Cracking The Da Vinci Code

Part Three: False Gospels

The Error of False Gospels

“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. In addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms.” (TDC, 234)

“the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls,… the earliest Christian records.” (TDC, 245)

The Truth

1. DSS – Nothing related to this story was found in the caves of Qumran. There were no gospels. There was no Christian literature. The tragedy is that the DSS discovery was actually very confirming of our Scripture.

2. The Nag Hammadi MSS – In 1945 an Arab peasant found an earthenware jar with thirteen leather-bound volumes of papyrus containing fifty-two treatises. In addition to multiple Acts (Peter, John, Twelve Apostles), letters, and apocalypses, there were five gospels – Truth, Thomas, Philip, Egyptians, and Mary. These became known as the Gnostic Gospels.

Gnosticism – A religious sect of the second and third centuries that contended against Christian truth. While Gnostics were not monolithic, there were several fundamental tenets common to most.

1. dualism – a distinction between the purity of the immaterial world and the corruption of the material.

2. The God of creation was not the pure God. “Pleroma” was a name often given to the supreme, eternal, transcendent Father who is wholly spiritual and has no contact with anything material. In contrast to Him is the Creator of the physical world, sometimes called “Demiurge” (or “maker”), who is a fallen, wicked, arrogant deity.

3. Jesus was not the God-man who died as a substitutionary atonement. He was a lesser deity who came to give us the knowledge (“gnosis”) necessary to salvation from the material world. The Lord Jesus could not be in a physical existence. His humanity was a phantom, an apparition, one of surface appearance only. The Jesus who was crucified was a mere human substitute, who was not physically resurrected.

4. Gnosis – The heavenly redeemer-savior came to help us find the self-knowledge within each of us that would lead us to freedom, ascent, and spiritual wealth.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas)

5. God is androgynous. “The Gnostic deity is both god and goddess, and the gnostics despised the Christians for ‘suppressing’ the feminine nature of the Godhead.”¹

The Gnostic gospels were written long after our gospels; specifically in the second and third centuries. And to give them credibility, they were assigned the names of Jesus’ contemporaries as authors. Brown leans most on The Gospel of Mary (late second cent.) and The Gospel of Philip (late third cent.).

Irenaeus (2^nd cent.) denounced them as “full of blasphemy” and wrote his five-volume The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-Called Knowledge to refute them and to encourage people “to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.”

The early church strongly rejected the Gnostic Gospels, because they failed on all three criteria: Authorship (Apostolic), Agreement, and Acceptance.

Perhaps the most popular of the Gnostic Gospels is The Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945 on a 5^th Century Coptic manuscript. It seems to have had its origin in Syria in the middle of the 2^nd century A.D. It contains no narrative but 114 sayings, “the secret words which the living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.” Its content is both pantheistic and strongly anti-female. For example, Jesus is quoted as saying of Mary, “Lo, I shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Elsewhere He says, “I am all…Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.” Statements like these turned away the discerning eyes of Spirit-led Christians.

The Error of “Q”

“The ‘Q’ document is a book of Jesus’ teaching, possibly written in his own hand.” (TDC, 256)

The Truth

Q is a theory. The reference ‘”Q” is from the German word “Quelle,” meaning, “source.” Some believe that slightly more than two hundred verses common to Matthew and Mark were derived from a common source document, “Q”. But there is no “Q” manuscript that has been discovered. There is no tangible evidence for it.

Consider

“Dozens of Christian Scriptures were Holy Writ, then heresy, then forgotten. Why are we looking at them again?” was the question Time magazine asked in its cover story on these gospels. Then Time suggested they “fill a perceived need for alternative views of the Christ story on the part of New Age seekers and of mainline believers uncomfortable with some of their faith’s theological restrictions.”