SGBC - The Davinci Code

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I. Introduction (Slide 1) Slide 2 – The Da Vinci Code has been number one on the best-selling fiction list for nearly a year now. It is a great book. It is a fascinating read. It is fast paced. I am not going to give away the end of the book. I will tell you that out of the four hundred fifty pages or so, about four hundred twenty of them take place between eleven o’clock at night and seven o’clock the next morning. It has a packed amount of information in just a brief amount of time. Let me begin with a big picture, and then I will come back and reiterate several points as we continue. I will begin with some of the premises of the book. A. Premises Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene herself was the Holy Grail. There is not a separate vessel that people have been seeking for two thousand years. She herself was the Holy Grail, the vessel that contained the blood of Jesus – meaning their daughter together (Sarah). Mother and child fled to France after the death of Jesus, and they were assisted there by Joseph of Arimathea. He is a figure that shows up right at the crucifixion. Jesus and Mary’s descendants became royalty, forming the Merovingian line of kings in France. Their secret was handed on through a secret society called the Priory of Sion. Some of the Grand Masters, the leaders, of this secret society include Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo Da Vinci, the famous artist. Brown’s thread throughout the book is that male and female are exactly represented in deity, but they have been changed by a male-dominated Church. True worship, he argues, should include god and goddess worship equally, and that is the conspiracy of the Church over the last two thousand years. If you have not heard, there is a rumor that Columbia Pictures has purchased the rights to put this on the big screen sometime in 2005. Ron Howard has allegedly agreed to take on the film, bringing with him the team that did A Beautiful Mind. He is planning to produce the movie and release it in 2005. This is late May of 2004. The book came out nearly a year ago, and perhaps next summer we will have a big blockbuster release of The Da Vinci Code on the big screen. B. Potential for Evangelism I want to emphasize an important point about discussing The Da Vinci Code with a nonbeliever that is the hardest thing to do in evangelism. How do I get from, “How was your day today?” to talking about Jesus Christ? Suddenly, Jesus has hit the mainstream of America, with The Da Vinci Code, with the Left Behind series, and with The Passion of the Christ movie. Everyone is talking about these things. It gives us an instant conversation piece with nonbelievers, and that is maybe the most exciting thing for us. Listen tonight, and begin thinking through these things in conversations that you have had or that you plan to have. Begin to talk to people at work. Talk to people where you work out. Talk to people in restaurants. When you see people carrying around this book – and you will see people carrying around this book – engage them in conversation. Some people say that they have not really talked about this or heard anyone talking about it, and that they have not seen the book very much. You have. You just have not noticed that you have seen it. When I started really looking into this just a couple of months ago, I started seeing it everywhere. I realized that it has really been around me for the last six or eight months. I am just now starting to notice it. When you talk to people, talk with a smile on your face. We have the truth. There is no reason to be threatened. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. It is really easy, when talking with someone, to get emotionally engaged in this and get really angry and “in their face.” That sort of conversation with that sort of an emotional attitude is usually going to steer someone away. It will drive you apart. Smile and listen carefully to what they are saying, even when they really believe the ideas presented in the book. Try to respond with your words, not your emotions. C. Main Characters The next slide concerns our main characters. I want to introduce you to a few people. Slide 3 – Robert Langdon, the main character, is a professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University. There is actually no post at Harvard called Professor of Religious Symbology, so this is a fictitious character all around. Jacques Sauniere was the murdered museum curator at the Louvre. He was also Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, sworn protectors of the Holy Grail. We are going to hear more about all these things. Sophie Neveu is an agent of the Department of Cryptology. She studied hidden codes and symbols and tried to come up with the answer to the riddle. That was her job. It is a branch of the French state police. She is also the granddaughter of the murdered curator. Sir Leigh Teabing was a wealthy Grail researcher and British Royal Historian, affiliated with Oxford University. Those are your four people that you need to know as we talk about this. We will talk about Robert Langdon, Jacques Sauniere, Sophie Neveu, and Sir Leigh Teabing. The book has