How the Gospels were Chosen byJames

How the Gospels were Chosen
byJames

The central "authority" in The DaVinci Code, Sir Leigh Teabing, states there were "more than eighty Gospels considered for the New Testament," and that only four were chosen "by the emperor Constantine" because they suited his political purposes. Really? Constantine was powerful, but he would have had to turn the clock back by two centuries to find himself at the moment when the four Gospels, the only ones with the slightest claim to being early or authentic, were recognized all over the world as the four, long before many of Teabing's eighty fantasies about Jesus were even written. Sir Teabing claims the secretive Dead Sea Scrolls contained hidden Gospels the Vatican tried to suppress; but no gospel of any type has ever been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. With dramatic flair, Dan Brown pictures Teabing opening a mysterious volume of the scrolls, but I have personally seen the scrolls in paperback in Walmart.

I don't think we who teach in the Church have educated people very well about the formation of the Bible. I think many folks harbor a false picture of how the books of the Bible were chosen, assuming some big meeting was held and a vote taken. Imagine this by analogy: how many biographies of Thomas Jefferson have been written? Maybe a hundred? We could get a committee together, an "America is good and we must suppress negative thinking about America" committee, to decide officially what Jefferson was like. So, biographies that tell of his fathering children by the slave, Sally Hemings, are to be burned. Biographies that show how Jefferson hated the clergy and rewrote the New Testament, expunging all miracles and anything divine about Jesus, are to be burned. We pick just four biographies that extol his virtues and support our ideology.

But this is not how the New Testament came into being. At first, stories of Jesus were passed along word of mouth, and pretty soon, Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and soon thereafter John, were committed to writing, because the first Christians wanted to be certain they had accurate, written testimony for future generations. They weren't covering anything up; on the contrary, they were doing everything possible to get the word out. But what about the "other gospels," the "hidden books"? Other gospels were written after many decades, but none were written nearly as early as the four we know well, and none could claim authenticity. No one ever met and voted to use these four and exclude the others. Within two generations, a consensus emerged in various cities around the Mediterranean that there just were four Gospels being circulated, preached, copied, read, discussed, treasured. As others emerged, they were not suppressed so much as they simply were not recognized as having validity. Clearly and by remarkably consistent understanding, the Church had four good stories about Jesus.

One account, the Gospel of Thomas, was written pretty early, not as early as the four we know so well, but early, and most scholars are inclined to think the Gospel of Thomas (also widely available in paperback) contains material that goes back to Jesus, but not contained in the four Gospels we know. For instance, when Jesus tells the about the sower flinging seed about, in Thomas he adds, "I have come to sow fire upon the earth." Jesus may well have said that; the other four don't record it, but they did not record everything he ever said.

I am always intrigued by two facts about this process. One is that there was a trend in early Christianity to get rid of three Gospels, as many leaders thought the Church could be more effective if they went out with just a single, authorized version of the story. But Christians had four Gospels of such authority, four that were so beloved, that this trend was in fact squashed. The Church was not in the business of suppressing truth, but wanted to hang on to all four reliable versions - even though in some points they did not seem to be absolutely in sync with one another.