Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code and Gnosticism DEBUNKED!

Yes, I know The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown came out nearly 22 years ago….

So why am I writing about it now?

Because my hope is that this article can live on and become a living resource for anyone who finds the book and wants the TRUTH behind all of the claims made in the book, and the truth about “Gnosticism”.

Because much of what Dan Brown claims in the book is completely false.

In fact, it took renown semitic language scholar Dr. Michael S. Heiser over SIX HOURS to break down all of the egregious fallacies in the book!

Now that would be fine if he were merely writing fiction, but the book doesn’t claim to do that.  The book claims to be rooted in scholarship and that has led many people to be confused and led astray.

So for anyone who stumbles into the book or the movie in the future, I hope this article and video finds you and helps you as you seek the truth.

Here’s a quick summary of what you will see in the video below:

This is a video originally posted by Guy Malone of http://www.alienresistance.org

This video is all 8 parts of his lecture from back in 2006.

Part 1: Introductions Although the hype surrounding the DaVinci Code has left the mainstream media, the ideas persist. Here, speaking in 2006 at the height of the DaVinci controversy, ancient languages scholar and Biblical Hebrew expert Michael Heiser gives us a solid and plain spoken introduction to Gnosticism.

Part 2: Reliability of New Testament Scriptures (esp vs the Nag Hammadi) Dr. Heiser compares the oldest scriptural texts with the gnostic texts and explains why the New Testament texts are reliable while the gnostic texts aren’t. Special attention is paid to the precise dating of New Testament texts, and serves as a primer for all serious students and teachers of the Bible.

Part 3: Were Jesus and Mary Madelene married? Dr. Heiser compares the Gnostic Jesus with the Jesus of the Bible. Was Jesus, as a rabbi, required to marry? Was Mary his companion? His wife? Were these and other secrets buried along with Jesus? These and other questions are examined. Relevant texts, including the gospel accounts and the gnostic texts, are examined. Mr. Heiser shows what is in the text and what isn’t. You might just be surprised.

Part 4: Gnosticism and Women Heiser offers an honest examination of the supposed “pro-woman” message often ascribed to the gnostics. Is gnosticism really “enlightened” in terms of womens’ roles. Looking at the actual texts the gnostics themselves wrote, their customs, rituals and spirituality, Heiser makes sense of the nonsense surrounding this ancient and mysterious religion’s place for women.

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Part 5: Neither Lord nor Christ? The Belief in Jesus as God before The Council of Nicea and the Exalted Christ of Gnosticism. This is a refutation of two ideas put forth in The DaVinci Code: That Constantine invented the idea that Jesus was God at The Council of Nicea, and that the Gnostic texts portray Jesus as only a mortal man (hint: they do not).

Part 6: What Really happened at Nicea? An examination of Constantine’s spiritual commitments and the documentary evidence left to history concerning the proceedings at the Council of Nicea.

Part 7: The Conspiratorial Logic of The DaVinci Code and Jesus Bloodline Theorists

Part 8: Jumping the Shark from the Newsroom to the Ivory Tower: Assessing the Gospel of Judas Frenzy

I’ve actually never read the book or watched the movie, but I found this teaching from Dr. Heiser absolutely captivating!

Please enjoy:

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Guy: Hi, welcome to the Da Vinci Code Conference. I’m assuming if you’re here or if you’re watching the DVD, you’ve already examined the website. You have an idea who Dr. Michael Heiser is, his credentials. Just in case you don’t, he’s got two master’s degrees in ancient texts and in ancient history.

This is what he does, and we’re simply today examining the views of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. There’s 45 million books in print. Many people are believing it to be a very true book, and the only thing worth noting is I want to let you know that Mike is not taking—he’s not approaching the subject from the view of an offended Christian who’s upset by Dan Brown’s work.

I know there’s a lot of them out there, but what you’re going to see today, Mike is going to be presenting to you because his specialty is ancient text and ancient history. He’s just going to simply show you: Is this book that many people are believing, even though it describes itself as fiction, is it historically accurate?

Is what Dan Brown tells you about the Gnostic Gospels and the ancient history true or verifiable or not? The way I know Mike, for example, there’s a quote in The Da Vinci Code book that says the Gospel of Philip says XYZ, and then you’re left to believe what Dan Brown says about it. What I know of Mike, he’s going to show you the Gospel of Philip, and he’s going to compare what it actually says to what Dan Brown says it is.

But we’re in for a great day. I know more than you do, so by the time this is over, you won’t be able to contain your applause. But right now, I’ll just ask you to give some applause to welcome up Dr. Michael Heiser than—um, Guy is correct.

Dr. Michael Heiser: I didn’t read The Da Vinci Code and just feel like I needed to go jump over a cliff or get overly angry about it. What disturbs me—and if you’ve never heard me on the radio or ever seen a DVD like this, you’ll pick up real quickly—what disturbs me the most is when people manipulate sources and when they only give you a partial picture of an ancient text, some issue in ancient history, to really drive a position that they have.