a lot of codes and anagrams – words that are mixed-up and scattered, but when you change the words or the letters around, you get the secret. It is like a Rubik’s Cube. You get the right combination and voila! – there is your answer. One person has said this (I simply find this interesting and offer it up as a possibility): one of his main characters, the person who reveals most of the secrets of the Grail and of the conspiracy of the Church is a man by the name of Leigh Teabing. He is the British Royal Historian and he is a knight. He is very much against the Church and proposes this Grail theory. He is the one who has dedicated his life to these things. In one place in the book, he references a real book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It is the source for a lot of the information he gives in the book. It is obvious that he based a lot of the things in his books on this book written in the 1980’s. Incidentally, think about the names of some of the authors of this book, and there are three authors. Remember the name, Leigh Teabing? Take some the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. One of the person’s names is Richard Leigh, and another person’s name is Michael Baigent. If you scatter those letters, you actually get “Teabing.” Some people say that Brown deliberately made the main character in his book, Leigh Teabing, as an anagram for the authors of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, on which he based his novel. Just a point of interest. D. Misrepresentation of “Facts” Slide 4, Page 1 – There is really only one page in the entire book that gives me problems. It is the very first page. Frankly, this has come back to bite Brown many times. It is page number one if you look at the book, and the page is entitled, “FACT.” The last sentence says, “All descriptions of art work, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” Documents? Really? So all his descriptions of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, the New Testament, the Bible – all those descriptions of documents, I gather, he is claiming to be accurate. Dan Brown said in the ABC interview that he began as a skeptic, but he became a believer. He, in fact, says he personally believes that the early Church deliberately covered up Mary Magdalene’s importance as Jesus’ wife and the mother of his child. Yes, it is a novel. It is fiction, but he believes it, and a lot of other people believe it. I am going to be debunking (disagreeing with) a lot of things as we go through here. I am not necessarily going to be separating the things he intended to be fiction from the things he intended to be fact in a fiction novel. It will be too hard to divorce those. In fact, that is exactly the difficulty that we have. It is too hard reading through this book to determine the difference. He says one sentence is true, but then the next sentence is not. What about this other sentence that alludes to a document? Is that one true? The novel mixes fact with fiction. The fact is, people are reading this and believing this fictitious novel to be true, and that is the impetus to our response. II. Misinformation (Slide 5) Let me start with some misinformation. Let me show you some places where Brown is historically or scientifically inaccurate. If you have read the book, you will pick up on some of these. A. The Olympic Games First of all, the motions of the planet Venus do not determine the official length of the Olympic Games, but he says that they do. Whether he intended them as fiction or not, he says that they do. The Olympic Games were not originally formed to honor Aphrodite. They were originally formed to honor Zeus. B. The Louvre The glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre does not have six hundred sixty-six glass panes in it. He runs with that number of Satan (666). It, in fact, has six hundred seventy-three panes. Six hundred three of them are diamond shaped and only seventy of them are triangular. C. Friday the Thirteenth Friday the Thirteenth is not traced to some massacre of the Knights Templar, the alleged keepers of the tales of the Grail. The book claims that Friday the Thirteenth originated on October 13, 1307, when Pope Clement V devised an ingeniously planned sting operation to squash the Templars and seize their treasures, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican. That is not the origin of Friday the Thirteenth. Many trace it all the way back to Good Friday, saying that the Friday on which Jesus was crucified was a thirteenth. Others say that no superstition was affiliated with that date until the eighteenth century. D. Tarot Cards Tarot cards were not a secret means of passing along ideologies banned by the Church. He says that they were. In fact, they were originally a game invented in the fifteenth century, and were not associated with the occult until the eighteenth century. E. Jesus’ Lineage Jesus, he says, was of a rare blood line giving way to a line of kings because he descended from David and Solomon. Thousands of people in the first century could claim the same thing. There was nothing so-called “unique” about that. F. Joseph of Arimathea Joseph of Arimathea was not Jesus’ uncle. Brown claims that he was. G. Witch Hunts Slide 