worked into the people of God as a whole. 

           

What’s in a name? :  The Gnostic Gospels and apostolic authority

 

            In answering why the Church rejected such works that Dan Brown thinks were maliciously left out as part of a conspiracy, we must place ourselves in the context of the times and must understand a bit about Gnosticism.

            It was generally recognized that the apostles carried with them a derivative authority from the Lord Jesus Christ himself.  True believers were not the only ones who saw this.  False teachers began to learn that if they wanted to have any hope of getting into, what seemed to be, the hermetically sealed teachings of the Christian faith with their own doctrines, then they need to jettison their own names and begin to use the names of the apostles.  So, these false teachers, known as Gnostics, began to write “Gospels” that bore names of the apostles like “the Gospel of Phillip”, the “Gospel of Mary” and, as of late, even the “Gospel of Judas,” along with plenty of other writings. 

            The earliest of these writings date back to at least the middle of the second century placing them at least fifty years outside of the death of the last apostle, John, and well over one hundred years after the death of Christ.  These are certainly not eyewitness accounts of the events in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, by far.  Now, at some point, these writings would come to Churches through a messenger or a false teacher himself and be offered to the Christians as the Word of God.  But the Churches recognized that these pseudo-apostolic works were not written by apostles, they did not pass the first test of Canonicity to be included in the New Testament Canon of Scripture.

           

            Another thing about these writings was their theology, or their beliefs about God. Gnosticism did not believe that the God of this world – the God of the Old Testament – was the one true God.  Rather they believed that the god of this world, whom they called “El”, was an evil god involved in the darkness of the material realm.  The true God was absolute spirit and light.  The further one got from the light, the more evil one became.  To the Gnostics, Jesus Christ was a messenger sent from the light world to tell some of us that we needed knowledge – secret knowledge – of the true origin of our souls and how to return back to the light world.  Hence, Jesus came to teach this secret knowledge not intended for everyone.

            This is certainly not a teaching that would be acceptable to one who holds the Old Testament to be true, especially the creation accounts and the passages that teach Monotheism, or the belief that only one God exists.  In fact, a quick sampling of some of the Gnostic text offered in The Da Vinci Code will reveal some of the distinctions between the writings of the apostles and the writings of the Gnostics.  For instance, in the Gospel of Phillip, written in the third century, we read such sayings as this:

 

“The Lord said, ‘Blessed is the one who exists before he came into being.  For he who exists was and will be.[7]’”

 

“Adam came into being from two virgins:  from the Spirit and the from the virgin earth….[8]”

 

“The world came into being through an error.  For he who created it intended to create it imperishable and immortal.  He failed to attain his hope.  For the world is not imperishable and neither is he who created the world.  For this is no imperishability, of things, but there is of sons.  And no thing can attain imperishability if it does not become a son.  But if someone cannot receive, how much more will he not be able to give?[9]”

 

            In just these small samplings of the Gospel of Phillip, we can already see some contradictions with the Old Testament revelation of God.  For instance, there is the denial of the immutability and eternal nature of God; we see that the world was created by a mistake; we see that Adam originated not from God but from “two virgins”; and then there is the nonsense of the person who existed before he existed.  Anybody familiar with the teachings of the Old Testament, even the teachings of the Apostles would clearly find themselves rejecting this particular work as an authentic work of an apostle and, hence, not to be included in the body of literature that would be known as Canonical Scripture.

            Consider some quotes from the Gospel of Mary, written in the mid second century:

 

“Then Mary stood up, greeted them all, and said to her brethren, ‘Do not weep and do not grieve nor be irresolute, for his grace will be entirely with you and will protect you.  But rather let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and made us into men.’  When Mary said this, she turned their hearts to the Good, and they began to discuss the words of the [Savior].[10]”

 

“When the soul had overcome the third power, it went upwards and saw the fourth power, (which) took seven forms.  The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth is the excitement of death, the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh, the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh, the seventh is the wrathful wisdom.  These are the seven [powers] of wrath.  They ask the soul, ‘Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?’  The soul answered and said, ‘What binds me has been slain, and what surrounds me has been overcome, and my desire has been ended, and ignorance has died.  In a [world] I was released from a world, [and] in a type from a heavenly type, and (from) the fetter of oblivion which is transient.  From this time on will I attain to the rest of time, of the season, of the aeon, in silence.’ [11]”

 

            “Made us into men?”  According to the Gospel of Mary, it was a blessed thing to be made into a man.  The second quote above really just makes no sense.  To the discerning Christian mind, it is clear that those ideas do not have their origin within the revelation of God, but are most certainly from an outside source, particularly the Gnostic teachers.  Hence, these works did not pass the

            So now, put yourself in the place of the early Christian leaders.  You know what is the true doctrine concerning God and Christ and about salvation.  Enter some writings that claim to be written by apostles that emerge, at the earliest, fifty years after the death of the apostles, some as late as two hundred years.  Do you simply receive them because they bear the name of the apostles or do you examine their writings and see if they are consistent with the known teachings of the apostles and the Old Testament revelation of God?  They did what any discerning Christian would have done:  They rejected the writings from the apostolic body of literature and, thus, ultimately excluded them from the canon of Scripture.  Hence, none of the writings passed the third test of general acceptance by the people of God.

 

            What happened to the Gnostic texts of Scripture?  Nobody is really certain.  More than likely they simply passed out of circulation being rejected wholly and completely from Christian circles.  Whatever the case, Christian history has never acknowledged them as part of the New Testament canon at any point before Constantine, nor are they the earliest Christian records being that they were written at least fifty years after the death of the last apostle to as late as two hundred and fifty years.

            In summary, the early Church rejected the Gnostic Gospel because they did not share the same theology as those from the apostles or the Old Testament, they did not bear the authorship or approval of any apostles, and they were never received by true Christian communities as authorative writings.

 

Summary

            The Bible that we have is not the composition of a “pagan emperor” who had an agenda against women.  The Bible that we have today is the way it has always been intended to be by the apostles and the earliest Christians.  It includes only those writings which are, as Paul says of Scripture in II Timothy 3:16 “God-breathed” or as Peter acknowledges, were written by men “as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (II Peter 1:21).  The writings that were never included in the New Testament canon of Scripture were left out for good theological reasons, and not social or political ones. 

            None of this information is secret, but can be found in works that deal with the historical process of the formation of the Bible.  Brown asserts that the New Testament is “false testimony”.  However, with the facts clearly laid out before us, it is clear that the only “false testimony” present The Da Vinci Code, is Dan Brown’s!

            The Church has never attempted to purposefully leave out books of the Bible that were meant to be in there.  Every book that is in the Bible as we know it is revelation from God and is categorized as the Word of God, and hence it is authorative Scripture.  All that is not has been left out. 

            That being said, we must also make a choice about what we will believe about the Bible.  Either it is false testimony about Christ or it is the truth about Christ.  If it is the truth about Christ, then we must believe that what it says about Christ and our need for him for salvation is true as well.