"Can We Trust the Gospels?"

Look Up: Galatians 1:6-9; 2 Peter 2:1-3; Jude 3-4

         Sermon preached by Dr. Wayne W. Poplin, Senior Pastor, Carmel Baptist Church
(Copyright 2006)

INTRODUCTION:  If I were to ask how many of you believed that our Scripture is true and reliable, how many of you would raise your hands?  If I were to ask you why you believe they are true and reliable, how many of you could give a sufficient answer to the “Why”?  Answers like “Well, I just do” won’t do. “I grew up believing that, and I still do” is not the answer that I am looking for [Teabing says: “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false, DVC, p.235]. With books and movies like the Da Vinci Code we have two dangerous situations converging:
                1.      A generation that enjoys a good mystery, which finds the “secretive” and a suggested “cover-up” fascinating, which believes that truth doesn’t matter, and is suspicious of the church.
                        G. K. Chesterton said something to this effect: When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
                2.      A Christian community that cannot give an answer for the hope within them, cannot articulate what they believe and why, cannot give a reasonable defense of their faith, and know next to nothing about church history.  [The need to be able to do so is not going away]

Why is this book so popular?  “We are a culture of people too eager to doubt and not quick enough to investigate [Boa and Turner, The Gospel According to the Da Vinci Code, p. 3]. 
As its core, the Da Vinci Code’s message is that Jesus is not the Son of God and that Christianity is a fraud [the gospels that tell the real truth about Jesus were outlawed, gathered up and burned—after Constantine financed a new Bible [words from Teabing, the “authority” Sir Leigh Teabing, DVC, p. 234—Leonardo lets us in on the real truth about Christianity –that is why Mona Lisa is smiling—she knows the truth]. While the book is appropriately labeled fiction, it’s a clever blending of fact and fantasy has managed to convince people that its underlying premise is true.  It presents its theories authoritatively.  For example, one out of every three Canadian readers of the book now believe that Jesus has human descendents walking around today [Strobel on “Approaching the Da Vinci Code].  Amy Welborn, who wrote an article for USA Today, tells how she has stood next to people studying copies of Leonardo’s Last Supper talking to each other about the figure to Jesus’ left and how, “Everybody knows that’s Mary Magdalene now.” Time magazine in 2005 called Dan Brown one of the 100 most influential people in the world today. 
            Will the media address the inaccuracies? Not likely. The media assailed Mel Gibson for trying to be accurate in his portrayal of Christ but is embracing the Code as they have their darling—the Jesus Seminar. 
            We can, however, know the truth and speak truth.  We need to know the truth to keep ourselves from doubts and to share truth with others in love.  I am preaching on this not to rehearse the movie or book, but simply to speak truth on the two major fronts that the book assaults:
            1.      The Gospels--The Gnostic Gospels are superior to our 4 Gospels.
            2.      The divinity of Jesus--Jesus is only human and not God and was never considered divine until Constantine, for political reasons, deemed Him such in A. D. 325   
In other words:
        1.      Can we trust the Gospels?
        2.      Is Jesus Divine? 
What Brown is suggesting is the replacement of our Gospels and the denial of Who we believe Jesus is. 
Now, we can just get mad—and I have done that. It may well be valid—as Jesus spoke to the Pharisees:

            “Woe, to you….You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces.  You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to” [Matthew 23:13 -14].
        Or we can use our energy learning and speaking the truth when we have the opportunity.  Only being angry makes us look like there is no truth to what we believe.  This is a time to speak up.  So today we begin with this question, “Can we trust our Gospels?”  This is the foundation from which we say who Jesus is. If this foundation is faulty, we have no defense.
            First of all, let me tell you or remind you what Brown says in his book about the NT Gospels through the mouth of “authorities.”

Recap from the Da Vinci Code
Politics determined what Gospels made it into the Bible. Constantine had about 80 other gospels outlawed and burned because they told the truth—i.e. they spoke of Jesus as only human, which He was.  Jesus’ human message was hijacked, shrouded in an “impenetrable cloak of divinity” [DVC,  p. 233].  Constantine needed a divine messiah because it was critical to the functioning of the Church and state, thus solidifying his power base.  Luckily, many of these gospels that Constantine tried to eradicate were discovered at Nag Hammadi and now the truth can be known.  The Vatican has tried to suppress these documents and make us think the variant gospels, which reveal glaring fabrications, are false.  
        “The Bible did not arrive by Fax from heaven” [DVC, p. 231] but was a product of man.  Actually the NT was determined by Constantine at a Council [Nicea] in A.D. 325. 

Now let’s look at the error here and then the reliability of our 4 Gospels. 

1. The error. There are not 80 other gospels. There are about 60 documents in question here of which some are Gnostic Gospels. The term “Gnostic” derives from “gnosis” which means “knowledge” in Greek.  The Gnostics believed they were privy to secret knowledge about God.  There is hidden wisdom or knowledge given only to a select group and that knowledge is necessary for salvation or escape from this world or escape out of this evil physical body in which we are trapped [we don’t need salvation but enlightenment].  Since God created this evil, material world, He is a demon.  Satan or the serpent is the “good guy” because he is the one who offered Adam and Eve “knowledge.” Gnosticism lets you be “spiritual”—as an inner mysticism—without worrying about objective truth or what you do with your body.  Old Gnosticism is basically New Age.  

