Today we are going to begin a series of messages that will talk about some of the questions that have been raised by Dan Brown in his book The Da Vinci Code. Unless you have just returned from Mars you are aware of the hype and controversy that the book has created. Many of you have heard of it and have read it. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for three years and has sold in excess of forty-four million copies. It’s been a cover story for most of the news magazines and TV news shows. On May 19 a movie based on the book will be released starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard. I have read the book and enjoyed the story in spite of what are some blatant historical errors and plan on seeing the movie.

For those of you who have not yet read the book, let me give you a quick sketch of what you need to know just for this series of messages. The central character is a guy named Robert Langdon. He is a forty-something, gray-haired, very bright, dashing, attractive Harvard professor who stumbles onto the amazing secret that, according to the book, (a) Jesus is not at all like the Gospels present him, and, in fact, he was married to Mary Magdalene, and they had a child whose descendant may still be alive (b) Jesus’ intent was for Mary Magdalene to become the head of the church after his death; (c) this plan made Peter jealous, so he squelched it after Jesus died; and (d) the early church and the New Testament documents engaged in a massive cover-up to conceal Jesus’ marriage and his mortality in order to put only men in control. The book also asserts that Jesus was not regarded as divine until centuries after his death when the Emperor Constantine suppressed the ancient documents that tell the real story and had the Council of Nicea in the 4^th century piece together what we have today as the New Testament.

Dan Brown says that what he presents in the book beyond the story is accurate. That has raised questions for lots of people. Are there other ancient documents about Jesus besides what we have in the New Testament? Are they more reliable than what we have in the Scriptures? Was Jesus married? Was his wife Mary Magdalene? Did they have a child? Was Leonardo da Vinci part of a secret organization that knew about this? Do we know why the New Testament includes the books that it does? Was Jesus human or divine? What was the Holy Grail, really, and how much time will it take for us to sort all this out? There really are answers to these questions, and they are, "Yes. No. No. No. No. No. Yes. Both. Who knows?" and, "Seventy-five minutes over the next three weeks."

There are many questions that we won’t get into, and several this book raises that I am certainly not smart enough to answer. The great thing about the book and the movie is that they give Christians the chance to define again what we believe about the Bible, the role of Jesus with his followers and the uniqueness of Jesus himself. What I want to do in these messages is get into the main issue: Does the Christian faith and our understanding of Jesus have a solid leg to stand on? I want to talk about this not for the sake of walking through information, but because this really is about deciding what we’re going to build our lives on. If it doesn’t result in our living the way that God intends our lives to be lived, it doesn’t mean anything. But we want to build our lives on truth. Part of what that means is that this is going to be one of those series where we go into the classroom together and roll up our sleeves and walk through a lot of material and do a lot of learning together.

The first question that the book causes us to ask is "Can the Bible be trusted?" Was there a conspiracy put in place to hide things about Jesus? How can we trust the reliability of the Scriptures? Were there other authentic sources or gospels that were discarded in the process? Here’s a quote from the book. One of the characters in The Da Vinci Code says, "The Bible is a product of man, my dear, not of God. History has never had a definitive version of the book. The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 325 AD." This questions the Scripture. How do we know we can trust it? One of the things that has always excited me about the Bible is not just its inspiration but also the preservation of the Bible. In other words how did we get it? It might be news to some of you that it wasn’t written in King James English and in the First Century you couldn’t go down to the local market and just pick a version that you liked. The way the Bible was written and preserved for us is equally just as miraculous as the fact that God spoke to people to write it. So how did the Bible particularly the Gospels begin?

Let’s start with the Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John--since that is what The Da Vinci Code questions. As Jesus traveled from place to place he would teach. His teaching changed lives. It did something in people. Remember in the gospel of John when Roman guards tried to explain why they didn’t arrest Jesus. They said, "No one ever spoke the way this man does." Initially, Jesus’ life and teachings were not written down; they were passed on because they were remembered and retold. They were told because only about 3% of the people in the area Jesus lived could read. That means that when Jesus was teaching people, probably only about three out of one hundred would have been able to read the Old Testament Scriptures for themselves. At night, people sat around a fire and told stories and shared wise sayings. They would even recite genealogies. Jesus’ day, was a culture where stories were all that people knew. They were just as smart as we are, but most were not literate. They knew the stories of Jesus’ life and teachings, and were very well equipped to preserve them.

