The trick is quite simple: the Revolutionist "finds" a lost Gospel, publishes it, and declares that the lost Gospel is the real Gospel, suppressed by Big Bad Church Meanies in the first centuries of Christianity.  The real Gospel is then trumpeted as the picture of Christianity as its author and originator intended it.  A plot as predictable as a Harlequin romance.

The funny thing about the lost-found-real Gospel:  it always seems to bear a striking resemblance to the discoverer's idea of what Christianity should look like, rather than what it has actually been for the centuries prior to the discovery.  In other words, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code tells us more about Dan Brown than it does about Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, or Leonardo Da Vinci.  Dan Brown (and not Da Vinci) is simply painting the Jesus and Church history he wishes were real. That it has become so popular tells us how far our culture has strayed from its Christian roots, not (as Brown would have it) how far the Church has strayed from true Christianity.

But again, this is nothing new. Let's skip back a few centuries and view another "Dan Brown," the radical early Enlightenment figure John Toland.  Comparatively little is known for certain of Toland's early life. Rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of an Irish Roman Catholic priest and his concubine, John Toland was born in Ireland on November 30, 1670, and was raised a Roman Catholic, until he converted to Protestantism in his mid-teens. But soon enough, after a trip to liberal Holland in the early 1690s, he rejected Christianity completely, and became a devoted Pantheist. (Pantheism is a form of radical materialism based on the notion that God and nature are identical.) He then embarked on a life-long campaign to displace Christianity with Pantheism.

Toland generally kept his radical views from the public.  Privately, he kept company with a transnational group of like-minded radicals.  This group not only got together and discussed the most recent, tantalizing, subversive literature, but (like all good modern revolutionaries) engaged in a far-flung enterprise of disseminating subversive literature.

One of the "products" exported all over Europe and England by Toland's group was the infamous Treatise of the Three Impostors, the impostors being Moses, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. The Treatise railed against the Bible as a "book [that] is only a tissue of fragments stitched together at different times... a book...which no one understands, it is so obscure & ill conceived; a book which serves only to foment divisions." 

According to the Treatise, Moses was "an able Charlatan, and a conjurer" who used "pretended Magic" to dupe the "imbecile Populace" of Jews into thinking he had contact with the Divine so that he could lord it over them. Jesus was also an imposter, who "got himself followed by some imbeciles whom he persuaded that the Holy Spirit was his Father; & his Mother a Virgin: these good people, accustomed to indulge themselves in dreams & fancies, adopted his notions & believed all that he wanted,...As the number of fools is infinite, Jesus Christ found Subjects everywhere;..."  Mohammed was treated no better.

Obviously Toland and his circle had nothing but contempt for Christianity. But that contempt couldn't afford to be too bold.  In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Christianity still had a firm alliance with political power. So, The Treatise of the Three Impostors was published anonymously and smuggled around the censors. 

But what has all this to do with Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code? While Toland had contempt for Christianity, he also had a healthy fear of being too public about it, given that Christians were in power.  He certainly couldn't risk persecution by carrying on his revolution in the light of day.

What to do? How could he de-claw Christianity? Well, interestingly enough John Toland "happened" to find a lost Gospel, the "ancient Gospel of Barnabas" (not to be confused with the real early Church document, the Epistle of Barnabas).  He published his findings in 1718 in a book called Nazarenus.

According to Toland, the Gospel of Barnabas reveals "the true and original Christianity," a Gospel that was buried, curiously enough, in a "Gospel of the Mahometans."  Muslims used the Gospel of Barnabas to vindicate their belief that Jesus Christ was not divine but only human, and that Jesus actually designated Mohammed as the coming prophet.

Toland argued that if we remove the overlay of Islam, we actually receive a glimpse of the beliefs of the earliest Christians, the Ebionites or "Nazarens," who believed that Jesus was only a "mere man."  The Nazarens were "the first Christians, and consequently the only Christians for some time." Unlike the later, institutional Church, the first Christians "affirmed Jesus to have been a mere man, as well by the father as the mother's side, namely [he was] the son of Joseph and Mary, but that he was just, and wise, and excellent, above all other persons, meriting to be called the Son of God by reason of his most virtuous life."

Toland reported all this in the most scholarly and detached manner, with plenty of footnotes to ancient texts in Latin and Greek, and cleverly let it to the reader to draw the desired conclusion: if the earliest Christians believed that Jesus was a mere man, the son of Joseph and Mary, and only the later Christians declared him to be divine, then...

You've got it!  The institutional Church, full of greedy priests and cut-throat prelates, has been suppressing the truth about Jesus all this time to feather its nest!  They pretended that Jesus was divine so that they could control the masses for their own gain! It's all a vast conspiracy! 

Sound familiar? It does if you've read Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

But it was a conspiracy...of Toland's. While there is a Gospel of Barnabas mentioned by the Fathers of the early Church, the text Toland discovered was actually an elaborate forgery, written sometime during the 14th to 16th century in Europe (perhaps Spain or Italy), a sign of which is that the "Gospel" contains a number of embarrassing anachronisms and confusions that show that the writer was very familiar with medieval Europe but not very familiar with the Holy Land of the first century.

Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. As the inimitable Yogi Berra would say, "It's Déjà Vu all over again."

Why the Gospel of Barnabas is not "Gospel"

The Gospel of Barnabas is not an authentic Gospel of Jesus. The author does not understand the language, history or geography of the 1st century A.D., and there is no ancient evidence for the book. The internal evidence of the book suggests it was written in the 14th century and there are Muslim scholars who agree with this dating. The book is a rewrite of the Biblical Gospel most likely by a Muslim who wanted to show that Jesus taught Islam and predicted the coming of Muhammad. This type of rewriting has been done elsewhere by Muslims in the Gospel According to Islam. This type of behaviour is disgraceful, and it is disgraceful for Muslims to continue to publish, promote and distribute this false Scripture.

