The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (21 page)

Chapter 7

EIGHTY GOSPELS?

Leftover Gospels outside the Bible

CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS

W
e have seen that Dan Brown’s expert on the Bible and early Christianity rarely knows exactly what he’s talking about. He’ll say something with a point to it, but he then invites the skeptic to dismiss it out of hand because of the egregious errors in which he wraps it. “Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’s status almost four centuries [
sic
: surely he means three!]
after
Jesus’s death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a
mortal
man.”
¹
Among these he numbers the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, in fact, never mention Jesus by name if at all, and the Nag Hammadi documents, which certainly do not depict a human or humanistic Jesus.
²

Later, it looks like considerably more of these writings—in fact, most, maybe all—survived the book burnings because they are buried with Mary Magdalene’s mummy, like packing paper, one supposes. Teabing starts christening these not-so-lost books “the Sangreal documents.”
³
They “include tens of thousands of pages of information. Eyewitness accounts of the Sangreal treasure describe it as being carried in four enormous trunks. In those trunks are reputed to be the
Purist Documents
[yet another title!]—thousands of pages of unaltered, pre-Constantinian documents, written by the early followers of Jesus, revering Him as a wholly human teacher and prophet.”
⁴
In that case, it seems safe to hazard the guess that they don’t capitalize “He” and “Him” as Brown does! In any event, this all comes from
The Hiram Key
, as we have seen, a completely fanciful source.

The number shrinks considerably elsewhere in the book: “More than
eighty
gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.”
⁵
No, Professor Teabing, there’s no “among them.” Unfortunately, those are the only four that made the cut.

These tantalizing remarks naturally make one wonder what sort of thing might be contained in the Purist Documents or Sangreal documents (or whatever we are to call them). Luckily, Teabing provides a couple of peeks: “Another explosive document believed to be in the treasure is a manuscript called
The Magdalene Diaries
—Mary Magdalene’s personal account of her relationship with Christ, His crucifixion, and her time in France.”
⁶
This is just hilarious, though one suspects unwittingly. Brown is descending to the level of the supermarket tabloid “scoops” such as archaeologists discovering love letters from Jesus to Mary. Or maybe it is a tip of the hat to an earlier dime novel,
The Magdalene Scrolls
by Barbara Wood (1978). In any case, here Mary Magdalene has become a first-century Jackie-O!

One can find all extant samples of noncanonical gospel literature assembled, with good introductions, in Robert J. Miller’s
The Complete Gospels
.
⁷
But while it’s this book you’re reading, let me provide my own take on some of the most interesting gospels.

THE “LOST” GOSPEL Q

“Also rumored to be part of the treasure is the legendary
‘Q’ Document
—a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists. Allegedly, it is a book of Jesus’ teachings, possibly written in his own hand. . . . Why wouldn’t Jesus have kept a chronicle of his ministry? Most people did in those days.”
⁸
It is hard to know where to begin! Brown probably got the idea that Mary Magdalene is wrapped up in Q from
The Hiram Key
. Those authors, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, misunderstand what Q is supposed to be. They have somewhere got the notion that it was a source document drawn upon by all four canonical gospels. Brown doesn’t understand what it is either. He seems to think it is supposed to be a notebook of some kind, containing Jesus’s basic preaching material, which he would check off after each gig to make sure he didn’t use the same material on the same audience twice! And Brown says such books were common. Not so. But in any event, whether Jesus kept such a thing or not, that is not what Q is supposed to be. What is it, then?

The one-letter title stands for the German word
Quelle
, or “source” (German scholars first came up with the theory), and Q is the sayings source used by Matthew and Luke in addition to their using Mark. To slow down: When one compares Matthew, Mark, and Luke in detail, it quickly becomes evident that they are not independent works. Somebody has been copying from somebody else. Much material is shared between them, quite often verbatim. And where they differ, it looks like the kind of difference you have when one writer edits another. These are called redactional changes. Most of Mark reappears in both Luke and Matthew, but Luke and Matthew also share a considerable amount of material that does not appear in Mark. Most scholars accept that the pattern of dependence was as follows. First, there were two major Jesus documents: Mark, largely a narrative, and Q, almost entirely a set of sayings. There are occasional parallels between the two, enough to suggest Mark might have picked up a few things from Q and rewritten them. Later, Matthew and Luke independently decided to combine the two well-known Jesus books and to add material of their own. So Matthew combined Mark and Q, adding much new material. Luke combined Mark and Q, but in a different order, also adding new material of his own creation. (John seems to have made some use of Mark and Luke, maybe of Matthew as well, but not of Q, which may have been lost by his day.) Thus the contents of Q are no mystery. There may well be other collections of teachings of Jesus buried out there somewhere, but if we want to talk about Q, we are talking about a hypothetical literary source whose contents we know because we can distill them from Matthew and Luke. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t even be talking about Q. So, contrary to Brown and Teabing, we already have Q. We’ve always had it. It’s just parts of Matthew and Luke.

This is not to say the subject of Q is not of considerable interest. Helmut Koester, James M. Robinson, Burton L. Mack, and others have drawn attention to a profound implication of there being a gospel composed only of sayings. Keep in mind, it is apparently a self-sufficient gospel in which some ancient Christian body expressed what it thought was most important—and it makes no mention of miracles, Jesus’s crucifixion, or a resurrection! What kind of Christians, when faced with the prospect of committing to paper what they wanted people to know about Jesus, would assemble just his sayings? Presumably a variety hinted at in the Gospel of Thomas, saying 13, when Matthew says to Jesus, “You are a wise philosopher.” We have no right to assume this early group even knew about the death of Jesus, much less believed in it as the vehicle for human salvation! Recent discussion of Q and its implications has indeed had a major impact on the way scholars are revising their understanding of Christian origins.