My goal over the course of the whole day—this is the first session of what’s going to be the equivalent of eight hours—my goal is to get you to look at the data, the primary material, and as Guy said, compare that with the claims of the book. Sometimes this isn’t going to be terribly exciting because what I will do—and that’s not, you know, now is not the time to click off the DVD—I’m going to explain what I just said.

What I tend to do is I tend to try to show you the source, and when I’m quoting from a secondary source like a dictionary or some accepted scholarly work that is just accepted and used and praised by everyone in a given field, I’ll give you the page—I’ll give you the page number. I’ll show you the text. I want you to have the information so that you don’t have to just assume that I’m quoting it right or I’m, you know, just such an honest guy you can just always trust me.

I think I am an honest guy, and you can trust me, but I still like to put it in front of your eyes so that you can see that I’m not making it up. The last thing I want to say by way of introduction is I’m not so worried about Dan Brown. Dan Brown is an author. He writes fiction.

He probably has gone a little too far in, uh, sort of implying and in some cases saying that he believes this or that about his sources. The people that I, uh, if I’m going to target anybody today, it’s going to be the people he uses as sources because I do think that they’re being dishonest, and I do think they’re being manipulative.

I will name them by name. They know where to find me if they don’t like it, and they’re free to prove otherwise because I think it’s going to be pretty hard because it’s going to be right in front of your face. The first session that I think we need to go through is introducing gnosticism for you.

This is a term that you often hear related to The Da Vinci Code and its contents. It’s one of those terms that people throw around, and you may or may not know what it is, but if you know the basics of gnosticism, the Gnostic worldview, it will help you frame certain positions that are put forth in The Da Vinci Code.

And so this is where we’re going to start today. This is the worldview behind The Da Vinci Code. Now the basics are this: In gnosticism, they’ll use the term “God”—the true God. The true God—you need to know right away—in gnosticism is not a personal being.

When you—if most—I don’t know if any of us in here in the room are gnostics, but chances are you’re not—when you think of God, you think of a person. You think of an actual being, an entity that has personality, emotions, that kind of thing, because you’re used to reading the Old or New Testament or some other book, you know, from a Western religion, and this is how God is spoken of.

In gnosticism, though, you have this sort of force called the Light, the Numa, which is a Greek word which means spirit. This thing is pre-existent and uncaused, and so that would be kind of similar to what we’re used to, but this force actually has parts. But it’s not a—it’s not a person. It’s just like a—for—think of Star Wars, I guess, for lack of a better illustration.

Gnostics will refer to the true God in masculine terms—the Father or the Spirit or the Numa. Gnostics will also refer to the true God, the ultimate God-thing, in feminine terms as Mother, also the First Thought. The Coptic word is “Anoia”—the First Thought of the Father.

So they sort of begin with this Father-God concept, but he’s not a person. And then as this—this thing—sort of is able to think within itself or do something—this cosmic intelligence, maybe that would be a better way to describe it—the first thing the cosmic intelligence thinks of is called the Anoia, the First Thought.

And that is viewed in terms of feminine terms. Now look at this—this is a circle. I picked a circle for a deliberate reason. In gnosticism, the ultimate God-force is whole. It is complete.

It is self-contained. It is self-existent and pre-existent. It has balance—masculine, feminine. It is androgynous. It’s not just one or the other—it’s not just masculine or feminine—it’s both.

There’s an emphasis in gnosticism on something called androgyny, which is this union—this sexless sort of thing—or this union of genders. I know this is going to sound kind of weird, but as we go on, you’ll start to see how this works itself out, not only in the system but in Brown’s novel.

The First Thought, according to gnostics, was—and they’ll use the word “impregnated.” Now we’re not talking about anything physical here, but they’re using procreative language to illustrate for you what they believe. The First Thought, the female, is impregnated by the Father and brings forth other eons—or aeons—these are gods.

So right away, we have—you know, us, as you know, from our background, Judeo-Christian background—this sounds like polytheism, and in some ways it is. But the point I want to stress now is not essentially the nature of the system, but you have the true God—the true God sort of creates other gods.

Okay, so you have this thing up above. The thing up above sort of creates within itself lesser things—lesser eons, lesser gods. The circle is androgynous, but the things that it creates are not. They are spoken of in gender.

In gnosticism, the universe is three-tiered. The diagram here has at the top—this is the true God—where the true God lives is one realm. The bottom realm is the created universe—the world you and I know—and then there’s this middle existence, and that’s where the other gods reside.

So from the true God, the whole entity, there are other divine beings created called aeons. You’ll notice by the features here—some are masculine, some are feminine. Now we’re not going to get too far into gnosticism, but what happens is they pair up, and they procreate.

Again, I’m using, you know, sort of literal language, but they produce other aeons. And so you have a whole system of gods—plural—underneath this divine thing, this cosmic mind or cosmic force. The middle gods are sort of expressions of the greater whole.

These are called aeons. The word next to it—“pleroma”—means fullness. When all the aeons are together and in harmony with the True Light, that is called the fullness. It’s the way things ought to be.

The fullness will come back to that term. They are the true God’s essence, and together the parts equal the whole. Now the true God—again, or the Light—produces these aeons. One of them is the Logos.

