Da Vinci Code Absurdity of the Week

A few weeks ago I made a tentative decision to stop writing about the Da Vinci Code because thought I'd run the risk of making this blog too repetititive, and perhaps because I'd come off as too much of a crank. I've changed my mind. Since the movie is still on the way, we have at least another couple of months where the ideas of the book will be as hot as ever (as depressing the thought of that is to me!). I also just started teaching a class on it at our church, so everything is fresh in my mind again. Here's the format I'll try in this and future posts: I'll quote a sentence or two from the book, and then make a few comments on why this quote qualifies as "A Da Vinci Absurdity."

This week's selection comes from one of the many historically revisionist speeches of the character Leigh Teabing. He says,"Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike." The hint of truth: Constantine did commision the copying of a few dozen Bibles after the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The absurdity: the list of Gospels included were only what anyone would have expected -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These Gospels were not in dispute as the historically reputable ones by anyone at the Council of Nicea. So, Constantine was not pulling a fast one, nor did he even personally act as the Bible's editor. Also, no evidence whatsoever exists to suggest that these Gospels were "embellished." On top of this, the four canonical Gospels, far from supressing ideas of Christ's humanity, are replete with his humanity. The critique of the Gnostic Gospels was, in fact, that they are the ones that diminish Christ's true human nature by turning him into some kind of phantasm that only appears to have had human flesh. Orthodox Christianity, from the earliest of times, claimed that Christ was fully God and fully human -- and this conclusion came because the four canonical Gospels emphasize both of those things. That Christ was fully human was not something that the early church denied or tried to supress as Dr. Teabing suggests -- in fact, Christ's full humanity is one of the most fundamental articles of faith as even the Nicene Creed itself alludes to.