Missing Books of the Bible

– where are they?

by James Denison, Ph.D. , Senior Pastor of Park Cities Baptist Church,
Dallas, Texas

Are there missing books of the Bible? In The Da Vinci Code, historian
Teabing calls the creation of the Bible "The fundamental irony of
Christianity!" and asserts, "The Bible, as we know it today, was
collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great" (p.
231). If this is true, the Bible we have today was produced by a
process which occurred around AD 325. Let's look at the actual facts.

The Old Testament canon was finalized by two councils held at the city
of Jamnia, one in AD 90 and the other in AD 118. The actual books
which compose our Old Testament were in wide use for centuries
before, and in fact had been translated into Greek 200 years before
these councils met. They in no sense "created" the Old Testament. And
they completed their work two centuries before Constantine.

Perhaps Teabing means the canonical process of the New Testament.

Here the facts are just as damaging to his case.

Missing books of the Bible - what are they?

The early Christians quickly developed four criteria for accepting a

book as Scripture. First, it must have been written by an apostle or
based on his eyewitness testimony. Second, the book must possess
merit and authority in its use. For instance, The First Gospel of the
Infancy of Jesus Christ tells of a man who is changed into a mule by a
bewitching spell but converted back to manhood when the infant Christ
is put on his back for a ride (7:5-27). In the same book, the boy Jesus
causes clay birds and animals to come to life (ch. 15), stretches a
throne his father had made too small (ch. 16), and takes the lives of
boys who oppose him (19.19-24). It was easy to dismiss such fiction.

Third, a book must come to be accepted by the entire church, not just
a single congregation or area. And last, a book must be approved by
the decision of the larger church, not just a few advocates.

Here is how this process unfolded. In the first century, a number of

books were soon produced in response to the ministry of Jesus. As an
example, Peter told his readers, "[Paul] writes the same way in all his
letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some
things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable
people distort, as they do to the other Scriptures, to their own
destruction" (2 Peter 3:16). Thus Peter considered Paul's writings to be
"Scripture."

Other less reputable books began to appear as well. Among them was
the Protoevangelion, purporting to supply details of the birth of Christ;
two books on the infancy of Christ, one claiming to be written by
Thomas; and the Gospel of Nicodemus, sometimes called the Acts of
Pontius Pilate. However, by the mid-second century only Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John were accepted universally by the church. The
other "gospels" simply did not meet the four criteria for acceptance set
out above.

Note that this process was completed two centuries before Contantine.
For example, in AD 115 Ignatius referred to the four gospels of our
New Testament as "the gospel"; in AD 170, Tatian made a "harmony of
the gospels" using only these four; around AD 180, Irenaeus referred
to the four gospels as firmly established in the church.

The Muratorian Canon was established around AD 200, representing

the usage of the church at Rome at that time. The list omitted James,
1 and 2 Peter, 3 John, and Hebrews (all due to authorship questions),
though these were soon included in later canons. It excluded all
gospels but the four in our Bible today. And it did so more than a
century before Constantine.

Missing books of the Bible are not really missing at all

The New Testament list we use today was set forth by Athanasius in
A.D. 367. His list was approved by church councils meeting at Hippo
Regius in 393 and Carthage in 397. Again, these decisions did not
create the New Testament. They simply recognized what the Church
had viewed as Scripture for generations. And Constantine had nothing
to do with these decisions. I checked several histories on the Council
of Nicaea, where Teabing says the emperor created the Bible, and
could find no connection whatever.

F. F. Bruce was one of the world's foremost authorities on the creation

of the Bible canon. His opinion should be considered: "One thing must
be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become
authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a
canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon
because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing
their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. .
. . what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the
Christian communities but to codify what was already the general
practice of those communities."

Excerpted from:
Denison, James C. "The Real Painter of the Gospel: The Da Vinci Code
in the Light of History"
Feb 2006. pp 5-6
Canonical Gospels or Other Gospels: What’s the Difference?

by Stephen S. Taylor , Associate Professor of New Testament at

Westminster Theological Seminary

One of the biggest misconceptions in all the discussion and hype about
The Da Vinci Code is that a large number of “gospels” were written by
the immediate followers of Jesus with a view towards inclusion in a
Christian scriptures. Dan Brown’s evangelist, Sir Leigh Teabing,
informs the wide-eyed Sophie:

“As a descendent of the lines [sic] of King Solomon and King

David, Jesus possessed a rightful claim to the throne of the King
[sic] of the Jews. Understandably, his life was recorded by
thousands of followers across the land. ... 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 Da Vinci Code, 231).”