Now for those of us who are Christians in the room, Logos is a word that gets applied to Jesus in John chapter 1. But now mentally stop yourself—the Logos in gnosticism here is not Jesus. This is not a one-to-one equation.

Jesus is something else to a gnostic, just so that you know that one of these gods is referred to as the Logos. And the Logos—if you look at the hierarchy, the row here, the way I have this arranged—the Logos is considered the very highest aeon.

He is the highest thing that the Light produced, okay? He’s the highest. If you notice there, you will read in Gnostic writings—if you go down to the third bullet—the Logos is called the form of the formless, the body of the bodyless, the face of the invisible, the word of the unutterable, the mind of the inconceivable.

The Logos is the primary expression of the Light—this cosmic spirit-thing that gnostics refer to as the true God, the ultimate God. The Logos possesses knowledge of all the other aeons. He is the entire image and likeness.

Now if you look here, we have father-language within the true God. We have mother-language. So we have Father, Mother, we have the Logos, and that forms—in gnosticism, you notice the triangle—this is sort of their Trinity.

Now that’s an oversimplification, but they will use triune language. They call it the Initial Triad—the initial three: Father, Mother, and Son. And they’ll actually call these bodiless beings the First Man, the First Woman, and the First Son.

The reason I’m pointing this out is when you read Gnostic literature—and for most of us, it’s going to be in the newspapers or The Da Vinci Code or some other work—it’s going to start saying things like, “Well, I mean, this is really kind of the same thing as Christianity. There’s the Son, there’s the Father, you know, there’s this thing—the divine feminine, you know, whatever that is.”

And they’re going to try to latch on to similar terminology to make you think that we’re all really talking about the same thing. Well, we’re really not, okay? The lowest aeon—you’ll notice the chain here progresses from high to low.

It’s a progressive dissipation of the Numa—the ultimate Light, the ultimate Spirit—from the primary aeon to the last one. There’s a finite number here. The last one right here is feminine, and that is called Sophia in gnosticism.

Now this is a term that comes up in The Da Vinci Code all the time. The Sophia is an extraordinarily important figure—an extraordinarily important aeon—to the Gnostic system, the way they understand reality. Sophia is the lowest aeon.

You’ll notice that I have her chin right on the red line. That is because Sophia was sufficiently far down the line enough that she was close to the material world, and she’s going to have some kind of interaction with the material world. She will, in fact, transgress the boundary.

She sins and rebels in Gnostic thinking. What she does—the Sophia—and this is a quotation from one of the Nag Hammadi texts—the Sophia wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit. She wants to reproduce like the ultimate God did.

She doesn’t want to involve her consort. Remember, I told you the aeons were paired—masculine, feminine—and they produce other godlike beings in the Gnostic system. She doesn’t want anything to do with her male counterpart. A thing came out of her which was imperfect and different from her appearance because she created it without her consort.

So the Gnostic story—the Gnostic mythology—is that Sophia says, “You know what? I want to be like the ultimate Light. I want to be like the Most High, okay? And I’m going to create of myself something. I’m going to imitate his behavior.”

Gnostics view that as sort of a good thing, but, you know, she kind of preempted the way it’s supposed to be done, but it’s still somewhat okay. Why did she do it? She is—according to Gnostic text—“unconquerably pros,” which means lewd: “I am the Holy One. I am the wife and the virgin—holy wife, virgin.”

Think Da Vinci Code. This act of—you know, there’s this thread running through the novel about how this sexual act, the sexual ceremony, somehow is an act of worship. What they’re trying to do—what Brown is trying to describe—and not all gnostics saw it this way, but many did—was that this ritual act of intercourse somehow commemorates not only Sophia—Sophia’s reunion—we’re going to talk about when Sophia gets back to the pleroma when she repents—but also the initial androgynous male-female togetherness of the Ultimate Reality.

That’s why this—the act of intercourse—has a sacramental value to some gnostics. What does she make of herself? She makes a being called the Demiurge, which just means “the maker.” The Demiurge is also known as “Yaldabaoth”—“Child, come forth” or “Child of Chaos.”

You will see both translations. He is also called “Sakas”—“The Fool.” He is also called “Sael”—“The Blind One.” This being is none other than Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, in gnosticism.

The God of the Old Testament, to a gnostic, is a created being. He is called a fool—why? Because he runs around saying, “I’m the only God. There’s none like me.” Duh, okay? Gnostics consider the God of the Old Testament a fool because he doesn’t want people to know—and he’s going to create humans—he doesn’t want humans to know that actually there’s a whole bunch of aeons that are bigger than he is, more powerful, and there’s even, further removed from him, this ultimate God-thing.

The God of the Old Testament, to a gnostic, is a fool—is blind—because he doesn’t seem to realize that there are other gods. He goes around denying it. He’s either blind, or he’s an idiot, and he’s just bad because he doesn’t want you—humanity—to know the truth.

Now here’s our line separating the middle realm from the realm we know. The Demiurge is going to create the world—just like, you know, in the traditional Old Testament. The Demiurge will also create archons, which is a word that means “rulers.”

