What do we know about Jesus?

The character of Leigh Teabing claims, in the pages of The Da Vinci Code, that “more than 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them” (page 231). Later he adds that the early Church “literally” stole Jesus and shrouded his “human message ... in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power” (page 233). Readers are also told that the human, accessible Jesus — supposedly presented in the so-called Gnostic gospels — was purged by the Church, replaced by the detached and divine-only Jesus of the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Although these notions about the so-called “secret” or “Gnostic gospels” have intrigued many readers of Dan Brown’s novel, they fly in the face of all of the evidence. Gnosticism appeared in the early to mid-second century, many decades removed from the life of Christ, the apostles and the formation of the Church. The Gnostics believed that the God of the Jews and Christians was an evil being who was responsible for creation, also evil. Only through gnosis (secret knowledge) could some elite persons be freed from the bonds of the material world. Gnosticism was elitist and esoteric, open only to a few. Christianity was inclusive and exoteric, open to anyone who acknowledged the beliefs of the faith handed down by Jesus and entered into a life-giving relationship with him and his Church.

The Gnostic writings vary substantially in character and content from the New Testament writings: They are non-historical or even anti-historical, and contain little narrative or sense of chronology. This is due in part to the documents being written generations after the fact, as well as the anti-historical bias of Gnosticism, which rejected the belief that the true God would care about the material, historical realm.

By the time Gnostic texts such as “The Gospel of Philip,” “The Gospel of Mary” and “The Gospel of Judas” were written (ca. A.D. 150-250), the canonical Gospels were known and accepted by Christians as the primary sources and authorities about Jesus and his life. The Gnostic books were written at time when the Church had, in her liturgy and practice, already recognized the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as being authentic, apostolic and inspired by the Holy Spirit. By the middle of the second century, there was a growing consensus about the entire New Testament canon, though that canon would not be defined on an official (though not universal) level until the late-300s and early-400s in a series of local synods. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and other second-century Christian writers specifically acknowledge the unique status of the four Gospels. There were not “80 gospels” in existence at that time; even using the term “gospel” loosely, there were fewer than 20 such documents, written decades, sometimes centuries, after the Christian Gospels.

Then there is the problem of content. The Jesus described in the canonical Gospels is a flesh-and-blood man: He gets hungry, weeps, eats and drinks with common people, and he suffers and dies. But the Jesus of the Gnostic writings is a phantom, a spirit who sometimes inhabits a body and sometimes doesn’t, who avoids human activities and who talks in ways that very few could understand.

Without the canonical Gospels there would be no historical Jesus at all, no narrative of his life, and no meaningful sense of what he did, how he acted and how he related to others. The “Gnostic gospels” aren’t gospels at all in the sense of the four canonical Gospels, which are filled with narrative, historical figures, political activity and details about social and religious life. The Church was intent, from her founding, on holding on to the humanity and divinity of Christ and of telling the story of his life on earth without washing away the sorrow, pain, joy and blood that so often accompanied it.

While the Church fought to keep her beliefs firmly rooted in history and fact, the Gnostics presented a Jesus who was barely, if ever, recognizable as a Jewish carpenter, teacher and prophet dwelling in first century Palestine. Instead, he is often described as a phantom-like creature lecturing at length about the deficiency of aeons, demiurges, and the archons. Docetism, an early form of Gnosticism, held that Jesus only seemed, or appeared, to be a man, in keeping with the Gnostic dislike for the physical body and the material realm.

Once again, the Code has it backwards and flatly wrong. But the assumption behind the remarks found in The Da Vinci Code about the Gnostic gospels and the Christian Gospels is that Christians — whether of the first or 21st centuries — are mindless drones who simply believe what they are told by their leaders. So readers are told that Constantine deified a man who no one ever thought of as divine and none of the Christians were bothered by it.

But were the same people who often suffered and died for their beliefs really willing to accept a radical, wholesale change in doctrine without so much as a peep? This is not only illogical, it is contrary to the historical and text evidence. Those who study the historical record do not have to believe that the early Christians were correct in believing that Jesus was human and divine, but they will have to acknowledge that that is exactly what those Christians did believe.

Carl E. Olson is the co-author, with Sandra Miesel,

of The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code (www.davincihoax.com),

published by Ignatius Press.

He is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com.