That’s one of the reasons why Jesus tells so many stories. Scholars estimate that about 80 percent of what Jesus taught was either in story form or in a kind of structure designed to enable people to remember easily what he said and to repeat it. After couple of decades of this, the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life began to age, and they were going to die. By this time the church was expanding rapidly. There were a lot of false teachers who could distort what Jesus taught. Church leaders recognized that they needed to write down Jesus’ story—his life and teachings—so that it would outlive them, and so that, in a uniform way, it could be spread to churches around the world. That’s probably why and how the Gospels were written.

Over time, other documents about Jesus were written as people talked about him. This is what we would expect. Some of them are what are called Gnostic gospels. That’s what the newly translated "Gospel of Judas" is. Gnosticism was a form of thought, loosely a form of religion, which emphasized a lot of secrets and concealed information and whether or not you were on the "inside". These Gnostic gospels had stories in them about Jesus that were wildly different from the kinds of things that we read in the New Testament Gospels. The early church leaders realized that they needed to have criteria that would help them decide which documents—which gospels—should go into what became known as the canon. This is a good word for us to know. It comes from a Greek word that means "the norm, the standard, the rule." They wanted to know, "Which books ought to be canonical? Which books can we trust? Which books are reliable?" Church leaders developed essentially four criteria to evaluate these different documents:

First criterion: Does this document have roots connected to one of the apostles? Was it written by an apostle or by a student or associate of one of the apostles? The four Gospels that we have in the New Testament meet this requirement. Matthew is associated with Matthew, also known as Levi the tax collector; Mark was a student of Peter; Luke was known as the "beloved physician," a good friend of the apostle Paul; and John is the gospel connected to the disciple John. (By the way, the other books in the New Testament, such as the letters of Paul or the letters of John, meet the same criteria.) It is important to understand that most scholars would agree that all these books were written within maybe thirty to sixty years after Jesus died. In other words, they were written while there were still eyewitnesses around who could challenge every word that was in them. They had to meet the task of being read by people who were alive when Jesus was around, and who would be able to say, "No. I was there," if something was inaccurate.

The Da Vinci Code talks about how there were many other ancient books about Jesus’ life and suggests that maybe the church was trying to cover them up. In reality, essentially all of these books were written much, much later. We know that the books of the New Testament were compiled as a unit near the end of the first century because we have letters from church leaders describing them. As far as these other books, in some cases, they were written centuries after Jesus—after that eyewitness generation. They were often given fictitious and misleading names like the "Gospel of Mary" or the "Gospel of Peter," even though they were written centuries after Peter or Mary had died.

Second criterion: To be included in the canon, the contents of the book had to be consistent with the kind of teaching that Jesus did. There’s one other account of Jesus’ life that’s also quite old called the Gospel of Thomas. It was probably written about fifty years after the gospel of John, the latest of the New Testament Gospels. Some scholars have argued that the "Gospel of Thomas" ought to be taken more seriously. Here’s one of the reasons why it wasn’t. I want to read for you the very last part of the Gospel of Thomas, and you decide how consistent it is with the teachings of Jesus: "Simon Peter said, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." Aren’t you glad that this didn’t make it into the Bible? Doesn’t that sound a little weird?

Third criterion: In order for a book to be included in the canon of Scripture, it had to have widespread influence in churches in Israel, in Asia Minor, in Rome, and so on, and had to have continuous acceptance and use by the church at large. We know that in 303 AD that Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered all the Christian scriptures burned and the churches destroyed. Now if a Roman soldier came to your home and demanded any copies of scripture that you had and you had a copy of the Gospel of Mark or another story of Jesus life that described him as turning clay birds into real ones which would you give up? Early Christians kept hidden the books that they all felt were worth saving.