The archons are mentioned in the New Testament. These are the principalities and the powers of the air, the rulers in high places who are wicked. But in gnosticism, the archons—yes, they’re bad because the fool, because the Demiurge, made them—but they’re not bad in the sense of they’re opposing God.

They’re actually, in gnosticism, the archons are God’s henchmen. They do his bidding to suppress humanity—to keep humanity from learning something—and we’ll talk about what that something is. So the Demiurge makes helpers—what we would think of as fallen angels or Watchers or fallen sons of God—archons.

It’s really the same old thing. Together, the archons—now look, the key there is “together the archons and the Demiurge make Adam.” “Let us create humankind in our image,” and we’d say the plural there indicates that the Demiurge and the archons get together and fashion the man.

It is a co-creation. Those of you who are familiar with other stuff I do know that I don’t buy that position because the grammar of Genesis 1:26 does not support it. But frankly, gnostics don’t care, so we’ll skip that point. If you want to find more about that, you go up to my website.

Sophia looks down at this—you see the yellow line there—Sophia looks down at what’s happening, and she goes, “This was probably a mistake because this guy’s kind of nasty. The Demiurge is kind of nasty, and now the Demiurge is just kind of doing what I did, and he’s starting to make all this stuff.”

“And I guess it was okay when he made this world thing—like, who cares—and the archons, well, you know, we’re more powerful than they are anyway, so I’m not too concerned.” But Sophia takes pity on Adam because Adam is created to be a slave of the Demiurge and of the archons.

And something clicks inside Sophia—according to the Gnostic myth—that says, “You know, I need to do something. This is just a little too far. I can’t abide this.” And so the Sophia—gnosticism disagrees here—there are two versions of this.

One has the Sophia voluntarily putting some of her divine essence into Adam. The other version has the Demiurge being tricked into doing it himself. But either way, a spark of the divine—you’ve all heard that phrase before—a spark of the divine gets deposited into Adam.

So that now Adam is not just a wormlike, you know, creature that just can’t think or has no mind and no spirit, just to serve the Demiurge—now Adam is flesh and spirit. He is material, and he is divine, okay? He’s a mix.

Adam then is used to bring forth Eve. In a later session, we’re—that’s really devoted to this Da Vinci Code myth about how the gnostics just treated women so wonderfully, and the Christians are just the misogynistic Neanderthals of the ancient world. We’re going to see that that is not the case.

In gnosticism, I’ll just telegraph one point here—in gnosticism, Adam has the divine spark. Eve doesn’t. Eve is less than Adam. She is less than divine to a gnostic.

That’s not a very positive, affirming thing, you know, for women, but that’s gnosticism really as you’ll see it in Gnostic texts—not in Dan Brown’s novel. Advanced concepts—I’m not going to park too much on this—Sophia is redeemed.

She’s the youngest and last aeon. She was furthest from the Light. She makes a mistake. She’s again driven by this procreative urge—her desire again was viewed positively in that she wanted to be like the Father.

There are really two parts to her, you know—she’s conflicted in the Gnostic myth, you know. She wants to be like the ultimate God, and—but yet she has this own self-willed rebellion thing going on. Eventually, the rest of the pleroma says, “You know, we can’t let this go. We need to get Sophia back here so that we are full—we’re complete.”

So we have the old pleroma back—the fullness. And so what they do is they decide to attract her. Several high aeons—the Holy Spirit—these are all separate beings in gnosticism—the Holy Spirit, the Kristos, and Jesus—that if that surprises you, if you’re a Da Vinci Code reader, good.

Because The Da Vinci Code has characters saying that in the—in—in the true Gnostic scriptures, Jesus was just an ordinary man. If you read the Gnostic texts, you will not get that message. Jesus is an aeon. He is a divine being in gnosticism.

He’s not just an ordinary Joe. These three devise a plan to attract Sophia back to the True Light. The Kristos appears to Sophia in the shape of a trans-cosmic cross, and now she sees that out in the universe, and she knows that this is a sign from the pleroma that “you can come back—just follow the light.”

Isn’t that a nice phrase we’ve all heard in our—in our—“Follow the light.” It’s Gnostic. You keep your eye on the cross, you follow the light, and you will make it back to the pleroma. Her celestial bridegroom, Jesus, awaits her.

Again, think of the Dan Brown Jesus-Mary Magdalene—they get together, they have, you know, intercourse, either ritually or just, you know, to enjoy it—probably just ritually if Dan Brown’s going to be consistent with his gnosticism, but he often isn’t. This whole idea of Jesus needing a consort—Jesus needing a wife to further the faith—is this idea.

Jesus and Mary Magdalene are mimicking the journey of Sophia back to the cosmic Jesus so that they can be one. It’s an expression of godliness. It’s an expression of fullness in the Gnostic system. That is their introduction to gnosticism.

I don’t know what the time is here—32—we have time—10, 15 minutes—for questions. But let me just summarize real quickly. The whole point with this is when you read about sacred marriage in The Da Vinci Code, the reason that that is an issue—and the reason that Dan Brown and his sources want to convince you that this was part of Christianity, that Christianity has suppressed the female, that Christianity has suppressed the goddess—is not because this stuff is really taught in the Bible, okay?

