What Vincent has to learn about Da Vinci
- Eddie Coulter
- | Feb 3, 2010
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Vincent Brown’s article exposing the ‘clever cocktail of fact and fiction’ in The Da Vinci Code is itself a mixture of half-truths and misconceptions in three key areas of Christian belief.
Did the early Christians regard Jesus as God?
From the beginning of Christianity Jesus was considered and worshipped as God, a claim he himself made and reflected in the New Testament writings. Corroborating evidence comes from outside the New Testament from Pliny, the Roman Governor of
Nor did the movement known as Arianism in the fourth century reject the divinity of Jesus, but held that Christ was ‘of like substance’ (homoiousios) with the Father and not of the ‘same substance’ (homousios) as the Father as the mainstream church believed. There was quite literally only an iota (the small Greek letter ‘i’) of a difference between the two groups. In other words both held that Christ was divine, but differed over the degree of divinity. The importance of Nicea was that it held to the view of the New Testament that Christ is fully God and fully man.
Can we trust what the New Testament says about Jesus?
The assertion that we cannot trust the Gospels as accurate records of the ministry and words of Jesus is itself not sustainable. The Gospels represent the eye-witness accounts of those who witnessed firsthand the ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Furthermore, the kind of major issues that affected the church at the time of the writing of the Gospels, such as the issue of circumcision for Gentile believers or speaking in tongues, are not reflected in the text of the Gospels. In other words, the Gospel writers did not put in the mouth of Jesus their own particular agendas, but faithfully reproduced the Jesus who entered history in the first century.
Also, the Gospels were written before the end of the first century within the lifetime of many of those who had witnessed the ministry and teaching of Jesus. If the ‘oral tradition’ had introduced mistakes or fallacies about Jesus, they would have been able to point these out. But good evidence exists to show us the reliability of the passing on of the message of Jesus. In a culture where many pupils of rabbis could recite the Old Testament word-perfect from memory and where education was largely by memorizing, it would not have been difficult for the followers of Jesus to memorize his teachings, especially as much of his teaching was cast in a form easy to memorize. Not only this, there was a means of checking the faithfulness of the message being passed on. The Apostles themselves acted to ensure the veracity of the message. For example, there was a council in
In addition, we know that the Gospels we have in the New Testament are what was originally written in the first century as we have literally thousands of Greek manuscripts that witness to the original text of the New Testament. Whilst copying of texts resulted in mistakes, omissions, amendments, the scholarly comparison of the thousands of ancient texts of the New Testament has resulted in the highest degree of certainty that what we have in our modern Bibles corresponds to what the original authors wrote. In fact, we have more witnesses to the text of the New Testament than any other historical document and all of these closer in time to the original writing than any other ancient historical writing. Therefore, the conclusion that we cannot be sure about what was written and recorded about the historical Jesus is unwarranted.
Was Jesus married?
The argument that Jesus must have been married because Jewish men of his age normally were married and that the readers of the Gospels would have assumed this is again unjustified. It is an argument from silence and such arguments cut two ways. For example in the discussion of an Apostle’s right to marry, in his first letter to the church in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul cites the example of the other apostles, the Lord’s brothers and Peter who all were married (I Corinthians 9:4-6). If Jesus had been married, Paul would have clinched his argument for a believing wife by citing the example of Jesus. But he doesn’t, his silence indicating that Christians knew Jesus was not married.
But we do not need to rely on arguments from silence as the New Testament and the first century Jewish culture show us that it was not the case that Jewish men had to be married. For example, Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, tells us of the men and women of the Essenes in Qumran by the
The question may be raised if it really matters whether or not Jesus was married. The answer is that it is not an issue! The witness of the New Testament is that he wasn’t married and it is pointless to speculate otherwise.
In summary, I welcome the debate opened by the Da Vinci Code about Jesus and believe the evidence of the New Testament to make better sense of Jesus than any journalistic reconstruction 2000 years after the event.
