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Were the earliest Gospels suppressed ?
On page 231 of The Da Vinci Code, the fictitious character Teabing confidently says:
"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."
Who chose which gospels to include ? Sophie asked.
"Aha!" Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. "The fundamental irony of Christianity ! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine Great... It was all about power...Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power ...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...The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned...Fortunately some of the [earliest] gospels ... survived. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950's...and.. the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi... confirming that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda...the modern Church's desire to suppress these documents comes from a sincere belief in their established view of Christ ..."
One of the Dead Sea caves
SO WHAT IS THE TRUTH ?
We will give you a quick, over-simplified answer first, and then give you resources for a more thorough investigation below. Basically the gospels of the bible - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are in a totally different class than all the other gospels mentioned in the Da Vinci code. Over a hundred years before the Council of Nicaea, before any central authority existed, the vast majority of individual churches around the ancient world had come to the same conclusion: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John should be viewed as scripture, and the other documents purporting to be gospels shouldn't. Consider the following quotes from different churches around the ancient world:
In Southern France before 181 AD:
Irenaeus declared about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: "It is not possible that the number of Gospels can be either more or fewer than they are…"
In North Africa by 206 AD:
Tertullian accepted only the four Gospels
In Egypt before 254 AD:
Origen after traveling extensively wrote that Matthew Mark, Luke and John "are the only indisputable ones in the church of God under heaven…we have approved solely what the church has recognized, which is that only the four Gospels should be accepted."
They concluded that the other 'gospels' such as Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Judas were written LATER than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John by those promoting a new, loose religious movement called Gnosticism. In other words, in order to promote their own, new, Neo-Platonic worldview, the writers of these rejected gospels took existing sayings of Jesus out of context in order to create a new Jesus in their own image. Rather than a more human Jesus who was tied to history, they created a less human Jesus - a disembodied sage of a mystery religion rather than a real Jewish carpenter. In addition, they typically viewed the body and physical world as evil and often had a low view of women. So the facts are the exact OPPOSITE of what is claimed in the Da Vinci Code - the gospels that were left out were later creations, not earlier gospels, they made Jesus less human not more, and their view of women was much more oppressive than those found in the bible. The table below summarizes 6 major arguments why we should come to the exact same conclusion today:
|
Gospels in Bible
|
Gnostic “gospels”
|
|
|
Many copies & fragments
to compare & date
|
YES
|
NO
|
|
Historical nature
listing places, dates, people
|
YES
|
NO
|
|
Intimate Jewish
connection w/ many quotes from OT
|
YES
|
NO
|
|
Focus on life, death &
resurrection of Jesus Christ
|
YES
|
NO
|
|
Appear in all or any
early lists of accepted gospels
|
YES
|
NO
|
|
SALVATION:
|
Accomplished for all by
the work of Jesus Christ
|
Accomplished by the
elite few who attain secret knowledge
|
If you are already familiar with the content of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you can test most of the claims in the table above by reading the most popular Gnostic 'gospels' for yourself:
Fragment from the Nag Hammadi Library
What we find in the "lost gospels" is less, not more, than what is in the biblical gospels. In other words, while the lengthy gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John contain tensions of all kinds (both Earthy existence and divine wisdom, both miracles and suffering), the short, rejected "gospels" are really simplified collections of wisdom sayings and proverbs. They do not focus on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Rather, they focus on secret sayings that their 'Jesus' usually gives only to one person. Rather than living in the messy tension presented in the four gospels, these later writers created their own one dimensional gospels or picked parts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that they liked. Consider the following diagram as a way of view the various groups that veered away from the blunt historical fact of Jesus Christ - often in opposite directions:
Each of the four early movements above (Pelagianism, Doceticism, Eionism, Manichaeism) strayed away from the full revelation of Jesus Christ revealed in the four gospels. For example, note how the Second-century church father Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies about various groups rejected the full council of all four biblical gospels:
7. Such, then, are the first principles of the Gospel: that there is one God, the Maker of this universe; He who was also announced by the prophets, and who by Moses set forth the dispensation of the law,—[principles] which proclaim the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and ignore any other God or Father except Him. So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them, and, starting from these [documents], each one of them endeavors to establish his own peculiar doctrine. For the Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel only, are confuted out of this very same, making false suppositions with regard to the Lord. But Marcion, mutilating that according to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God, from those [passages] which he still retains. Those, again, who separate Jesus from Christ, alleging that Christ remained impassible, but that it was Jesus who suffered, preferring the Gospel by Mark, if they read it with a love of truth, may have their errors rectified. Those, moreover, who follow Valentinus, making copious use of that according to John, to illustrate their conjunctions, shall be proved to be totally in error by means of this very Gospel, as I have shown in the first book. Since, then, our opponents do bear testimony to us, and make use of these [documents], our proof derived from them is firm and true.
In short, the general consensus of early Christians was that the 'lost' gospels mentioned in the Da Vinci Code were actually later, skewed re-writes of the story of Jesus that amounted to identity fraud - creating a Jesus so different from the one of history as to paint a false picture of him. These documents are important and should be studied to help us better understand religious movements of the 2nd and 3rd century, but they add nothing to the basics tenets of Christianity found in the bible.