Dr Paul Allen

  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...

Dan Brown’s bestselling conspiratorial thriller  The Da Vinci Code  seems like ancient history now. At its peak of popularity, the novel set records both for sales and for irritating scholars with its view that Jesus and the 12 apostles held to gnostic heresies. The book’s bizarre plot focuses on Jesus’ bloodline extending through a child born by Mary Magdalene. Within that narrative, Brown asserts that the New Testament canon was determined by the Roman Emperor Constantine—who was not friendly to gnostic Christianity—at a time much later (fourth century AD) than any New Testament scholar would endorse. Unfortunately, this myth has since taken on a life of its own. The notion that Constantine decided which books should constitute the New Testament springs from the ancient  Life of Constantine  by Eusebius of Caesarea (AD 263–339). Eusebius reports that in a letter written in ad 331, the emperor instructed him to … order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptur...

Here we go again! A newly revealed piece of papyrus offers evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, according to a Harvard Divinity School professor. A fourth-century codex in Coptic quotes Jesus referring to "my wife," Karen King , a scholar of early Christianity, said on Tuesday. It is the only extant text in which Jesus is explicitly portrayed as betrothed, according to King. King is calling the receipt-sized slip of papyrus " The Gospel of Jesus' Wife ." She believes it was originally written in Greek, and later translated into Coptic, an Egyptian language . The fragment says, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...,'" according to King. The rest of the sentence is cut off. Another segment says, "As for me, I dwell with her in order to..." The speaker is not named. The fragment contains just 33 words spread across 14 incomplete lines—less a full-fledged gospel than an ancient crossword puzzle. ...

Cover via Amazon Oil painting of a young John Calvin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) One of the most pressing but invisible threats to Christian thinking at the present time is that of fallacious history. Like carbon monoxide, it can kill; you just do not notice it is happening until it is too late. Fallacious history comes in numerous forms. The most obvious and influential are those pushed by popular culture. Movies are the primary culprits here. So powerful are the aesthetics of modern cinema that the stories the movies tell can be compelling for no other reason than that they seem so real. Thus, if there is a movie in which Americans crack the Enigma code in the Second World War , then the common assumption is, well, the Americans cracked the Enigma Code. (It was actually the British who did so.) Books, too, have an influence, especially those that are combined with a glossy movie. Take The Da Vinci Code , for example. Dan Brown tells us therein that the church only agreed to affi...