The Da Vinci Code

 

Who can forget Dan Brown’s best-selling book The Da Vinci Code? Millions and millions of people have read the book and seen the movie. I can remember having conversations with friends and acquaintances who believed that what Dan Brown wrote in his novel was historically accurate. 

In one passage, the fictional character Sir Leigh Teabing, a professorial guru, points out that “the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.”1 Teabing goes on to explain, “The Bible is a product of man … not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”2

Teabing claims that there were “more than eighty gospels … considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.”3 

This claim of there being eighty other gospels is outright fiction. To be sure, there were many other gospels written in the centuries after the New Testament gospels were composed,4 but Dan Brown created this number eighty out of thin air. 

For the uninformed reader of The Da Vinci Code, this information could surely be discomforting. To think that our sources for the life of Jesus were just some of the many possible sources available and that what we have today has been altered and changed makes it all seem quite arbitrary. So what are our main sources for knowing about Jesus? Are they found in the New Testament or somewhere else?

1 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 237.

2 Brown, 237.

3 Brown, 238.

4 You can read these extrabiblical gospels for yourself. See Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations (New York: OUP, 2011), and Marvin Meyer, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts (New York: HarperOne, 2007).