6, Page 125 – I have a quotation here about the witch hunts. “During three hundred years of witch hunts,” Dan writes, “the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.” In fact, the European witch craze claimed between thirty and fifty thousand victims. Not all were victims of the Church. Not all were burned. Not all were women. You have all heard of the Salem witch hunt, the Salem witch trials, in 1692. Twenty-four people died. Nineteen were hanged. Seven were men. H. Original Sin Slide 7, Page 238 – Here is another quotation: “It was man, not God, who created the concept of ‘original sin,’ whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race.” That shows a misunderstanding of the term “original sin.” People in the church get this confused all of the time. What is the Fall, and what is original sin? There are two doctrines that are related, but they are not the same. The Fall (capital “F”) describes the introduction of sin into humankind as a result of Adam and Eve. Original sin is what each of us is born with. It is what we originate with. We are conceived in sin, so that every human being that is born is born positionally a sinner (theologically). Page 425 – “The orb from which Eve partook,” Langdon said coolly, “incurring the Holy wrath of God. Original sin.” Again, he is using the term incorrectly. Once again, Dan Brown demonstrates that he is not a theologian. He is misusing these terms. The book has a lot of codes and anagrams – words that are mixed-up and scattered, but when you change the words or the letters around, you get the secret. It is like a Rubik’s Cube. You get the right combination and voila! – there is your answer. One person has said this (I simply find this interesting and offer it up as a possibility): one of his main characters, the person who reveals most of the secrets of the Grail and of the conspiracy of the Church is a man by the name of Leigh Teabing. He is the British Royal Historian. He is a knight, and he is very much against the Church and proposes this Grail theory. He is the one who has dedicated his life to these things. In one place in the book, he references a real book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It is the source for a lot of the information Brown gives in the book. It is obvious that he based a lot of the things in his book on this book written in the 1980’s. Incidentally, think about the names of some of the authors of this book, and there are three authors. Remember the name, Leigh Teabing? Take some of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. One of the person’s names is Richard Leigh, and another person’s name is Michael Baigent. If you scatter the letters in “Baigent,” you actually get “Teabing.” Some people say that Brown deliberately made the main character in his book, Leigh Teabing, as an anagram for the authors of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, on which he based his novel. That is just a point of interest. III. Brown’s “Facts” versus Historical Facts We are going to look at five things this evening. We are going to look at what Dan Brown says and what history says about Constantine, the gospels, secret societies, Da Vinci and Mary Magdalene. A. Constantine (Slide 8) Let us begin with Constantine. The early Church, led by the Roman Constantine sought to empower male domination by giving men the edge in all of the Christian literature. Again, remember Brown’s presupposition is that right worship involves god and goddess worship equally. He is going to accuse Constantine in particular, the Vatican, and the Church (capital “C”) of a huge centuries-long conspiracy to suppress goddess worship by marginalizing women at every level, and to enhance the worship of God so that the men could have rightful power in a male-dominated Church. Constantine did what he could to eradicate the memory of Mary Magdalene, knowing the truth about her would jeopardize this male-dominated Church. He heightened Jesus’ status to deity, because Jesus, you see, is a man. Worship of God is what he is after – anything but worship of a goddess. They erased the memory of Mary Magdalene. Here are some quotations. Slide 9, Page 124 – The Priory’s beliefs conveyed by Langdon, the main character: “Powerful men in the early Christian Church ‘conned’ the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine …. Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from a matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.” Slide 10, Page 37 – “In the battle between the pagan symbols and Christian symbols, the pagans lost.” Page 37 – “As part of the Vatican’s campaign to eradicate pagan religions and convert the masses to Christianity, the Church launched a smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil.” In pagan symbolism, there is parity between the gods and the goddesses, so Christians had to eradicate all the pagan symbols so that the gods – the male gods, worship of the man, the male-dominated Church – could win. Slide 11, Pages 232 and 233 – Leigh Teabing (the character who has dedicated his life to Grail studies) says: “Nothing in Christianity is original …. Originally, Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagans’ veneration day of the sun …. To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute – Sunday.” We are going to look at a few verses in a few minutes. Slide 12 – Here is Teabing again, regarding Nicea. Nicea was the first worldwide Church council. It met in A.D. 325. There was another church council that is talked about in Acts 15 during the first century, just years after Jesus died, in the year A.D. 49 or A.D. 50. This is the first worldwide Church council after the persecution that Christians were under for nearly three hundred years. Here is what Teabing says about Nicea: “At this gathering, many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus …. Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal ….” Slide 13, Page 233 – “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea …. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world …. The early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity and using it to expand their own power.” Let me pause here a moment just to say one thing. Every place Brown talks about the Church in this book, it is capitalized – capital “C,” meaning the Roman Church. When this terminology is used in papers that I read or papers that I write, a capital “C” means the official Roman Catholic Church. I am not a Roman Catholic, and it is odd that I would be standing here defending the Roman Catholic Church against false accusations. I am not the biggest fan in the world of the Roman Catholic Church. If I were, I would be a Roman Catholic; however, I am standing here defending the Roman Catholic Church, to which I do not belong, against allegations. Why am I doing that? It is not a love for the Roman Catholic Church. It is a love for truth. The things that are pointed out and the accusations that are leveled in this book are simply false. Slide 14, Page 231 – From Teabing: “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen. 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. The fundamental irony of Christianity: the Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman emperor, Constantine the Great.” I’ll get back to that number, eighty, later on. Brown says, “more than eighty gospels were considered.” No one knows where he got that number. No one has been able to determine where he got that number, because everyone knows that it is an embellished number. Were there other gospels besides those that were included in the New Testament canon? Yes. How many? Seven to twelve. Somehow Brown has come up with the number of “more than eighty gospels.” He says, “FACT: … All descriptions of … documents … are [true];” so, is that a fact? He did not research that. He did not read that in a book. It is not in print because it is absurd, and everyone knows that it is. It has never been printed until here. Slide 15, Page 244 – Teabing says this: “… Any gospels that described the earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible,” again, in this grand conspiracy of Constantine’s. Page 234 – “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.” Slide 16, page 232 – Teabing responds to Sophie, who thought Constantine was a Christian. He says this: “Hardly. He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest.” “In 325 [Constantine] decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity.” Slide 17 – Sophie says this: “Why would a pagan choose Christianity as the official religion?” There is already a false notion in her question. Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion (the official religion) of his day. Page 232 – Teabing answers her, nevertheless, this way: “Constantine was a very good businessman. He could see Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse.” Let me give you a few things about Constantine that are true. Constantine was a key figure, and his rule was a turning point in Christian history. In A.D. 312, Constantine had a vision and a conversion to Christianity. I have put “conversion” in quotation marks in my document because it is disputed to this day. Essentially, he was fighting a battle to become the sole Roman emperor of his time. He was the huge underdog in that battle. He prayed to Jesus Christ and he received a vision. Perhaps you have seen the “Chi Rho,” the “X” with what looks like a “P” in the middle (they are Greek letters). The Chi and the Rho are the first two letters of “Christ” in the Greek language. Constantine looked up into the sky and saw “Chi Rho.” He put it on the fronts of the shields of his warriors and won the battle, then becoming the sole Roman emperor. Was it genuinely a conversion? It is debated still. The next year, in A.D. 313, Constantine issued what is called the Edict of Milan – an edict he wrote in Milan the year after he had this vision. This edict merely gave toleration for Christians. It did not make Christianity a state religion. It did not make Christianity the only religion. Until that edict was signed, Christianity was a persecuted church. This was an attempt to put an end to persecution of the church. Constantine died in A.D. 337. In A.D. 380, forty-three years after the death of Constantine, a man by the name of Theodosius the First banned paganism and declared Christianity as the state religion for the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, Theodosius’ name never made it into Dan Brown’s