Some will try to make it—force it—into the New Testament in some odd passages, and we’ll talk about those a little later. What they’re really saying is, “Look, this is the way this particular sect of Christianity saw things, and this is the truth—this is the real Christianity—and it was suppressed because these nasty church fathers that you and I think of as the orthodox, you know, of Christianity, they were just prudish.”

“They didn’t like to talk about women. They didn’t like to talk about sexual things. They tried to do whatever they could to suppress women and their roles in the church and their leadership and their character and everything like this.” The reason—so Dan Brown, you know, tells the story—is that they were reacting to what was really the truth—gnosticism over here.

And if you—if you’re a discerning reader—Brown has tapped into a cultural sensitivity in here—in our time—how women are viewed and treated, and he’s bringing you along on that thread into the Gnostic camp. But he’s not telling you all this other stuff. He’s not telling you about, again, sexual sacraments.

He’s not telling you that the God of your Old Testament is a liar and a fool and a blind person and, frankly, bad. He’s not telling you all sorts of that stuff. Now he may not know it—that’s possible—but don’t be duped into thinking that, you know, two sides of the same coin.

There are fundamental differences between the Gnostic sect and what historically was orthodox Christianity. The primary one is—I’ll give you the primary two, and then I’ll take questions—Orthodoxy has Jesus as an uncreated being, united in essence with God the Father, and they are both good.

Gnosticism has Jesus as a created being who is above the God of the Old Testament, who is bad. Those are not two sides of the same coin—they are mutually exclusive, right? So don’t be led astray into thinking that we’re just talking about the same thing.

We have any questions? If not, we can take a little break, and we’ll move to the next one. Go ahead—questions. “Consider Yahweh—are part the other aeons?” Yahweh is under the aeons. He is lesser in power than the aeons.

He—he—he straddles—and really, when he—when he starts to create material things like the world, he moves away from the middle realm down to the lower realm in the Gnostic universe. He is derivative from one of them—and even the lowest of them—so he is not on a par.

Another question in the back: “So there were gnostics at the time of Jesus, and where did they come from? Where did the Gnostic thinking come from, and where did they fit into that time in history? We, as Christians—like, what were they doing, right?”

The question is, “Where—you know, the gnostics were around, they developed—where did they come from?” Gnosticism, as a full-blown system—you don’t have what we call gnosticism until the second or third century AD as a system. You have elements of its thought—of its worldview—prior, and the strands come from different places.

One of the more obvious is that it was a struggle—and frankly, if we’re honest, it still is to some extent—it was a struggle to understand how you can have a God in three persons, but they’re all the same, but yet they’re not. And the Council of Nicaea was an attempt—not to come up with a new position—the Council of Nicaea is arguing for an ancient way of understanding that.

And in—I think the third or fourth session here—we’re going to talk about Jesus as God well before Nicaea. And frankly, the idea that there was a godhead in Judaism—that idea is not a Christian invention—it’s Jewish.

But backtracking—it’s hard to understand. I’ll take you through some Old Testament passages today, and you’ll look at them, and you’ll go, “Well, there’s two there—how can that be? How can there be two gods? I thought Judaism was this monotheist—you know, it is, and it isn’t.”

It depends how you define your terms, and it depends what the texts are saying. And they were struggling with this—like some of you, when I show you some of these things, you’re going to go, “Well, how did that work? Why didn’t they get that—or if they got it, why did they go over here with it?”—that kind of thing.

Gnostics are trying to—they’re struggling, you know, and I feel somewhat sympathetic to gnostics on that level—and to Arius, who was the focal point of the Council of Nicaea—his heresy—because he’s just trying to figure this out.

Another strand is Jewish mysticism—the idea of, “Well, what is it really like at home in the godhead? I mean, what is it really like? Who lives there with God?” And, you know, we ask these questions now: “Well, before there was a creation, what was there? What was God doing?”

“If there was no time, can God have thoughts that are in order? Can there be chronology before time?” I mean, they’re thinking these thoughts, and when the ancients are thinking these thoughts, they’re essentially putting them down—either in their heads or in writing.

They’re trying to systematize their thinking—to understand what goes on with God and what’s His relationship to these other beings that we see in the scripture. We see plural Elohim in the Old Testament. We see the Word. We see the Name.

We see the Angel of the Lord. We see the one who rides in the clouds who isn’t Yahweh in Daniel 7. They’re reading their Bibles, and they’re trying to grapple with how to correctly systematize this. Now what happens is you take those questions—which are all legitimate—and gnostics come from Egypt.

And what they did was they started to try to merge what they’re seeing in the Old Testament and in Jewish writings—this is all before the New Testament’s written—and it carries on when the New Testament starts getting written—and they start looking for counterparts in the local religion of Egypt.

And once that happens, you see this convergence of threads, and out of that comes gnosticism. Another strand is, “What about evil? Why is there evil?” You know, we—Orthodoxy has—I’m not going to say there’s just one explanation for this—but Orthodoxy wants to see—and, you know, I agree, but I’m not going to go any further than that because there are ways to understand this, and there’s difference of opinion—but the orthodox position is that, “Look, if there’s anybody in control of evil other than God, then we’ve got problems.”

