The Gnostic Gospels and the Canon of Scripture

Excerpts from 'Reinventing Jesus: What The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don't Tell You'
by J. Ed Komoszewski, James M. Sawyer and Daniel B. Wallace

Sir Leigh Teabing, the theological gadfly in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, makes several absurd pontifications. One of the worst is this: "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."2 He adds, "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."3 Most Christians do not realize how much of Teabing's diatribe is pure fiction.

Apocryphal Gospels
Gospels not accepted into the canon are called apocryphal gospels. The Greek word apocrypha means "hidden things." Ancient Christian writers who disapproved of these books said that they were apocryphal because they deserved to be hidden! That is, they were heretical in their teaching and should not be read in public.

Several apocryphal gospels floated around in the early centuries of the church. In general, all of them intended to accomplish one of two things: to supplement or supplant the canonical Gospels. Some of them wanted to do a little of both. The apocryphal gospels focused on two tantalizing gaps in the life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels: his childhood and the three days between his death and resurrection. Those gospels that intended to supplement the canonical Gospels were often written simply to entertain, or to play with one's imagination. Those written to supplant were written with a more pernicious motive: to put forth a different Jesus.

What kind of Jesus do the great majority of these gospels present? One who was not really human. It's almost as if this Jesus hovered three feet above the ground! He didn't need to learn anything as a human being, he spoke in intelligent sentences as an infant, and he seemed altogether otherworldly. The predominant heretical gospel envisioned Jesus as more than a man and other than a man.

The 'Gnostic' Gospels
Several gospels have been identified as Gnostic gospels, proto-Gnostic gospels or gospels that at least have Gnostic leanings. The Gnostics were a knockoff pseudo-Christian group that came to be defined by (1) a black-or-white mentality in which all material (including the body) was seen as evil and spirit was seen as good; and (2) a view of spirituality that equated knowledge — especially secret knowledge — with salvation.

Gnosticism was influenced by Docetism, a heresy that taught that Jesus was divine but not human. Ironically, the chief theological struggle that the church had in the second and third centuries— thus, before the time of Constantine — was that it did not always accept the full humanity of Christ, while his divinity was unquestioned. That The Da Vinci Code flips this on its head is, at best, astoundingly naïve and, at worst, historically irresponsible, even deceptive.

Apart from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, no gospels are known to come from the first century. The "more than eighty" that Sir Leigh Teabing mentions (though we have no idea where he got that number from) originate from the second to the ninth century — up to 500 years after the time of Constantine!

The most well known "Gnostic" gospel is The Gospel of Thomas. Most scholars date the original Thomas to the mid-second century. It is "proto-Gnostic," because the full-blown teachings of Gnosticism were not fully developed. Other gospels, such as the gospels of Philip, Mary, Peter and the Egyptians, are also Gnostic, proto-Gnostic or Gnostic-like.

As illustrations of what these gospels said, consider the following snippets. The last paragraph of The Gospel of Thomas (known as logion 114) states, "Simon Peter said to them, 'Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.' Jesus said, 'Look, I shall lead her so that I will make her male in order that she also may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'"

Here we see plainly the asceticism that found a home in Gnostic circles and an attitude toward women that is hardly compatible with the biblical portrait. The Gospel of Peter embellishes the resurrection narrative as follows: "When those soldiers saw this [the stone moving from the entrance of Jesus' sepulcher], they awakened the centurion and the elders, for they also were there to mount guard. And while they were narrating what they had seen, they saw three men come out from the sepulcher, two of them supporting the other and a cross following them and the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of him who was being led reached beyond the heavens." This kind of bizarre embellishment nowhere occurs in the canonical Gospels.

The apocryphal gospels were not the only documents to have fun at truth's expense. In The Acts of John, Jesus seems to be out of this world. John says, "Sometimes when I meant to touch him [Jesus] I met with a material and solid body; but at other times when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and incorporeal, as if it did not exist at all. . . . And I often wished, as I walked with him, to see his footprint, whether it appeared on the ground (for I saw him as it were raised up from the earth), and I never saw it." Clearly, a divine Jesus — but not a human Jesus — is in view.

Rejection of the 'Gnostic' Gospels
What was it that made these gospels obviously inferior? First, they were recent productions. They did not bear the stamp of antiquity. Not one was from the first century, unlike our canonical Gospels. Some were from several centuries later.

Second, they emphasized the deity of Christ while sacrificing his humanity. They were usually non-narrative, emphasizing the words of Jesus but not his deeds. Along these lines, they tended to be strongly ascetic. They loathed marriage, sexual intimacy and the bearing of children.

In such documents, Mary, Salome and other women are elevated in their status as disciples of Jesus. However, contrary to the claims of The Da Vinci Code, they were not elevated because of their intimacy (sexual or otherwise) with Jesus. Rather, as women, they modeled for the men what it meant to be a celibate and ascetically minded disciple. These very gospels that discourage marriage would hardly have promoted a picture of sexual intimacy between Jesus and any woman.

Third, when they did give a narrative description, it was often an embellishment of the canonical Gospels — and sometimes a bizarre one at that. Such embellishments show that the apocryphal gospels were later, because they were dependent on the four Gospels.

Finally, they tended to self-consciously promote their claim to authorship by an apostle. The canonical Gospels were all anonymous works to begin with. But many of the apocryphal gospels claim apostolic authorship. This marked difference suggests that they were trying to get on the fast track to acceptance by the church. Since they were not first-century documents, something had to be done to give them an edge. Claiming to be written by an apostle was just the ticket. But in due time, the church was able to sniff them out and declare them heretical.

If Constantine had really picked the Gospels to go into the New Testament, wanting only those that elevated Jesus to the heavens, he must have been singularly incompetent, because he left out all the juicy tales! Although The Da Vinci Code is a fascinating story, that's all it is: a tale, a fable, a good yarn spun by a master storyteller. But it has nothing to do with the facts of history.

1The excerpts from Reinventing Jesus (from chapter 11, "What Did the Forgers Think of Christ?”) have been altered slightly to fit into this essay. Reinventing Jesus is published by Kregel Publications, and is due out in May 2006.

2Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003) 231.

3Ibid., 234.

4The quotations from the apocryphal gospels are from J. K. Elliott, editor, The Apocryphal New Testament, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999).

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