Banned from the Bible? Why the "Gnostic Gospels" Aren't in the New Testament.

Banned from the Bible? Why the “Gnostic Gospels” Aren’t in the New Testament.

In Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, the eccentric Professor Sir Leigh Teabing says to Robert Langdon and Sophie Nouveau: “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.” (p. 250, emphasis in original)

What were these “more than eighty gospels” that were essentially banned from the Bible? They were books with weird-sounding names like The Protoevangelion of James, The Prayer of the Apostle Paul, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Gospel of Nicodemus, Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary, and the now-famous Gospel of Thomas. And why were they banned? According to Brown through his fictional academic Teabing, after “upgrading” Jesus’ status from human to divine in a “bold stroke” almost four hundred years after his death, “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels which spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned.” (DVC, p. 250, emphasis in original) Basically, in a mad grab for power, Constantine (272-327 AD) banned and burned all those books that didn’t agree with the view of Jesus that he and the Catholic Church were trying to push. This is a restatement of the old Walter Bauer (1877-1960) thesis of the 1930s that Christian history was written by the winners; until the mid-second century AD, the Bauer (a German New Testament scholar) thesis goes, there was no orthodox view of Jesus, but instead dozens of rival and competing Jesus sects, until the emerging Catholic Church began to squeeze out all these rival views of Jesus. And in order to do this, the Church had to ban and burn their sacred texts. Thus, according to Sir Leigh Teabing, and not a few popular modern scholars like Princeton’s Elaine Pagels and UNC’s Bart Ehrman, who have revived Bauer’s long-discarded theory, we might’ve had totally different gospels including several Gnostic gospels in our New Testaments were it not for Constantine and his power-mad bishops, who, at the First (the second one was in 787 AD) Council of Nicaea in 325 AD essentially created the Bible that they wanted.

But is any of this true? Could it be that Constantine was responsible for the shape the New Testament canon took? Should the Gnostic gospels have been included in the New Testament? Actually, no. All of this may make for great drama in a novel, but as noted British New Testament textual scholar the late F. F. Bruce (1910-1990) might've said about his fictional peer Prof. Teabing’s statements, “It’s all a load of rubbish!”

In the first place, the First Council of Nicaea (as scholars Bauer, Ehrman and Pagels acknowledge) had absolutely nothing to do with the formation of the canon. That was essentially already a done deal, and had been since the 2^nd century. The Muratorian Canon Fragment (a fragment of a longer document named after the 18th century Italian priest who discovered it) of ca. 175 AD, a list of books considered canonical by the Roman Church, lists every book now in our New Testament except Hebrews and James, and by 325 these two texts had been accepted. Indeed, only seven books of the New Testament (Philemon, Hebrews, James, II Peter, II and III John, Jude) were ever debated, but by 325 AD they had all been accepted, and none of them contains distinctive teaching not found in other undisputed books. So a core list of twenty canonical New Testament texts existed from very early.

The Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine primarily to deal with the Arian heresy, in which the presbyter Arius (ca. 250-336 AD) had started teaching that Jesus was not preexistent and coeternal with God the Father. “There was a time when he [the Son] was not,” Arius said. The Nicene bishops rejected Arius’ teaching, and not by a close vote, either, as Teabing says: of the approximately 311 bishops at Nicaea, only two voted against the Nicene theology which upheld the traditional view of Christ’s deity. Christ’s deity was never in question, either before or after Nicaea; even Arius believed that Jesus was divine, just not coeternal with God. Certainly the Gnostics never questioned Jesus’ divinity. This is where Brown and Prof. Teabing really drop the ball.

Gnosticism, from an ancient Greek word gnosis, or “knowledge” was a second century AD heresy with Christian and pagan variations. Gnosticism was basically Platonism on steroids. Essentially, in Platonism, the abstract is more real than the physical. Thus in Platonism, the created space-time universe is a shadow, or cheap copy of the immaterial realm of the Forms, which were universal and eternal concepts like goodness, truth, beauty, justice, mercy, etc. In Platonism matter is transient, disposable, while spirit is eternal.