The Gnostic gospels were not rejected in an attempt to solidify Constantine’s power nor suppressed because they told the truth about Jesus’ lack of divinity.  Most of these gospels, in fact, deny Jesus’ humanity and exaggerate His divinity. You find in them the story of Jesus bringing clay pigeons to life and pushing a child off a roof and killing him so He can bring him back to life. These gospels were not rejected because they did not help Constantine’s political agenda, they were rejected from the canon because of the time of their writing and the fact that they did not measure up to the standard for inclusion [Canon= “measuring stick”]. 

The standard involved three areas:

            a.  Apostolicity.  Written or sanctioned by an apostle, who was an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry. The Gnostic gospels were not written by nor sanctioned by an apostle.  Some of them are: The Gospel of Thomas, Philip, Mary, Judas, etc.  There is no serious scholar today they believe these gospels were written by the names used.  Someone used the name of the apostle to gain credibility.  The early church rejected outright any book written under a pseudonym.  Also, the earliest of these writings were over 120 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Other writings have been attributed to the 3^rd and 4^th and even later centuries.  They were not written by eyewitnesses.  
            b.      Conformity to the rule of faith.  Orthodox in teaching that did not contradict the apostolic teaching or the Old Testament. The Gnostic gospels are not similar to the New Testament, they are strikingly different.  In fact, they have material that is non historical and bizarre. Examples [Lutzer, The Da Vinci Deception, pp. 38-39]. 
            c.       Widespread and continuous acceptance in the churches throughout the known world. Gnosticism was a parasite that tried to tie its platonic ideas to the church. There exclusion from the canon did not involve the issue of politics but the issue of truth.

The Gnostic gospels did not conform to these standards. And they were condemned unanimously by the Christian community early on. The Church Father, Irenaeus [the student of Polycarp, who was the student of the Apostle John], in his book “Against Heresies” [A.D. 180] said about the Gnostics—“Those who draw away under a pretense of knowledge.”  And when Irenaeus wrote against the Gnostic writings in A.D. 180, the 4 Gospels were so universally recognized that he referred to them as the 4 pillars. 
            *Brown says that the Gnostic gospels tell the truth about Jesus. The exact opposite is true. 
            Also, Constantine did not determine what went into the NT at Nicea. In fact, 20 matters were considered at that Council [the record is still available] and not one of the 20 matters pertained to the canon of the NT. The New Testament was not officially canonized then, but the NT as a group of books, like what we have with the exception of a couple of books, had been circulated as a group for over 170 years before Nicea [that would be like 1840 compared to the present]. The four gospels were established long before Constantine was born.      

2. Reliability of the four Gospels.  What about the NT Gospels that we have that Brown says should be replaced? How reliable are they?

1. They all conformed to the canonical standard.  If you want reliability do you want eyewitnesses or people who lived 200 years later [that’s like going with someone today on what they saw and heard George Washington say and do]?  It is like approving the minutes at the next committee meeting.  You can correct and approve them based on those who were there, rather than those who were not there or tried to amend the minutes 200 years later. The NT is the minutes of those who were with Jesus.  When dating the Gospels and the NT books, the difference between conservation and liberal scholars is in terms of decades, not centuries.For example, the conservative dating for the Gospel of Mark is between A.D. 50-60.  More liberal scholars date it around A.D. 70.  Generally speaking, Paul’s letters were written between A.D. 50-66, the Gospels between A.D. 50-70, with John’s Gospel being the latest—A.D. 80-90.  Jesus died around A.D. 30, so we are talking about authentic eyewitnesses.
2.  The accuracy of the manuscripts.  Obviously, we do not have the originals.  But what manuscripts do we have? The integrity of any ancient writing is determined by the number of documented manuscripts or fragment manuscripts that can be examined.  Regarding this, let’s look at a comparison of the NT with other ancient documents.

Author               Written            Earliest            Diff              Copies
Aristotle          384-322 BC       AD 1100        1400 yrs.            49
Plato                       400 BC         AD 900         1300 yrs.          7
J. Caesar             100-44 BC        AD 900         1000 yrs.          10
NT                     AD 50-90        AD 125-140     35-50 yrs.        5366

                                                c. 114 fragments         c. 50 yrs.
                                                c. 200 books                 100 yrs.
                                                c. 250 [most of NT]        150 yrs.
                                                c. 325 [complete NT]      225 yrs.
[Geisler and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, p. 408]. 
The NT is the most dependable ancient document in all of history in terms of textual credibility.   

The accuracy found in the transmission scripture [copying of texts] is unparalleled. For example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, a scroll of Isaiah was found that was 1000 years older the oldest Hebrew manuscript available. The differences were insignificant. 

Also the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeology has not only confirmed biblical claims but has never refuted a biblical claim. 

Add in the issue of prophecy that was accurately fulfilled, etc., and ask yourself if a fictional book with errors is to be taken as truth rather than the Bible, which has stood the test of time, or that these “other gospels” be accepted for an understanding of who Jesus is rather than those of our NT. Absolutely not. These Gospels tell me about the love of God, the death of His Son for me, and the life that I can have through Him. I have experienced that. I praise God not only for what He has done for me through His Son but also for this true and reliable Word.