"As I mentioned," Teabing clarified, "the early church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus's life had to be omitted from the bible..."

Currently, my girlfriend is reading The DaVinci Code. So she's asking questions about the Council of Nicea, and other topics which haven't been a typical part of our relationship.

As you may know, Dan Brown makes the allegation that Jesus was just viewed as a normal human being until Constantine declared him as divine through the council of Nicea in the fourth century. At that point, the church also suppressed all these "other gospels" which taught Jesus was a mere man, not a divine being. Brown then alleged that Constantine re-wrote the bible.

The biggest problem with this narrative is that dating techniques available through modern science show it is actually the biblical texts which are old and original -- dating long before the Council of Nicea. The same technologies also show the Gnostic texts were written later, in an apparent attempt to imitate, revise, and supplant the earlier documents and belief system -- a mirror image of what Dan Brown tells his readers.

But we'll just ignore that little hard reality for the moment...

Nicea

If you don't know anything about the Nicean Council, Brown's argument sounds plausable. Yet, error about Constantine's role aside, the ironic bit here is that even the losing party at Nicea -- Arius -- didn't believe Jesus was a mere man.

True, Arius taught that Jesus was somehow different than God the Father -- he said Jesus was the first created being, existing before even the angels -- but certainly not a mere man. To Arius, Jesus was a "secondary God" or "subservient God" to the Father, who was over all.

For example, the Columbia Encyclopedia says:

As a priest in Alexandria, Arius taught (c.318) that God created, before all things, a Son who was the first creature, but who was neither equal to nor coeternal with the Father. According to Arius, Jesus was a supernatural creature not quite human and not quite divine.

If I can make an analogy, this is a bit like claiming, from some vantage point in the far future, that the United States stopped being a Communist nation in 2004 when John Kerry lost to George Bush. True, Kerry was probably a bit warmer towards socialism than Bush, but he wasn't a Communist, nor did the US have such a history.

Likewise, even Arius would have been aghast at the idea Jesus was a mere mortal, an ordinary man. You don't think of the first created being, existing before the rest of the universe, and the one who administers all of God's works as an "ordinary human being", do you?

The Gnostic Jesus

Well, what about these other documents that supposedly tell the "real", "original" Christian story? Again, Brown's argument sounds plausable until you take the time to read said documents -- and discover they say nothing of the sort!

Ancient Gnostics didn't view Jesus as human either: typically they believed, a bit like Arius, that he was the incarnation of a powerful, nearly-divine non-human spirit, like an angel, who existed before the world. And since flesh was considered evil, the Gnostic Jesus was often NOT human, and, in some cases, does not even have a normal human birth or take on real human flesh.

The Gospel of Judas

Here, for example, is a quote from The Gospel of Judas [pdf] -- which we've known about for quite a long time, but about which National Geographic recently deceived so many:

They [the disciples] said, “Master, you are […] the son of our god.”
Jesus said to them, “How do you know me?"

And another:

Judas [said] to him [Jesus], “I know who you are and where you have come from. You are from the immortal realm of Barbelo. And I am not worthy to utter the name of the one who has sent you.”

And:

They [the disciples] said to him, “Master, where did you go and what did you do when you left us?”

Jesus said to them, “I went to another great and holy generation.”

His disciples said to him, “Lord, what is the great generation that is superior to us and holier than us, that is not now in these realms?”

When Jesus heard this, he laughed and said to them, “Why are you thinking in your hearts about the strong and holy generation? Truly [I] say to you, no one born [of] this aeon will see that [generation]... and no person of mortal birth can associate with it..."

Jesus is from "the immoral region of Barbello", he acknowledges being the son of God; he claims to have visited "another generation" in another spiritual realm, a place where "no person of mortal birth" can go -- meaning, of course, that this Jesus is not a being who had a mortal birth, unlike his disappointed disciples.

So the Gospel of Judas doesn't teach Jesus was a mere man -- in fact, it teaches that he was not human -- and did not have a normal human birth, and was not a native resident of this realm.

The Gospel of Truth

The Gnostic Gospel of Truth starts as follows:

The gospel of truth is joy to those who have received from the Father of truth the gift of knowing him by the power of the Logos, who has come from the Pleroma and who is in the thought and the mind of the Father; he it is who is called "the Savior..."

Jesus has come from the "Pleroma" (spiritual realm) -- and he is, in fact, in "the thought and the mind of the Father". Like Arius, this "gospel" (which dates long after the time of Christ) teaches the Jesus "was the first to come forth" and says that "nothing happens without him". Again, hardly human!

Further, we learn that the authors of Gospel of Truth also believed Jesus was crucified and raised incorruptable, just as in Christian doctrine:

Oh, such great teaching! He abases himself even unto death, though he is clothed in eternal life. Having divested himself of these perishable rags, he clothed himself in incorruptibility, which no one could possibly take from him.

Jesus resurrected himself. Mere mortal? Not hardly.