book. It is all placed on the shoulders of Constantine. The Nicene Creed was drafted in A.D. 325 as a result of the Council of Nicea. It was an affirmation drafted to formalize what was already believed. Was there a vote taken on Jesus’ divinity? Yes, there was. There were a little over three hundred people at this council – Church leaders from around the world. It is known as the first worldwide ecumenical council. They voted on the Nicene Creed, which they had drafted against a man by the name of Arius, who denied the deity of Christ. There were two dissenters, and over three hundred people voted in the affirmative. Was it a vote with a narrow margin? No. There was a vote to affirm the Nicene Creed. There were over three hundred people in the affirmative, and two dissenters. The Church gathered only when there was no persecution, and there had been persecution for nearly three hundred years. They gathered together, usually to draft a document against a popular, known heretic. In this case, there was a presbyter (an elder of the Church) named Arius, who was proposing things that most churches disagreed with. They came together to draft the Nicene Creed against the Arian movement of that day. Again, it is affirming the deity of Jesus. They did not vote to say whether Jesus was deity or not. What about the notion that Christians worshipped on Sunday? Acts 20:7 says that they gathered on the first day of the week. First Corinthians 16:2 says, “They gathered on the first day of the week.” Revelation 1:10 calls it “the Lord’s Day.” The Didache, an early second-century manuscript, states that Christians worshipped on Sunday, and calls it “the Lord’s Day.” Justin Martyr (many of you have heard his name) said in A.D. 150, “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read.” Way before the time of Constantine, really in New Testament times, it is established that Christians were meeting on Sunday – not because of a pagan god, but because that is the resurrection day. In honor of the Lord’s resurrection, the Lord’s Day, they commemorated and set aside that day instead of Saturday. They would often do things to distinguish themselves from the Jewish people, anyway. Jews, it is said, fasted on Mondays and Thursdays, so Christians fasted on Tuesdays and Fridays. I may have the days mixed up there, but twice a week Jewish people fasted. Christians said, “We want to fast twice a week, too, but we want do not want to be associated falsely with Jewish people, so we will fast on different days.” According to Brown, “The gospels were altered by Constantine [and this is interesting] to make Jesus divine.” It is really a great argument in our favor! Brown is saying that Constantine altered all the gospels that we have (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), to make Jesus appear to be deity. That is actually a great affirmation for us, because we have all of the gospels. We have manuscripts of them – actual manuscripts in actual libraries of all of the gospels in the same form they exist right now in your Bible (only in Greek) before Constantine by over a hundred years. What Brown is arguing here is that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John affirm the deity of Christ. Facts show us, by those documents that exist, that Constantine was not responsible for some sort of an emendation. B. The Gospels (Slide 18) Let’s move on to the gospels. I will return to a couple of facts about Constantine later on, but I want to move on to the gospels to see what Brown has to say about them. Again, we have a few quotations from Teabing. Slide 19, page 231 – “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven …. The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God …. It has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.” Slide 20, page 234 – “Nobody is saying Christ was a fraud, or denying that He walked the earth and inspired millions to better lives, all we are saying is that Constantine took advantage of Christ’s substantial influence and importance. And in doing so, he shaped the face of Christianity as we know it today …. Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death.” Slide 21, page 235 – “Almost everything our [Church] fathers taught us about Christ is false.” Page 341 – Langdon considers the implications of “presenting to the world [this is in quotations] thousands of ancient documents as scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony.” Scientific evidence that the New Testament is false testimony? Slide 22, page 234 – Another quotation: “Fortunately for historians, some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive.” “Some of the gospels” – remember that. “The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950’s, hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi.” A couple of things are wrong with this. One of the things he says is that some of the early Christian gospels abided, they remained, they were hidden away. And he mentions two places – the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library. Have you heard of the Nag Hammadi Library? Have you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Now, imagine that you are a writer and you really want to “wow” people by talking about some hidden