“Then we’re dualists—then there’s a competitor to God out there who’s just as powerful as He is—and that isn’t reflected in the text of the Jewish Bible—the God of Israel, you know, who is our God—the God of the New Testament—because the church derives from, you know, Judaism in that sense.”

And so that just wasn’t an option. But then that means that God is somehow in control—ultimately—of evil. Now, does God cause evil? Does He passively allow evil to happen? God is bigger than evil, so He can take evil and manipulate it and work it and predestine it to good, okay?

That is taught in the New Testament—these ideas. But to the gnostic, here’s the way the gnostic answered the question: The reason that there’s evil is because that’s the way the world was created. There’s no fall—it was just created evil.

And if you have an earth that’s created evil, somebody evil had to do it. And since that person in the Jewish Bible is Yahweh, Yahweh must be bad. That must be why there’s evil—because the fullness—the true God—the Light—would never create anything evil.

Therefore, there’s a separation between the true God and this god over here who creates the world. Gnostics were troubled by the problem of evil, and that’s an honest question—that’s an honest, you know, issue. So I’m not going to portray gnosticism as some sinister movement or force that, you know, four guys got in a room one day because they didn’t have anything better to do and say, “Hey, let’s create a counter-system to Christianity.”

“We all just hate these Christians—let’s come up with something that mocks it and turns it on its head or whatever.” No—they were asking the same questions that everybody else was asking, and they were doing some bad exegesis in the process, but the questions were good ones.

And they were reacting—not necessarily to, you know, the orthodox point of view—but what Dan Brown tries to give you the impression of—and his sources especially—you know, Brown’s just a fiction writer—they want you to think that at one time gnosticism was the dominant view, and that was never true.

There is not a scrap of evidence for that. Gnosticism was always a peripheral thing that was reacting against the majority opinion. And the majority opinion was not just based on, “Well, which way is the wind blowing—you know, we have so much power here in the second-century church—you know, forget the fact that the Romans are killing us off in droves—you know, we have so much power here, we need to suppress these gnostics.”

It’s just—it’s silly. But that’s the view that Brown’s sources want to convey with you. They want to give you this impression that, “Well, the reason orthodoxy won was because Irenaeus and these other church fathers were so powerful—they just, you know, they just put the screws to everybody else.”

“Hey, they’re trying to survive like everybody else. Christianity is not legal—you can be killed if you have a copy of the New Testament. This is not a bunch of power-hungry slobs, you know, dictating something to this little piddly group over in Egypt.” It is just a mischaracterization of what the historical record is.

But again, I want to leave you the impression—it’s not that gnostics started out as this sinister group. They’re asking good questions, but they’re basically refusing the instruction—and they’re not refuting the arguments of the majority—they’re coming up with their own arguments.

And that eventually leads to the Council of Nicaea, where they have their day in court, and they lose, okay? Because they cannot refute the arguments of the majority. It’s not that they go there as the majority, and then somebody gangs up on them and sticks some theological knife in the back—that is not what happened.

And we’ll talk about that today later too. Other question: “Yes—so the Council of Nicaea pretty much put an end to gnosticism then?” No—the Council of Nicaea made a declaration. There were a lot of people there who did not buy what Arius was saying, but they didn’t want him expelled because, in their eyes, he was still a Christian.

You know, he accepts that Christ is the way of salvation and so forth and so on. But the opinion came to be that, you know, pragmatically speaking, “We need to do something so that the rest of the ancient world knows that Arius’s position is not, you know, correct.” So they did expel him.

But even after he is expelled from his position, Arians are referred to as Christians in ancient writings. It’s not that, “You’re evil, and you’re going to hell now,” or anything like that. But the whole point was that, “We’re going to declare that this position is incorrect—Arius is not able to articulate the position that reflects the ancient text—but we’re just kind of hoping that, you know, he comes back to the fold.”

Gnosticism and Arianism continued, you know, along with their own followers. Eventually, it just sort of dies out because there aren’t many of them, you know, relatively speaking. But the ideas get picked up, you know, in the Middle Ages by certain groups—early, late Middle Ages.

It never completely goes away because some people like that position. They just—they preferred—they thought that that was a good answer to these questions. But it was never, you know, the majority, and they never produced anything that refuted the majority—they never did it.

But they didn’t really care because they just preferred the position. “Is there an official start to the date of gnosticism?” No—not as a movement. What happens is its threads go all the way back, you know, into pre-Christian days—with, you know, your Jewish Bible in the first millennium BC, we’ll say.

There are threads—there are ideas in what we call Gnostic ideas in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They didn’t have gnostics there, but gnostics liked the way this guy over here wrote that—“I like the way that scroll says that, so we’re going to use that to foster our idea over here.”

You have all these strands sort of converging in the second or third century when gnosticism becomes known as a movement, and you have figures like Arius who become sort of, you know, champions for this view. Okay.