Samuel Green

While it is my own personal belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters have merit, each individual reader must make the choice whether to agree or disagree... I see no truth whatsoever in stories of extraterrestrial visitors, crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, or many of the other 'mysteries' that permeate pop culture. However, the secret behind The Da Vinci Code was too well documented and significant for me to dismiss.

- Dan Brown from his online FAQ

Heretic's Hall of Fame

Sorry Dan, but by all measures you fail to qualify for the Heretic's Hall of Fame. Our top 3 nominees were far more substantive and original in their attempts to disestablish orthodox teachings about Jesus.

As we’ve seen with John Toland, Dan Brown’s reaching back into the history of Christianity in the Da Vinci Code to resurrect heretical writings is nothing new. Although much damage has been and will be done by the string of misinformation that drives the plot of Brown’s book and movie, at least this much good may come of it. It might give Christians a healthy and needed nudge to rediscover their own history. Indeed, books like the Da Vinci Code are only effective insofar as we are ignorant of what really happened.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some famous heretics of Christianity’s first centuries. You never know—you might meet them in Dan Brown’s next book (or the hundred wanna-be’s published in its wake).

We might begin by asking what exactly makes a heretic? Heresy is parasitic. It always exists as the denial of something else. It stands or falls only because something else stands first. If we examine heresies in the first Christian centuries, we usually find that heretics are (like John Toland and Dan Brown) dissatisfied with Christianity as it is handed on, and so decide that it needs a remake.

The Apostles were constant companions of Christ. They witnessed his life; they sat at table while he ate; they saw him sleep; they knew that he was beaten nearly to death and then slaughtered. To their great shock, he was resurrected, body and soul.

That is the truth the Apostles handed on as a Rule of Faith (the Latin tradere, from which we get “tradition” means “to hand on”). The Rule of Faith was a kind of confessional synopsis of who Jesus Christ is as the Messiah, and this rule of faith preceded both the New Testament canon and the Church’s creeds as defined in councils.

But the Rule of Faith did not fit what some people wanted to believe. An important example of this is the Gnostic scheme. Gnosticism was rooted in a pagan belief that there were two gods, a good god who created the good spiritual realm and an evil or lesser god who created the evil physical world. For Gnostics, since the body was evil, the whole point of redemption was to escape the evil body.

Valentinus

Therefore, when Gnostics came into contact with Christianity, they couldn’t accept the Rule of Faith, so they rewrote it to suit their own views. One of the more famous, Valentinus, who worked in the mid-second century AD, thought he must make a new and improved Christ, a pure spirit who came into the evil material world to awaken souls trapped in evil bodies and “spirit” them away.

For Valentinus, because the body was evil, God could not really have become incarnate; all the more so, Jesus could not really have been killed since he was a pure spirit; and most of all, redemption could never, ever mean the resurrection of the body, and so Jesus could not really have appeared again in bodily form after the crucifixion.

But the Apostles had lived with Jesus as a man, not a pure spirit; they knew that he was beaten and killed; they were shocked by his bodily resurrection; they learned at his feet both before and after the crucifixion. In short, they knew the Gnostic Jesus to be a false figure of the Gnostic imagination. And so they knew Valentinus to be a heretic.

Marcion

Interestingly enough, Christians have heretics to thank for the New Testament, a heretic named Marcion to be exact. Marcion, another Gnostic, was the single most influential heretic of the 2nd century. He was born about 85 AD in Sinope in northern Asia Minor, the son of a Christian bishop, so we are told. He became a wealthy shipowner and merchant, but somehow found time to preach a suspect version of Christianity. Migrating to Rome around 135, he worked out his theological system more fully and began his mission of evangelization.

During this time, the various New Testament writings did exist, but they had not yet been gathered into an official canon, and false gospels had not been clearly and officially distinguished from true. Marcion decided to make his own “Bible,” eliminating the entire Old Testament and offered the first canon of the New Testament, consisting only of edited versions of the Gospel of Luke and edited versions of the Pauline Epistles (excluding the Pastorals).

Why did he do that? As a Gnostic, he believed the body was evil, therefore he identified the God of the Old Testament as the evil god who created the evil physical world. Out with the Old Testament then! Furthermore, since so much of the New Testament writings draw favorably on the Old Testament, and so much of what Jesus said in the four Gospels affirms the physical world as good, all of these would have to be cut out as well!

Marcion’s Bible didn’t cut it with the Rule of Faith. But it did push the early Church into gathering together those works circulating during the first century and a half of Christianity that did present the truth about Jesus as known and handed on by his Apostles. Our familiar version of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is largely the result of the early Church’s need to offer a counter-canon to combat Marcionism.

Arius

Another great crisis for Christianity was initiated by one Arius (c. 250-336). He was ordained a deacon at Alexandria, Egypt, and later a priest. His heresy consisted in denying the true divinity of Christ, arguing that Jesus was not the co-eternal second person of the Holy Trinity made flesh in the incarnation, but instead a creature created by the Father. Arianism spread faster than Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, and became at several points, the official religion of the Empire.

This short survey only represents a small percentage of the heresies circulating during the early years of Christianity, and so also presents only a fraction of the struggle. But it at least gives us several important lessons. The attempt by Dan Brown to refashion Christianity is nothing new; his efforts are merely one more in a long line stretching back over two millennia. Second, Christians have a most serious responsibility to know the essentials of faith so that they can discern the impostors. Third, Christians must, as the Christians of those first centuries, combat misinformation with information. Perhaps we will know our faith all the more deeply and clearly after the Da Vinci hysteria dies down—and we might have Dan Brown to thank for it!

Benjamin Wiker

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