It is true that there do remain some scores of gospels that were unknown or distasteful to the nameless compilers of the canon. Mary Magdalene’s kiss-and-tell memoirs happen not to be among them, but these books are interesting nonetheless, and I propose to survey them here. I will have more or less to say about each depending on its relative importance or interest.

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

This document is the only surviving example of the sayings gospel genre, though we have reason to believe there were others, including the Q source. There are but stray narrative bits in Thomas, which are there to set up the sayings. And yet it is not quite right to say that Thomas’s sayings just hang timelessly in the air with no narrative framework (like those collected in the Book of Proverbs). Depending on how one understands the phrase “the living Jesus” at the start of the book, the ensuing sayings may be intended as a (primitive version of a) revelatory Resurrection discourse like the Pistis Sophia, The Dialogue of the Savior, or The Epistle of the Apostles. These books presuppose some sort of Passion and Easter Narratives and propose to enlighten the reader on special esoteric teachings given by Jesus to the elite among his disciples before his final ascension, the sort of thing hinted at in Acts chapter 1 but not made explicit there. We may read Thomas as providing a collection of such resurrection teachings.

But does this not conflict with the fact that many of the sayings in this collection are other versions of sayings attributed to Jesus during his Galilean teaching ministry in the traditional gospels? Yes and no. Actually, it just goes to vindicate Rudolf Bultmann’s observation that early Christians made no distinction such as today’s historians like to make between remembered sayings of a historical Jesus and inspired prophetic oracles issued in the early Christian congregations by prophets uttering a word of wisdom or word of knowledge in the name of the Risen Lord.

Why is this gospel connected to the name of Judas Thomas, Judas the Twin? Many in early Syrian Christianity supposed that Thomas, being, after all,
someone
’s less important twin brother (otherwise the
other
brother would have been dubbed “ditto,” Didymus or Thomas, i.e., the Twin), was actually the twin of
Jesus
. (Mark 6 does list a brother named Judas.) But just as often this brother relation was understood to be spiritual and figurative, Thomas being the paramount example of (or a fictionalized symbol of) the Christian who achieves Jesus’s own level of spiritual advancement. This was something considered impossible by emerging institutional Catholicism, whose dogma of inescapable Original Sin functioned as a stifling, self-fulfilling prophecy for those catechized to believe it, thus ensuring the hierarchy would never work itself out of a job.

Since the Gospel according to Thomas was discovered among a cache of overtly Gnostic documents at Nag Hammadi, scholars have assumed it, too, is a Gnostic product. In recent years, Stevan L. Davies and others have pointed out how mild the esoteric character of Thomas is compared with full-fledged Gnostic texts like the Pistis Sophia.
⁹
While some sayings do seem to teach Gnostic doctrines like the preexistence of the soul and implicit reincarnationism, others inculcate strict Torah observance. Some sayings hotly repudiate belief in a future coming of the Kingdom of God, while others plainly teach it. Some sayings teach antisexual Encratism; others presuppose the Jewish Platonism of Philo.

Is Thomas dependent on any or all of the traditionally canonical gospels? There is a lot of overlap. But the verbal similarities are considerably looser than those between, say, Matthew and Mark or Luke and Mark. The situation is similar to that of John and the Synoptics, where the dependence is much looser, the rewriting considerably freer—if there is dependence at all. Scholars including Helmut Koester, Stevan L. Davies, and Stephen J. Patterson argue vigorously and plausibly that Thomas presents us with an independent and often earlier, more authentic, version of those Jesus sayings it holds in common with Matthew, Mark, or Luke. The key to the debate is whether close reading of Thomas’s sayings reveals any of the distinctive marks of Matthew’s or Luke’s redactional style. That is, we think we can often pinpoint just how and where Matthew and Luke have retouched their Markan and Q source materials, and if we were to find in Thomas something that appears to retain the editorial marks of Matthew or Luke, this would count as evidence that the compiler of Thomas had derived the sayings in question from those Gospels, not just from free-floating oral tradition. If Thomas seems to be quoting Matthew’s version of a saying, then Thomas is later than Matthew and used Matthew. And this is what I think did happen. I believe there are sufficient signs to indicate that Thomas follows Matthew and Luke. And yet Thomas certainly seems to be a collection of variegated materials, many derived from oral tradition rather than written sources. But we don’t have an either-or dilemma here. Oral tradition of the sayings of Jesus continued to thrive for a long time after the gospels were put down in written form, and we learn from Papias that at least some Christians continued to prefer what they considered the living voice of apostolic tradition to what they could find in books. What I think happened in the case of Thomas is that its compiler did three things.

First, he relied upon memory quotations of material he had once read or heard read from Matthew and Luke, having no copy at hand as Matthew did of Mark when he was writing his own gospel. In other words, through memory quotation, necessarily imprecise, and more so as time goes on, the written gospel materials reentered the stream of oral tradition, not once, but many times. And Thomas represents a second written crystallization of some of these sayings. Second, the compiler wrote down various sayings he had heard in word-of-mouth tradition, whether attributed to Jesus or not, many of them plainly ascribed to Dame Wisdom, speaking as she does in Proverbs 9, and then ascribed them to Jesus. Third, he coined a number of sayings of his own and redacted or reshaped others.

Those who consider Thomas independent of Matthew and John tend also to make it early. Koester and Davies both place Thomas around 50 CE, earlier than any other surviving gospel. If I am correct, and Thomas does in fact owe a debt to Matthew and Luke, such an early date is impossible.