gospels that were later discovered. The Nag Hammadi Library exposed all of these great secrets. If you were the reader, would that “wow” you? No, probably not, if you have not heard of the Nag Hammadi Library. What if you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Dead Sea Scrolls expose all of these hidden secrets. The fact is that the Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with Christianity. They contain no gospels. They never mention Jesus. They have no artifacts, allusions, quotations, or references to anything written anywhere in the New Testament. It is completely separate from the Nag Hammadi Library, which should have been the only thing he included in that quotation. We are going to consider two sources: the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Philip came from this Nag Hammadi Library that we just discussed. The Gospel of Mary came from neither. He does not tell us the source of the Gospel of Mary, but we are led to believe that it came from the Nag Hammadi Library. It was not found there. The Gospel of Mary was found in the Berlin Codex discovered in 1896. It is a manuscript dated to the fifth century; but the date of the writing, they say, is to the mid-second century. The Nag Hammadi Library of manuscripts were manufactured in the middle of the fourth century. What we have (those manuscripts themselves) dates to the middle of the fourth century, after the death of Constantine. Constantine died in A.D. 337. The texts of the fifty-two writings found there are dated to the second and third century. While we have the manuscripts dated to the mid-fourth century, the texts that they represent date back to the second and third centuries. Philip was found among them, dated to the late third century. The Gospel of Mary was not found there, but what they have in common is that they are Gnostic gospels from a cult Christian sect called the Gnostics. Incidentally, one of the persons I was listening to recently about this, who indicated that he was a Christian responding to The Da Vinci Code, said that there were forty-five gospels found at Nag Hammadi. That is not true. He indicated that, in total, there were fifty, fifty-two, or fifty-five gospels known at that time, and that is not true. Again, there were seven to twelve outside of the New Testament that were known, so the grand total number of gospels that we know about from anywhere in this time frame, is eleven to sixteen at the most. Slide 23 – We will look at some of the dates of the Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary. I thought I would give an illustration. If Jesus were born in the year 1900, then what would be the chronology of what we have in the New Testament, versus these secret, unaltered texts that Brown is referencing here? If Jesus were born in the year 1900, then Jesus, as a boy, would have visited Jerusalem when he was about twelve years old – at about the time the Titanic sank. His death and resurrection would have been in the year 1930. The first New Testament books would have been written about 1945, around the close of World War II. The first New Testament gospel (probably the Gospel of Mark) would have been written around 1960 – thirty years after Jesus’ public ministry, death, and resurrection. The last New Testament gospel would have been written fourteen years ago, in 1990, by the apostle John, the youngest of the apostles. The Gospel of Thomas – that is one we often hear about, and Brown does not discuss this in his book since there is nothing for him to discuss – was one of the earliest non-biblical gospels. That gospel would have been written in about 2030, still twenty-six years from this year. The earliest non-canonical gospel outside of the New Testament, if Jesus were born in 1900, still would not be written today. It would not be written yet for another twenty-six years. Was Thomas, who allegedly wrote it, really one of the apostles, and he just happened to live to be one hundred fifty years old? Or – was it written by someone else? The Gospel of Mary will be written in about the year 2050. So again, is this really Mary Magdalene? These are not debated dates. Believers, liberals, and nonbelievers all agree to these dates. One hundred fifty years after Jesus was born is the earliest that the Gospel of Mary would have been written. Clearly, it would not have been written by Mary, even though the person who wrote it claimed it to be so. The Gospel of Philip would be written in 2170. That is not a “typo.” That would be one hundred sixty-six years from now. That is about when the Gospel of Philip would have been written. Do you think that was written by the Philip who evangelized to the Ethiopian on the road in the books of Acts? I don’t think so. It brings up the term “pseudepigraphical,” false writing. The author is writing under a fictitious name. Why would someone do that? Why would someone not named Thomas write as though he were the Doubting Thomas of the gospel? It puts you instantly on the best-seller list if people believe it. Why would someone write under the name of Mary Magdalene if they really were not Mary Magdalene, or under Philip’s name, or under Peter’s name? To do so gives them an audie

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