1 John 4:1-3
May 28, 2006
Preached by Monte Johnston
Fact or Fiction?
Have you seen the new design of all of the paper money printed by the US Treasury? The new designs and all of the security features. The government is trying to stay ahead of counterfeiters. There is the red and blue threads in the paper. There is all the fine detail. There is the way that the portraits seem separate from the background. They have added watermarks and other features. And yet there will always be people who try to copy the bills, because there is a huge motivation. This is always true for counterfeiting. It is easier to copy someone else’s work than it is to do your own. We don’t just see this with counterfeiters, or during tests in 10th grade math classes. It is also true with religions. From the earliest days there have been counterfeiters of Christianity. There was the original and authentic form and then there were cheap knockoffs. The question was: How do you tell the truth from a lie? That is the topic of our sermon text today. And we will find it just as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.
Scripture: 1 John 4:1-3
1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world. (NRSV)
Da Vinci’s “Secret”
This past week I went to see the Da Vinci Code. First, it was the book that conjured up so much conversation and controversy, now it is the movie. Without giving away more than is in a typical review of the book I can tell you who haven’t read it that it suggests there are secrets about Jesus, the Holy Grail and the church, secrets that had supposedly been kept for 1400 years, which Da Vinci knew and then have been kept right up to the present. If you love conspiracy theories, this would have to be the grand-daddy of them all. Because what is revealed is that Jesus was only a regular human who was married to Mary Magdalene who had his children and lived in France after he died. But to prove this Brown has to rewrite a considerable amount of history.
And I have to confess that I was not much of a fan of the book—a bit to formulaic. And I didn’t think the movie was any better—too long. I found both to be incredibly frustrating. The reason for this is that both the book and the movie are taken up with long segments of history, from Jesus’ time through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What is so frustrating is that Brown can’t seem to deal with any part of that history without changing it for his purposes. When reading the book I was aware of how he did this with church history, but since then I have learned that it is true with his use of art and architecture as well.
An increasing number of books have been written trying to set the record straight. And the number of pages that have been written to debunk Dan Brown are dwarfing the number of pages that he wrote. He twisted almost everything that he touched.
I am not even going to try to correct him. But I will take two topics that he deals with as a jumping off point to help our understanding and those two topics are Scripture and Jesus.
Scripture
In The Da Vinci Code Brown writes:
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.” (231)
He assures his readers that the New Testament cannot be divinely inspired. Then, he claims that the Gospels that we have were chosen by the Roman Emperor Constantine to support the claim that Jesus was divine. Because, as he states, no one believed that Jesus was divine before the year 325. He claims that other Gospels would prove that.
This is so much malarkey that it is hard to know where to begin. Constantine didn’t pick the books of the Bible. The Gospels that we have actually highlight Jesus’ humanity better than the other accounts, and a Roman governor, named Pliny the younger, in a letter to the Emperor in the year 112 AD, writes that Christians follow Christ “whom they worship as a God.”
The real history of the Scriptures is more interesting than your run-of-the-mill political power play. See, in the years after Jesus’ death the apostles spread out throughout the Roman Empire and proclaimed the death and resurrection of the Jesus that they followed and who they believed to be Lord and God. At this point there was no need for written accounts of Jesus’ life and death because there were eyewitnesses were around. However, as time and persecution wore on, eyewitnesses were harder to come by and so Christians began to rely more and more on written accounts. Very soon the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, along with the letters of Paul, formed the core of this new collection of writings that were viewed to be as authoritative as the Old Testament. All this happened by 150 AD. In the years that followed a great consensus emerged among the churches which included the other letters in the New Testament. There were other writings by Christians that were around at the time that were considered.
The Canon
There were three criteria which were used.
The remarkable thing was that while there was some squabbling over one or two of the books there was remarkable consensus among churches, even those on the opposite ends of the empire that had very little contact with one another. And none of the Gnostic Gospels were even on the list! At the end of the day, each church recognized the intrinsic power and authority of these writings. They heard within them the voice of God as it testified to Jesus Christ. The church has agreed ever since.
Gnosticism
But Brown is correct in stating that there were other gospels that presented a different view of Jesus. Some of these are known as the Gnostic Gospels, which include those found at Nag Hammadi. This is actually a fascinating story. It seems that in 1945 an nomadic Egyptian named, memorably enough, Mohammed Ali, was digging for fertilizer near the village of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, and what he found was a jar that contained 13 leather volumes that dated back to the fourth century group known as the Gnostics.
However, what concerns us today is that there are some writings in this collection that have to do with Jesus, but they fit Jesus into their philosophical system, rather than view Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament.
What Gnostics believed was that one’s salvation would come through gaining knowledge of spiritual mysteries. The word, “Gnostic,” comes from the Greek work for knowledge. According to them, to gain access to the mysteries is saves you from your fallen, fleshly life. The bad news was that it was only for a privileged few who gained enlightenment.
But this is very different than authentic Christianity. In fact it is the very point of the gospel that it is not a secret for a few, but it is the mystery of God that has been revealed for everyone. That is what it says in Ephesians 1:9. Jesus is the revelation of who God is and what God is about to the whole world. God is not keeping secrets. He has announced his will, his plan, and his intentions to the world.