Several pages later, the sermon continues:

"Fortunately for historians," Teabing said, “some of the gospels

that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive.
The Dead Sea scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave
near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic
Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In addition to telling the true
Grail story, these documents speak of Christ's ministry in very
human terms....”

These wildly unrealistic claims were edited out of the movie—

apparently, director Ron Howard had a bigger research budget than
author Dan Brown—, but the historical and conceptual assumptions
underlying them still frame the movie version.

Virtually every assertion in the quotations above is problematic in

some way:

• The Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain "gospel" material, though

there was some speculation about this in the early years after
their publication.
• The Nag Hammadi "gospels" (if they can indeed be called that,
see below) do not speak of Christ's ministry "in very human
 terms." For them, Jesus was a Revealer from the heavenly realm
who was never human but only appeared so.
• “More than eighty” appears to be an number drawn out of a hat
—it bears no discernible relationship to the standard scholarly
lists of early gospels.
• Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not "among" the gospels
"chosen for inclusion," they were the gospels chosen for
inclusion.
• And the choice concerning the gospels was not a decision made
by politically powerful men on one occasion in the fourth century,
but the result of countless decisions made by many Christian
communities both inside and outside the Roman Empire—
decisions which collectively spelled the canonical uniqueness of
the of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by the first decade of the
third century, when Christians were still a powerless, persecuted
minority in the Mediterranean basin.
• Finally, if Teabing’s characterization of Jesus were at all accurate
—a mere mortal married to Mary Magdalene prior to his
crucifixion—it is not at all “understandable” why “thousands
across the land” would have cared to record his life. Historical
sources from the period are clear: a crucified man, not matter
how vocal his claims and well know his Davidic pedigree, could
only be considered a false Messiah. This comment shows that
while Dan Brown may have mastered the modern-day thriller, he
lacks the historical and religious sensibilities to understand the
social-cultural context of first-century Palestine.

Perhaps one of the fundamental misunderstandings undergirding Dan

Brown’s thesis is the notion that any book which purports to relate
something about Jesus deserves to be called the a “gospel.” Advocates
of this notion fail to read ancient documents as literary wholes and
thereby, in the very act of quoting them, flatten out what is
noteworthy and distinctive of each. In point of fact, there is a wide
variety in the known “gospel” material.

The canonical gospels, on the one hand, share some distinctive traits:

1. They show very little interest in the biographical details of Jesus'

life. Apart from dissimilar accounts of his birth and a brief story,
related by Luke, concerning Jesus' coming-of-age, the canonical
gospels focus on Jesus' public career, which could not have
comprised much more than the last three years of his life.
2. Remarkably, within that focus, the canonical gospels give
inordinate attention to the last week of Jesus' life, especially his
 crucifixion, burial and bodily resurrection. The Gospel of Mark,
for example, devotes 40% of its presentation to this kind of
material, what scholars called the "Passion Narrative." This fact
is all the more striking given that Mark contains only a brief
account of the resurrection. Similarly, the Gospel of John
reserves nine of its 21 chapters for his version of the passion
narrative. Matthew and Luke are similarly weighted toward the
death and resurrection of Jesus, though they devote a significant
percentage of their space to Jesus' teaching.
3. The canonical gospels agree that Jesus really was a man who
experienced hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and disappointment as
he walked the roads of Palestine with his disciples (which did
include a number of women). They also acknowledge that he
was crucified and buried.
4. But each canonical gospel in its own way insists that Jesus was,
mysteriously, more than a man: he did startling miracles,
possessed uncanny insight, and claimed and evinced a unique
relationship with the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.
Moreover, they all insist he was raised bodily from the grave to a
new kind of life.
5. Finally, the canonical gospels describe Jesus as a real historical
figure within a specific historical context. According to their
testimony, Jesus was a Jew who lived his entire life in Palestine,
whose final and public years were characterized by an
intensifying disagreement with Jewish leaders over the meaning
of the Jewish scriptures, the best way to understand and do
God's will, and the proper definition of the people of God. This
disagreement, they agree, finally led to the execution of Jesus at
the hands of Roman authorities.