Gnostics took this a step further, holding that matter and thus the space-time universe wasn’t just transient, or disposable, but was downright evil, created by an inferior, imposter god, often identified with the Jewish God Yahweh. In Gnosticism, creation was the original sin. The Gospel of Philip says plainly that “The world came about through a mistake.” (Gospel of Philip, 75) In Christian Gnosticism, at creation, divine sparks became trapped in human bodies; Jesus was a divine spirit (though not God) who came to earth to show these (mostly male) people how to recognize and free the divine spark within themselves and escape the constraints of the physical universe. Thus the last thing any Gnostic would’ve wanted was a fully human Jesus. No, in Gnosticism, Jesus’ body is just an illusion—that or the Christ spirit comes upon and “possesses” the human Jesus. Of course if Jesus’ body was just an illusion, so was his death, or, as in some Gnostic theology, Jesus switches places with Simon of Cyrene, who was crucified in his place. So there’s no concept of the Atonement in Gnosticism. In the Gospel of Judas Jesus wants to die, though purely as an example, to show Judas and others how to save themselves by realizing the divinity within them and Judas becomes the hero because he hands Jesus over to be killed, thus helping him fulfill his destiny. The Gnostic Jesus is more like an a-historical pagan philosopher teaching mystical wisdom than the first-century, Second Temple, Palestinian Jewish Messiah Jesus.

If you’re thinking by now that Gnosticism doesn’t look anything like the Judaeo-Christian view presented in the Bible, you’re right. As world-renowned New Testament scholar and Christian author N. T. Wright says:

“Neo-Gnosticism is the philosophy that invites you to search deep inside yourself and discover some exciting things by which you must then live. It is the philosophy which declares that the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find when you engage in that deep inward search. But this is not a religion of redemption. It is not at all a Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves. It appeals, on the contrary, to the pride that says “I’m really quite an exciting person deep down, whatever I may look like outwardly” – the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world. It appeals to the stimulus of that ever-deeper navel-gazing (‘finding out who I really am’) which is the subject of a million self-help books, and the home-made validation of a thousand ethical confusions.”

By “Neo-Gnosticism” Bishop Wright is referring to the modern, reworked, politically correct version of ancient Gnosticism that is all the rage now. It’d have to be re-worked, because if Gnosticism was presented as it really was, nobody’d wanna join!

As already said, original Gnosticism took a decidedly negative view of creation. It also took a decidedly negative view of sex and procreation. Can’t have the creation of more human bodies to trap more divine sparks, now can we? (Though some Gnostics believed since your body was irrelevant you might as well party up in it.) And Gnosticism was at best ambivalent about, at worst negative towards, women. In fact, in saying 114 (the last one) of the much-hyped and super-popular Gospel of Thomas, we read:

“Simon Peter said to them, ‘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.’”

Then there’s the fact that the Gnostic “gospels” weren't written until about 150 AD, over one hundred years after the New Testament texts were written (the New Testament texts were all written within the first-century AD). One of the first writers to actually mention the Gnostic writings was the second-century Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 125-ca. 185) in 180 AD. And for the record, out of all of the fifty-two Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt (the Jewish Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran on the Dead Sea in 1947), only about five are actually called gospels in their titles.

So were the Gnostic gospels really “banned from the Bible?” No, because they were never seriously considered for inclusion in it to begin with. So why do these conspiracy theories persist? Why are they so popular? I believe Penn State’s Prof. Philip Jenkins, in his book Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way has put his finger on it:

“Despite its dubious sources and controversial methods, the new Jesus scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s gained such a following because it told a lay audience what it wanted to hear.”

Sources and Further Reading:

F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture

Darrel Bock, Breaking The Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone's Asking

Darrell Bock, The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities.

Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels

James Garlow, The Da Vinci Codebreaker

Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way.

Rudolph Kasser, Marvin Meyer and Gregor Wurst, The Gospel of Judas

Andreas J. Kostenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

Nicholas Perrin, Thomas, the Other Gospel

James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library.

N. T. Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus: Have We Missed the Truth About Christianity?