The second session today is a comparison, really, of the Testament issue—the gospel issue—the manuscripts of the New Testament—not just the gospels—versus the Gnostic Gospels from Nag Hammadi. In The Da Vinci Code, one of the characters—Leigh Teabing—who is cast in the story as an expert on the Holy Grail—which we find out in The Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail is not a chalice or cup—it is a bloodline of Jesus—but one of the characters, Professor Teabing, says this:

“More than 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them. These texts,” quote, “are the earliest Christian records and the unaltered gospels.”

Now before I turn the slide here—there is a reason why when The Da Vinci Code came out, every scholar—from any theological position, from the most rabid fundamentalist to the most rank atheistic liberal—said, “This is bunk.” And this is one of the biggest reasons why.

These claims—as far as the nature of the gospels, earliest and unaltered—are just frankly laughable to people who do this for a living. But again, it’s like, “Well, it’s just fiction,” and everybody could have lived with that if it wasn’t for the fact—on the first page or the inside cover of The Da Vinci Code—he talks about the meticulous research that went into this and how this is just going to change everything.

And then successive interviews—that’s what people—off—regardless of their theological position—because, frankly, scholars don’t like when people invade their turf and say dumb things about it, okay? Now, what are the Nag Hammadi documents?

You’ll notice in red there on the map—the bottom third is Nag Hammadi—the place. The Nag Hammadi texts are a collection of 13 ancient codices—which is essentially—we’ll call it a book—something bound on one side or folded—containing over 50 Gnostic texts.

They were discovered by accident in Upper Egypt in 1945. The man at the center is the credited discoverer—Muhammad Ali Samman—had gone off—kind of like the Dead Sea Scroll story—he goes off and, looking for fertilizer in the mountains close to his village, and he unearths a jar, and the rest, they say, is history.

The books that were found at this location were quickly sold into the black market. The Egyptian government eventually got them—you know, fairly quickly. This is what they look like—you’ll notice that, you know, as manuscripts go, this is pretty decent condition.

I mean, you can get a whole lot worse than this. Despite the figure to the left there, you can see how tattered some sections are. They were taken to the Cairo Museum, and another few years went by before scientists knew about them.

In 1966, at a conference in Italy devoted to gnosticism and these new texts, James Robinson assembled a group of editors and translators to publish the codices in English. This is the cover of the book—I have it with me here if you want to look at it today.

Robinson was chosen to oversee the project, and eventually a facsimile edition was published. Facsimile editions—they’re just literally pictures of each leaf in book form—they’re plates—if you’ve ever seen a book that has plates in it—that’s what you get.

It’s only $750, so rush right out and get yours—it’s an expensive set. Subsequently to that, though, there was a translation in English, and the introductory material prefacing the translation—this is taken from Robinson’s book—says this: “The library of fourth-century papyrus manuscripts consists of 12 codices plus eight leaves,” so on and so forth—fourth century.

These were Coptic manuscripts. Coptic is just the Egyptian—the ancient Egyptian language—put into a sort of Greek. A lot of the letters in Coptic and Greek match—there are a few different letters that were added because of the sounds in the Egyptian language that the Greeks didn’t use—but there’s a lot of overlap there in the language.

But these were from the fourth century. Now the first century—I should say this before we go much further so you get this fixed in your mind—the first century is the year 0 to 99. Second century begins with the one—as in 100 on. Third century begins with two—you just back it up a digit, okay?

So fourth century—we’re talking about written in the 300s sometime. This is Coptic, but everyone agrees—and rightly so—that the Coptic texts were actually themselves translations of older Greek material. One of the ways that’s known is there are lots of Greek loanwords in the texts.

There are other ways to tell that too, but we’re not going to worry about that for today. These texts—according to The Da Vinci Code—are the earliest Christian records, okay? Boy, he didn’t look very far for that. Here are some sources—and again, if you get the DVDs, you can look these books up if you’re interested.

And I recommend taking some interest in textual criticism—it sounds horrible, but it’s actually really interesting. Text of the Greek New Testament: Textual Criticism by David Allen Black is a nice intro for the layperson—I recommend it. Dave’s a nice guy too—he’s a friend of mine.

Canon of Scripture—F.F. Bruce—is a classic, and the latest work on the canon—The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon by McDonald—is really quite good. Again, these are well-recognized, mainstream scholars with no particular axe to grind. Let’s talk about the date, though, from those books.

Those books were my sources—places you can go to check up on me as I go through this. If you look at the timeline here—you have the cross—33 AD—we’ll take that as a sort of consensus date. New Testament gospels and Acts—the Book of Acts, which is the fifth book in the New Testament order—were written sometime between 50 and 80 AD.

That is not a conservative, fundamentalist number—that is a consensus view. There are very few people who would date them before—some people would put Mark in the 40s—and there are very few people who would go beyond 80 for any gospel—50 to 80.

Now you have the presumed Greek originals of the Gnostic texts—and you can see with the blue there that we’re talking at least—at least—a hundred years after the New Testament books—and then, of course, the Coptic Gnostic copies. Now why 50 to 80 AD for the New Testament? What’s the evidence?

