Jesus: Debunking the Myths - Discovery Website

Jesus: Debunking the Myths

Love it or loathe it, you cannot run away from it! Since the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the second century AD, which presents Jesus as a kind of spiritual wunderkind with amazing supernatural powers, history has been rife with imaginative reconstructions of Jesus’ life, mission and message. He was a pacifist; he was a revolutionary. He was a legalist; he was a libertine. He was a Muslim; he was an Essene; he was a Cynic. Supposedly ‘lost’ gospels are dusted down and attract huge interest. Conspiracy theories abound, and help to sell many books.

In recent years, however, one book more than many has helped to define and shape this climate of scepticism. The Da Vinci Code has been a runaway success, being translated into more than sixty languages worldwide, and launching Dan Brown onto the international stage. Its reverberations are still felt in many popular views of Jesus.

But is its portrayal of Christianity accurate? Has the Church, in fact, been deceiving us for the last two thousand years? Let us consider some of the main claims made in the book:              

CLAIM:  Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
         
FACT: There is no historical evidence for this whatsoever, even in the documents that Brown cites. Early Church History is one of the most intensely researched fields of study by scholars of all beliefs and persuasions, and yet no-one has ever produced a shred of evidence to support this claim!
         
CLAIM:  The 'Gnostic' Gospels emphasise the simple humanity of Jesus and the role of women in the early church.
         
FACT:  On the contrary, most 'Gnostic' writings present Jesus as an other-worldly, supernatural being, barely human at all, while many are very dismissive of the role of women. By contrast, the four Gospels we have in the New Testament (particularly that of Luke) present Jesus as a very human figure and give prominence to the ministry of women.                 

CLAIM:  The 'Gnostic' writers more accurately represent the original teaching of Jesus.
         
FACT:  The Gnostics believed that matter was evil and that creation was a mistake. This is an idea diametrically opposed to the teaching of Jesus, or any Jewish thinker of the time.               

CLAIM:  The four Gospels in the Bible were imposed on the Church by the Emperor Constantine in AD 325.              

FACT: Extracts from the four Gospels we find in the New Tesament are quoted authoritatively by Paul (AD 65), Clement (AD 95), Ignatius (AD 105), Justin Martyr (AD 150) and a host of later Christian writers of the second and third centuries. Even the 'Gnostic' writers (who wrote long after these Gospels were finished) seem happy to quote from them! Statements by Irenaeus and in the 'Muratorian Canon' (both from around 200 AD) are clear in their acceptance of these four Gospels while at the same time rejecting the Gnostic writings.      
   
CLAIM: At the Council of Nicea in AD 325 the bishops voted narrowly to accept for the first time that Jesus was divine.
       
FACT:  Far from being a 'close vote', it was  actually carried with ninety-nine per cent in favour! This, in fact, is no surprise. Try counting the direct references to Jesus as 'God' in the New Testament, or in the surviving works of Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Hippolytus, all of whom wrote between 100 and 200 AD. In each case you will come up with double figures! Add to this the evidence of non-Christian writers of the second and third centuries AD and the case against Brown's view becomes overwhelming.
        
CLAIM: The figure next to Jesus in Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper' is actually a woman.
        
FACT:  In a sketch for the painting in Venice the figure is clearly labelled as John the Apostle. As he was considered to be a mere teenager it was conventional in paintings of this period to present him with softer, more feminine features.            

CLAIM: It is significant that no single cup or 'Grail' is presented in the painting.
        
FACT:  This is true in about a third of the depictions of the Last Supper we find in Italian paintings at this time. Most of the details we have about Jesus's final Supper with his disciples comes from John's Gospel, which makes no reference to a cup either. So there is nothing new here!          

CLAIM:  Documents in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris prove that the French royal family were directly descended from Christ.
       
FACT:  In the early 1990s Pierre Plantard testified on oath in a French court that he had placed the documents there fraudulently to advance his own claim to the French line of succession. Furthermore, the forger of the documents themselves, Philippe de Cherisey, has admitted they were a hoax.                

CLAIM: The Church has suppressed the real truth about these things for the last two thousand years.
        
FACT:  We all love conspiracy theories, and they tend to make a lot of money! But where do you stop? Some people believe that NASA faked the Moon landings in a Hollywood studio, that Prince Philip ordered the murder of Princess Diana, or even that the earth is run by green lizards!

What, then, does the Bible itself have to say on this subject? Firstly, we should note that it warns us to ignore conspiracy theories, but instead, to focus directly on God himself:       

"Do not call conspiracy everything that these people call conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy." (Isaiah 8: 12-13)

Secondly, it warns us about being led astray by foolish speculation:  

Command certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. These promote controversies rather than God’s work--which is by faith...Some have wandered away from these and turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm. (1 Tim 1: 4-8).

To each of us Jesus addresses the question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matthew 16:15). Our answer to this question is critical to the destiny of our own soul.  In the original Greek Jesus’s words in John 8:24 read, ‘Unless you believe that I AM you will die in your sins'. In other words, if we do not see Jesus as he truly is, as nothing less than ‘God with us’, we could be gambling away an eternal destiny.

Does this sound uncomfortably dogmatic or exclusive?  If so, it is no more so than Jesus himself was, in declaring himself to be the direct human expression of God. And if there is even a fractional chance that Jesus actually was in fact everything he claimed to be, we have no alternative but to take him very seriously indeed.

We would do well to adopt the attitude of Thomas, as described in Chapter 20 of John’s Gospel. Not content merely to accept the assurances of his friends, he was determined to view the evidence of the risen Christ at first hand - and, as a result, went further than any of them in recognising who Jesus was. His conclusion reverberates through history in five simple but utterly profound words: 'My Lord and my God!' (John 20.28).

It is pointless, therefore, to approach these issues with a fixed agenda. When we come to Christ, we need to leave all our preconceptions behind, and ask him, like Philip, to ‘show us the Father’ (John 14: 8). But at that point the questions about Christ have to stop, and rather a lot of questions about us begin instead!

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