Taking all this together and keeping in mind their evident differences,
the canonical gospels are appropriately defined as early Christian
works that seek to present the significance and meaning of the death
and resurrection of Jesus by placing them in their proper religious-
historical context, which includes, of course, the events of Jesus’ public
career. The canonical gospels presuppose a situation in which public
facts about Jesus pose a problem or impediment to faith. For these
gospels, the crucified and resurrected Jesus was certainly the
culmination of the Jewish story and the key to all history; but just as
certainly for them, the truth and precise significance of this claim were
still live issues within the communities for whom they were written.
By this set of shared traits, very few of the other "gospels" even
qualify as gospels. This is particularly true of the so-called "Gnostic
Gospels" which comprise the only ancient sources Teabing bothers to
cite in support of his conspiracy theory. In comparison to the canonical
gospels, these gospels have a timeless, ahistorical, and almost
disembodied character to them. Their Jesus has no racial identity,
engages in no public debates, and indeed occupies no historical space
at all. This Jesus not only did not die on a Roman cross and
subsequently rise again, but could not have done so, since his very
mission was to propound secretly to a small circle of disciples the
unreality of what we take to be human life and death. Far from
embracing a role in the Jewish story about God, creation, and
Abraham and Sarah’s children, the gnostic Jesus purports to expose all
these as illusions conjured by a creator-god—a god intent on keeping a
select few from transcending the material world of variation and
change, of sex and procreation. These gospels, then, are far removed
from the issues and controversies that would have arisen from a Jesus
Christ situated in the story of Israel and the Jews.

It is one of the great ironies of Dan Brown’s account is that he

profoundly misreads the very sources he cites to anchor his case
concerning Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Mary does
indeed speak of Jesus’ relationship with Mary—she is made the sole
vehicle of secret revelations—, but this implies no affirmation of her
femininity, much less of physical sex and procreation. Rather Mary is
made to say, “Let us praise his greatness, for he has prepared us and
made us into men.” Mary is made an apostle of androgyny, not a lover
and mother. The Gospel of Philip, sharing the same gnostic framework,
gives advice that Brown fails to heed: “The truth did not come naked
into the world, but came in types and images.” The special affection
between Jesus and Mary, sealed indeed with kisses, is hardly to be
taken literally, the gospel writer would insist; it is rather to be taken
symbolically of the spirit’s embrace of incorporeal transcendence. If
Brown ignores and denigrates the canonical gospels, he completely
fails to understand the gnostic ones.

Of course, neither Brown’s faulty reading nor the striking differences

between the canonical gospels and other gospels settles the issue of
truth. But it does help us make an informed judgment as to which is
more likely to be the original or primary and which the derivative or
secondary. For when we go back to the earliest uncontested
documents of the Christian movement, the letters written by Paul of
Tarsus no more than thirty years after Jesus’ death, we find a
conception of Jesus that fits with that of the canonical gospels, though
not in a slavish or contrived way. Paul’s Jesus was also born of a
Jewish woman, a descendant of Abraham and of David, and an
authoritative teacher in tension with more mainstream Jewish
authorities.

But supremely, for Paul, Jesus was one who had been crucified and
raised from the dead. The first biographical item Paul acknowledged to
be a scandal to Jews and foolishness to everyone else, but he did not
soft-pedal it and move it to the background; he insisted that it
displayed the very power and wisdom of Abraham’s God in dealing
once-for-all with the brokenness of human existence. The second item,
for Paul, revealed the man Jesus to be the eternal son of God, destined
to confirm all the promises made to Abraham and to redeem all of
creation.

The canonical gospels, then, belong to Paul’s world, they easily reflect
the concerns, perceptions, and controversies of the first generation of
Christians as they grappled with the figure of Jesus. Dan Brown’s
gospels tell us little about how Jesus was remembered by the earliest
circle of followers but they do give us a valuable window into a later
and very different set of concerns. But here is the rub, neither set of
gospels agrees with Brown hypothesis about the Holy Grail. In spite of
their vast differences, on that issue all ancient “gospels” agree.