GOSPEL TRUTH?

A comment on John 20:19-31

Does Jesus want us to be naïve?
When Jesus showed himself to Thomas the sceptic a week after the resurrection, he said to him: “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed” Does Jesus want us to be naïve? Unfortunately, too many people are naïve and believe anything they are told. That is why books like The Da Vinci Code become so popular. They think it is based on thorough research, when it is only a mix of fables. Unlike Thomas, we have never seen the risen Jesus Christ with our physical eyes. The only thing we have is the Bible telling us that it happened. How can we know it is true? Are we naïve to believe these stories? What about these other gospels that have been discovered, like the gospel of Judas?

Why were some books not included in the New Testament?
One of the claims in The da Vinci code is that at the time of the Roman emperor Constantine, there were many gospels in circulation. Dan Brown says that Constantine authorised just four of the gospels and had all the others burned. And when this so-called gospel of Judas becomes known to us, people start believing that they can’t trust our Bible anymore. So what really happened? Let me first give you a short answer and then a long one: The short answer is that there are three main reasons why they were not included: Firstly, they were not written by eye witnesses. Secondly, they were not in general use across the Christian church. Thirdly, they were not in accordance with the teaching of the apostles. Although Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, had an interest in church politics, there is no evidence that he burnt any Christian books, and he did not authorise a particular list of books.

A long process
The gathering of the scriptures of the New Testament was not the choice of one man or one particular church synod. It was a long process, and it involved all the churches in the Christian world. The first Christians did not have the New Testament. They had something better: the New Testament writers themselves. They had Jesus Christ himself, who is in person the Word of God. They had the apostles, who remembered what he did and what he said, and who had received the Spirit of truth from Jesus.

The next generation of Christians had the scriptures of these apostles and the evangelists. They used these eye witness accounts in their worship services, along with the holy scriptures from the Old Testament. They also had a whole lot of other scriptures. These were widely used as literature, but they were not regarded as holy scripture on the same level as the gospels and the letters of Paul. The most famous of these scriptures have been gathered in a collection called “The apostolic fathers”.

The first known list of recognised New Testament books dates from around AD 170-200. It mentions all the books in our New Testament. The famous bishop Athanasius of Alexandria listed our twenty seven books in the year 365. A few years later, Gerome translated the Bible into Latin and gave the West its standard text, the Vulgate. These lists were then finally confirmed in two general synods in 397 and 418. My point is that this was not the accidental choice of one or two men. The whole Christian church was involved in this long process, and they used very strict criteria: The scriptures had to be eye witness accounts that were in accordance with the apostolic teaching and in common use in the worship services all across the Christian church.

What about the apocryphic gospels or acts?
A number of scriptures were written too late to be regarded as authoritative holy scripture on the same level as the scriptures that were included in our New Testament. These are sometimes called apocryphic books. Some of them are in accordance with the apostolic teaching while others represent heretic teachings like gnostisism. Common for these scriptures is that they try to fill in the gaps where the New Testament scriptures keep silent, for example about the childhood years of Jesus and the stories of the apostles not mentioned in Acts. It was common to give the book a name after a famous person. But even though the intention was good, this wasn’t always reliable.


The Gnostic gospels
Gnostisism was a syncretistic religious system that blended Christian beliefs with Greek philosophy and Eastern mysticism, and very much opposed to Jewish beliefs. It was a dualistic system where everything physical was regarded as evil and only the spiritual was good. The Greek word gnosis means “knowledge”. The idea was that Jesus gave secret knowledge to some of his disciples, who in turn passed it secretly on to others. In the Gnostic gospels the villain of the Biblical stories becomes the hero. The creator god of Genesis becomes the villain, while the serpent is the hero.

What about the gospel of Judas?
This was presented to the public just before Easter this year. It was found in Egypt around 1970 and smuggled to the USA. The fragmented manuscript is a Coptic (Egyptian) translation from Greek, dated to around AD 300. Scholars say that it does not give us new knowledge about Jesus Christ or Judas, but it does give us interesting knowledge about Gnostisism. The original Greek text was probably written around AD 150, so it was not written by Judas. The Church father Irenaus mentions it in AD 185. The text gives us the typical Gnostic picture of Jesus: Divine but not really human. Quite typically it makes the villain into a hero. Judas is the only one who understands who Jesus really is. When Judas betrays Jesus, he is only freeing him of his human “clothing”, so he is actually doing Jesus a favour.

Not naïve
Perhaps some of you also have begun to doubt if the gospels we have in our Bible are true, or perhaps you think they are there by coincidence. Let me tell you that they are not there by coincidence. God has been in control of the process. Our Lord Jesus Christ breathed his Holy Spirit on his disciples. He gave them insight. He spent 40 days with them, teaching them what was written about him in the scriptures of the OT. He gave his disciples authority to pass on this knowledge. And they did so. They wrote down their stories, and the first Christians took great care in passing the scriptures on to those following after them. We are not naïve if we trust them.