In 325 AD a new emperor is chosen who is friendly to Christianity named Constantine. He gathered the church leaders together to answer some important questions about Christianity. One of those questions was, "Which books belong in the New Testament?" They didn’t have a table in front of them and pick and chose. No, they simply affirmed by the criteria we have discussed what everyone in the church already accepted for 250 years. One historian puts it like this: "None of the noncanonical gospels comes close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance." None of them comes close. So the idea that we have the New Testament Gospels today because Constantine put them together in 325 AD for political purposes is way off the mark. More than one hundred years before Constantine, a man by the name of Origen said, "The four gospels,"—and he goes on to name them—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—"are the only undisputed ones in the whole church of God throughout the whole world." That’s a quote from at least a century before Constantine and the Council of Nicea. A great New Testament professor, William Barclay from Edinburgh, once wrote, "It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them from doing so." They had that power to them.

This brings me to the fourth and final criteria. Remember that we have said that the Gospels were recognized as authoritative if the were written by an apostle or associated with an apostle, if they were consistent with what Jesus taught and if they were accepted by the largest portion of the Christians. The last one is this: "Did they have a spiritual power to them that set them apart from every other writing?" That is the key to understanding Paul’s message to Timothy in our text this morning. Timothy was an outstanding young man whose life had been impacted from birth by his Christian mother and grandmother. They guided Timothy in his faith by using the Scriptures. It was possible for them to have had access to a copy of at least the Gospel of Mark or of Matthew by this time. He says that these Scriptures "have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus." How did they do that? Because Paul said, "All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It straightens us out and teaches us to do what is right. It is God's way of preparing us in every way, fully equipped for every good thing God wants us to do." (v.16-17)

"All Scripture is inspired by God…" or as the NIV says, "All Scripture is God-breathed…" What those words mean is that God has chosen to convey himself and his message to us through the words of people. That he has given to those words an inherent power that is unlike the power or inspiration found anywhere else on earth or in history. These words are not on the level of inspiration like Shakespeare or Plato or any other human writer. Just as God gave life to Adam, breathing into him the gift of life, so God has chosen to give to these words, all of them, every line, every verse in the gospels as well as the other 62 books, His life. They are life! When anyone—man, woman, boy or girl—opens their heart to the Bible they discover several things:

• That it is a book of life; it is a book with life-changing power. (v.16)
• That it is a book that that points to the only One who can give real life-the person of Jesus Christ. (v.15)
• That it is a book that teaches us how to live life by showing us what is true, places where we are wrong, areas where we can improve and teaches us what is right. (v.16)
• That it is a book that equips us to guide others to this life. (v.17)

Can the Bible especially the Gospels be trusted? I believe that they can beyond any question! Yet I am not asking you to believe that based solely upon the basis of what we can prove historically as valid as that is. The question to ask is: Have they spoken to me personally? Have I sensed that somehow through these words on the pages of this book that God, the God of all time and eternity is talking to me, helping me, guiding me, teaching me, and changing me? For most of you there is no doubt that they have. That is the reason you have built your life upon these words. That is the reason that no other book out sells the Bible year after year. That is the reason that years after The Da Vinci Code is on the sale table for less than a buck that people will be publishing, printing and buying the Bible because it is a book of life, points to Life, corrects life and guides life!

Maybe you are here today and you don’t know this kind of life we are talking about. While you may have read the book or plan on seeing the movie, let me ask you, "What about sitting down and just reading the Bible?" Read Mark or Luke and see for yourself if these words are worthy of your trust. What you will find if you are honest is not the hidden secrets to a novel but the very person of Jesus Christ! You will find as John said about what he wrote, "But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life." (John 20:31, NLT) Can the Bible be trusted? The answer is yes! Because it is the book that has shown you and me where to find real life!

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Dr. Bruce Tippit, Pastor

First Baptist Church

Jonesboro, Arkansas

btippit@fbcjonesboro.org

Sources used:

"Jesus and The DaVinci Code," a sermon by John Ortberg

FAQs About the DaVinci Code by Mark Thomas, Ph.D.

The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown

Exploring The DaVinci Code by Lee Strobel

A Quest for Answers—The DaVinci Code by Josh McDowell

The Books and the Parchments by F. F. Bruce

Archeology and the New Testament by Merrill Unger

"Why I Believe the Bible Is True," a sermon by Bruce Tippit

Class Notes from "Biblical Backgrounds" by Bill Tolar, SWBTS

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels

Breaking the DaVinci Code by Darrell L. Bock