The Gospel of Philip

This text portrays Christ, who is again called "first-begotten", as the one who created all the angels:

Then Bartholomew said to him: "How (is it that) <he> was designated in the Gospel 'Man' and 'Son of Man'? To which of them, then, is this Son related?"

The Holy One said to him: "I want you to know that First Man is called 'Begetter, Self-perfected Mind'. He reflected with Great Sophia, his consort, and revealed his first-begotten, androgynous son. His male name is designated 'First Begetter, Son of God', his female name, 'First Begettress Sophia, Mother of the Universe'. Some call her 'Love'. Now First-begotten is called 'Christ'. Since he has authority from his father, he created a multitude of angels without number for retinue from Spirit and Light."

Again, Jesus is not portrayed as a mere mortal, but again is the first-begotten son of God, and the creator of all the realms of angels.

Pistis Sophia

Here's the story of Jesus's incarnation as it is told in the Gnostic "gospel" Pistis Sophia:

Jesus continued again speaking and said: "Now it happened after this, through the command of the First Mystery, I looked down again upon the world of mankind, I found Mary, who is called my mother according to the material body. I spoke to her in the type of Gabriel , and when she turned to the height towards me, I cast into her the first power which I had received from the Barbelo, which is the body which I wore in the height. And in place of the soul, I cast into her the power which I received from the great Sabaoth, the Good, who is in the place of the right...

There they go again with the "immortal region of barbelo" stuff, which we also heard in the Gospel of Judas. Notice that Jesus "looked down on the world of mankind" before his own birth, as directed from some original spiritual entity. He also is the being who appears to people as the angel Gabriel.

Does this indicate Jesus was being thought of a normal human by these Gnostics, as Dan Brown and so many others claim? Or is he portrayed instead as "spiritual being", which Brown claimed only Christians thought he was?

And once again, this "suppressed" Gnostic text also portrays Jesus as having been killed and resurrected:

But it happened that after Jesus had risen from the dead he spent eleven years speaking with his disciples...

Conclusion

I tire. I could go on and on, making the case from Gnostic text after Gnostic text. The Gnostic Jesus was not a normal human being; he was typically the first created being, or came from God, existed before his incarnation here on earth; can visit other spiritual realms where no human can ever go, and was resurrected from the dead.

There are huge differences between Gnosticism and Christianity: Gnosticism taught matter was evil, the God of the bible was sometimes or always evil and/or in error, and that "salvation" was obtained by learning secrets, not being forgiven. Yet, ironically, all that aside, the Gnostic Jesus was at least superficially closer to the Christian vision of Jesus than the one favored today by modern critics of Christianity and contemporary "liberal Christians". He was an immortal creature from before our world who was killed, crucified, died, and resurrected, not a mere mortal who was just misunderstood.

And, also ironically, it is the bible which has all the details about the "earthly aspects" of Jesus's life -- it shows him eating, sleeping in fields, procuring and drinking first-class booze, weeping, being angry, talking about sex and defecation (Mark 7:19) -- where the Gnostic version of Jesus never almost never does anything "earthly" or human (or even interesting!) -- typically he's zipping away to other supernatural realms, looking down on the ant-like world of humans, or spouting Gnosto-babble. If a "human" Jesus is somehow preferable, then the bible beats Gnosticism hands-down.

All it takes is reading these documents to confirm this.

The only question this raises in my mind is how so many could be so wrong about something which is so easy to check. I suspect the answer is simply that it is appealing because people want to believe it, much as they say of their opponents.

The truth, as I see it, is that the real secret is that God did intervene in human history, manifesting himself in the body of Jesus, and does care how we behave. That's a lot more controversial than the idea that Jesus was a mere man, and a lot more personally threatening.

In Dan Brown's novel he imagines the truth is hidden behind a veil of lies, suppressed by the powerful institutions of the world. He imagines an Opus Dei "monk" (even though Opus Dei doesn't even have monks) attempting to assassinate people to prevent this dangerous truth from getting out.

Yet in real life, as I can show here and on countless other points, the actual lies are being used the opposite way: not to promote Christianity, but to oppose and obscure it; to keep people from realizing the truth. Not that a wealthy man once got married and had children -- indeed, that's hardly interesting or unusual -- but that God is gentle, kind, and humble, and took the form of a simple carpenter, healer, and preacher to let us know he cared, atone for our sins, and invite us to his party to celebrate our new relationship.

Evil was enraged at the time and had him killed. And is there today a fanantical Catholic albino, running around murdering people who might leak the story? People will surely contemplate the possibility.

But once again the opposite is true, and many times over: millions of Christians are assassinated each year to prevent their friends and neighbors from discovering the secret they've uncovered. This truth is opposed by organizations far more powerful than the Catholic church; and is so dangerous that it has been banned by governments all around the world, and is strictly controlled in others. Massive media campaigns are mobilized to oppose it -- using books, movies, and television. Even the UN turns a cooperative blind eye to lethal attempts to suppress it in places like North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Nepal, and the Sudan.

Everything you "know" is upside-down and backwards.

Join the real revolution.