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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2006 Tom Flannery
700 words

"JUDAS GOSPEL," "DA VINCI CODE" ARE NO GOSPEL

By: Tom Flannery

Every year as Resurrection Day (called Easter) approaches, some combination of the media/academia/Hollywood launches a blistering assault upon the claims of Christianity or on Christ Himself - and this year was certainly no exception.

The big enchilada this time around was the release of "The Gospel of Judas" and the fanfare that surrounded it, including a two-hour National Geographic Channel TV program.

The true gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the first century, the period following the death and bodily resurrection of Christ. Matthew and John were both apostles, first-hand eyewitnesses of the events they recorded. Mark was a protege of the apostle Peter, while Luke was associated with the apostle Paul and interviewed many of the first-hand eyewitnesses for his account.

The so-called "Gospel of Judas" is one of the Gnostic gospels, which were popularized in the Dan Brown book The Da Vinci Code. These manuscripts were written in the second and even third centuries, long after the events occurred, and were rejected by the Christian church from the time they first surfaced. Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, denounced them as heretical in 180 A.D. and made clear they weren't being read in the churches of that time, nor were they ever.

They were written not by Jesus' disciples or even proteges of first-hand eyewitnesses, as the true gospels were, but by a fringe religious sect called the Gnostics who rejected the truth of the Bible. The word "gnostic" comes from the Greek word for knowledge, since the Gnostics believed that salvation came not through faith alone in Christ (as the Bible teaches) but rather from special revelation, or knowledge, from God.

In other words, these books weren't even written by true Christians! Nor were they written by the people whose names are attached to them (Judas didn't write the "Gospel of Judas," Thomas didn't write the "Gospel of Thomas," etc.). The Gnostics tried to pass their books off as the works of Thomas, et. al., for credulity's sake. Yet we are being told today that these error-riddled manuscripts written by non-Christians, in some cases hundreds of years after the fact, were the books that Jesus and the early church intended to be accepted as divinely inspired.

No, these were frauds which like so many other manuscripts of that time and since then took key events and names from the Bible in a deceitful attempt to legitimize false teachings - teachings that directly contradict the God-inspired doctrines of the Bible. Just like, say, the Book of Mormon does.

At the heart of these assaults against historic Christianity is an attack upon Christ. According to Dan Brown's distorted version of history, the Gnostic writers exposed that Jesus was merely a man but this was covered up by Constantine at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. when he nefariously replaced the Gnostics with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to create a religion based upon the false idea that Jesus was God.

In the Dan Brown version of history, Matthew/Mark/Luke/John didn't receive legitimacy until 325 A.D., and then only through stealth. Yet we know from the writings of the early church fathers that these gospels were functioning as Holy Scripture in the churches no later than the early part of the second century - some 200 years before Constantine ruled or Nicea was convened.

We must remember that by 325 A.D. the truth of Jesus' deity had already been consistently confirmed by all the true gospel/New Testament accounts ("the Word was God...[He] became flesh and dwelt among us," John 1, etc.), as well as being confirmed by all the early church fathers that followed. The reason Polycarp and so many other Christian martyrs gave their lives for the faith during those first 300 years, being fed to lions or burned on stakes in Roman arenas, was for their unshakable testimony that Jesus is Lord (the one true God).

A whole cottage industry of books and DVDs exposing the many lies, distortions and unspeakable blasphemies of "The Da Vinci Code" has emerged since its publication, yet that hasn't stopped Hollywood from turning it into a major motion picture to be released in the coming weeks.

Here we go again.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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