Theological Illiteracy, Part Four

Whenever conspiracy theories about the Bible are discussed one name always seems to pop up, that of Constantine. Mr. Brown's The da Vinci Code (TDC) is no different. For example, here is a sampling of Mr. Brown has to say regarding Constantine:

(1) "The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine... He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too week to protest" (pp 231 - 232).

(2) 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" (p. 234).

But Mr. Brown's characters are quik to tell us all was not lost at the hands of the evil Constantine...

(3) [Some of the gospels Consantine tried to destroy] "managed to survive. The Dead Sea scrolls fond in the 1950s... and the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi.. These are... the earliest Christian records" (pp. 234, 245).

Alas, while the conspiracy to silence the Gnostic records by Constantine are not new, it appears few people have actually looked at the true historical record. Constantine (274 - 337) was not a lifelong pagan, but converted to Christianity. Even after his conversion Constantine was a tolerant emperor, allowing people to worship as they saw fit (see his Edict of Milan). As for his being too weak to protest being baptized, there is not one shred of historical evidence to this fact. What was known was that he was baptized in 337 and until several days later he wore "the white robes of a neophyte". This postponement of baptism was because of the seriousness with which one entered into baptism. The prevailing theological concept was that of baptismal regeneration, that baptism washed away sins and that it could be applied only once. Thus the desire to put it off to a time as close to death as possible was not unheard of.

Now what about that nonsense of Constantine "collating the Bible"? For starters, the Old Testament had been compiled before the birth of Jesus. The formation of the New Testament began around the end of the first century, about 200 years before Constantine. In fact, the official list of books to make up the current 27 books in the New Testament was not confirmed until the Council of Hippo in 393, over half a century after Constantine! To complicate matters, the final confirmation for the Eastern Orthodox Church did not occur until about AD 500! Amazing, isn't it. Now, what Constantine did do is to request 50 copies of the the books listed by Eusebius in his History of the Church.

Somehow, in all of this, supporters of conspiracy theories want to say that the books comprising the Bible were somehow altered/embellished by Constantine. But there is no historical evidence showing that any of the accepted Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were embellished by Constantine or any of the scholars under him. And how can anyone seriously say that the Gospels in the Bible were changed to hide Christ's human traits. Christians since the first centrury have believed that Christ was both 100% human and 100% divine and human traits are shows throughout the gospels (such as hunger and fatigue in Luke 4:2 and 8:23). Ah, but what about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, were they not even earlier gospels that were suppressed for fear of changing what people believe? Of course not. The Dead Sea Scrolls contained no gospels of any kind. The manuscripts were pre-Christian Jewish writings, containing portions of the Old Testament, some secular documents, and even some accounting records! As for the Nag Hammadi writings, they do contain gospels of Gnostic origin, but they were not records of "earliest Christian writing" but data to around AD 250 - 300. These Coptic writings were based on Greek writings that scholars date back to the mid-100s at the earliest, about 70 years after the last of the synoptic Gospels was written.

Hopefully this gives you a feel for the type of sloppy "scholarship" that will pop up over and over in TDC. It appears that, for Mr Brown, there is littler difference between "fact" and fiction.