In other words, are you going to come here and just have me tell you that and walk away thinking, “Oh, that’s nice”? Why do people say that? Well, there’s actually evidence for that. Three non-technical points for today are: The gospels—all of them—or at least Matthew, Mark, and Luke—prophesy the destruction of the temple.

In other words, there’s a prediction—Jesus makes predictions about the temple being destroyed. That happened in 70 AD—everybody on the planet knows that, okay? However, none of the gospels mention its fulfillment. So the presumption is that they were written prior to the fulfillment of the prophecy because nobody mentions it—and that was a big deal in Judaism—a huge deal.

Luke never mentions the death of Paul and Peter in either his gospel or its sequel, the Book of Acts. We know from external sources that Paul died in the late 60s—66, 67 AD. The Book of Acts ends before his death, and Luke was written prior to Acts—so there you go—do the math.

Manuscript evidence—this is called the Rylands Papyrus. It is the oldest manuscript—piece manuscript in any size—of the New Testament, and it dates to roughly the 130s or the 140s—something like that. It is from John 18:31-33—this is when Jesus is in front of Pilate.

I’m not going to translate the whole thing, but just so you know where it comes from—“Therefore Pilate said to them, ‘Take him—you all take him—and judge him according to your law.’ And the Jews said to him, ‘We are not authorized to put to death anyone.’”

“They said that in order that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled, which spoke of the type of death that he would die,” and so on and so forth. But the red are the letters that show up in this papyrus—and so this is what papyrologists and New Testament paleographical experts do—they’ll take a scrap, and now especially with the use of computers, you can find where the matches are in a document, okay?

This is the oldest one. Now if this manuscript dates to the 130s, the original—logically—let’s put our thinking caps on—logically would have been prior to the 130s, okay? Again, why doesn’t Brown or his sources go into this?

They either don’t know it—which isn’t good if you’re writing—especially if you’re claiming to write nonfiction—or they don’t want you to know—which is probably worse. Do we have any other hard evidence that the New Testament gospels are older than the oldest Nag Hammadi material? What about the rest of the New Testament?

Well, the answer is yeah, we do—very simply—early church fathers—early church writers—quote the New Testament—like, what else would they quote? They’re doing sermons, they’re doing commentaries, they’re writing theologies—they’re quoting the New Testament—and we know when these guys live because of Roman records, okay?

We know when they lived—we know when Barnabas—we know all these figures—their dates and everything else—so when they quote something, it fixes a date for that quotation. The thing they’re quoting must have existed prior to the quotation—this is simple, coherent logic that apparently escapes Brown’s sources—or, again, they just don’t want you to know.

The Epistle of Barnabas—there—the date—70 to 79—quotes Matthew and Mark. The Didache quotes Matthew extensively—and that’s between 70 and 130. Luke and John are both quoted in what’s called the Muratorian Fragment—again, 170 to 180.

There are external methods of dating too—paleographical analysis, carbon-14, whatnot. Polycarp—there—these are his life dates—69 to 155—lived a long life—he was a convert of the Apostle John—you know, the John—quotes the Book of Acts in his own Epistle to the Philippians.

The Shepherd of Hermas quotes Acts several times—there you have the dates. The Epistles of Paul—Romans is cited by Clement of Rome a lot—there are his dates. He’s also cited—Romans is cited—by Polycarp in the Didache.

First Corinthians is cited in the Didache and The Shepherd of Hermas. So is Second Corinthians—and also by Polycarp. Galatians is cited by Polycarp and Ignatius. Ephesians and Colossians by Polycarp, Clement, and Ignatius—there you have Ignatius’s dates.

Philippians is cited—again—by Polycarp—you get—you see a pattern emerging. What I’m going to do here is I’m going to go through every book of the New Testament—every book of the New Testament is quoted in a source earlier than the oldest Gnostic material at all—every one of them—without exception.

Epistles of Paul—more of them—First and Second Thessalonians, First Timothy, and Titus—again cited by Clement, the Didache. Ignatius makes allusions to the personal letter of Philemon—there’s a debate whether that’s an actual quotation or an allusion—but an allusion, you know, works for our purposes.

The Book of Hebrews is cited frequently by Clement. James also. First and Second Peter cited by Clement. First John and The Shepherd of Hermas. Second John by Polycarp and other sources—and the Book of Revelation cited by Hermas and Justin Martyr—whose date is 160.

Every book in the New Testament is quoted by somebody before any Gnostic gospel was written. I’m not talking the translation was written now—the only possible exception among the Gnostic material is the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas might be roughly contemporary with some of the later gospels—but that is the only one—and there’s debate over that.

But I’m telling you because there’s debate on it, okay? And by the way—the Gospel of Thomas—if you—again, a lot of this scholarly material is really expensive, and you’d have to be near a library to get a hold of it—but there are—you know what a harmony of the gospels is?

When they’ll take the gospels—the four of them—or the three anyway—the three Synoptics—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—and they will put them together into a flowing narrative—there are sources by scholars—one of whom I know—Craig Evans—if you listen to Coast to Coast a couple weeks ago—Craig was on the show—talking about the Gospel of Judas.

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