Counterfeit Christianity
Gnosticism is a counterfeit of Christianity. These Gnostic gospels are counterfeits. Just like a counterfeit bill looks very similar to an authentic bill, they come from different sources.
We know that they are counterfeit by the standard set our in our passage that we read earlier. The message is right and true and comes from the Holy Spirit if it meets a simple test: does the message proclaim that Jesus who came in the flesh as a human is from God? Jesus was not the bearer of a big secret. He himself is the message, because he is God in the flesh. Gnosticism sees a chasm between the flesh and the spiritual realm. The secret knowledge is supposed to free people from the flesh which is bad. But true Christianity proclaims something even more amazing. That God came in the flesh in order to redeem it and restore it, not to destroy it.
It is not Jesus’ message that saves, but Jesus himself. And he did it by becoming fully human. He was fully human and fully divine.
These other books about Jesus present Jesus as if he were just another Gnostic teacher. The church rejected these as reliable testimonies to Jesus Christ. I don’t think it is hard to see why. One book called the Gospel of Peter is very anti-semitic and teaches that Jesus never suffered.
There is also work of stories by someone else calling himself Thomas. This is a collection of stories concerning the childhood of Jesus.
III. 1 But the son of Annas the scribe was standing there with Joseph; and he took a branch of a willow and dispersed the waters which Jesus had gathered together.
2 And when Jesus saw what was done, he was angry and said to him: O evil, ungodly, and foolish one, what harm did the pools and the waters do to you? behold, now also you thou shall be withered like a tree, and shall not bear leaves, neither root, nor fruit.
3 And immediately that lad withered up wholly, but Jesus departed and went unto Joseph's house. But the parents of the boy that was withered took him up, bewailing his youth, and brought him to Joseph, and accused him for having such a child.
IV. 1 After that again Jesus went through the village, and a child ran and dashed against his shoulder. And Jesus was provoked and said to him: You will not go all thy way. And immediately he fell down and died. … And the parents of the dead child came to Joseph, and blamed him, saying: You that have such a child can not live with us in the village.
Clearly this is a very different Jesus. It is not hard to see why the early church looked at these writings by people who claimed to be Christians and decided that while they used Jesus’ name, they clearly had someone else in mind. And they just wanted to use him for their own purposes. Moreover, scholars have concluded that all of these other books were written from one to eight hundred years after Jesus lived, while all of the writings in the New Testament were writing in the first century. From a historical perspective these are not very reliable documents. They completely leave behind the Jewish context.
Gospel of Judas
Recently there was a big deal made in the press about the publication of the Gospel of Judas. There were some wild claims about how this shed dramatic new light on Jesus. But most of the academic community couldn’t even get worked up enough to let out a yawn.
Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State concludes:
“The ‘Gospel of Judas’ tells us nothing about the historical Jesus or Judas; it adds next to nothing to our knowledge of early Gnosticism or of sectarian Christianity; and it actually adds very little indeed that was not already known from texts published a century or more ago.”
Secret Knowledge
So what is all the interest in these documents and in Dan Brown’s novel? I think that is the lure of secret knowledge. We have this fascination with secrets and conspiracies. We love exposés. We love to be in on a secret. Just tell a child that you want to tell them a secret and then watch their eyes light up. It is what drives gossip—the desire to be in on a secret and a mystery.
Three preachers were on a non-productive fishing trip when they began to discuss various topics to pass the time. One preacher said he thought it would be nice if they confessed their biggest sins to each other and then prayed for each other. They all agreed, and the first preacher said that his biggest sin was that he liked to sit at the beach now and then and watch pretty women stroll by.
The second preacher confessed that his biggest sin was that he went to the horse racing track every so often and put a small bet on a horse.
Turning to the third preacher, they asked, "Brother, what is your biggest sin?"
With a grin, he said, "My biggest sin is gossiping."
There is something that we really like about secret knowledge. And this is a driving force behind the interest in The Da Vinci Code and Gnosticism in general. But that is not, nor has ever been what Christianity is all about.
What can we conclude:
1. The earliest books about Jesus are the ones that we have in the Bible. All the press reports and so on about other books are all later fictions. So you don’t need to be concerned that you are missing the real Jesus.
2. There isn’t secret knowledge that you need to know. What you need to know has been revealed in Jesus. That is: God is love and he created the world in love. We, his creatures, rebelled, and so we bear the consequences of our rebellion. We live with evil and we live separated from our Maker. But God, out of his love for us, came to us in the God-man Jesus so that we might be saved through his life, death, and resurrection. There is no esoteric knowledge. You don’t need a Ph.D. You don’t need to be able to solve puzzles. You need only believe and accept the truth. And as it says in the Bible you only need to see things like a child.
3. If God came into the world as one who was fully human, if he lived as a first-century Jew, if he lived fully in that cultural, political, and historical context, and saved everyone, then we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible also bears all the marks of its human origins. It too arises out of historical, cultural, and political contexts. But just as Jesus was Jewish, he was still God. So in the same way just as the Bible was a human creation, it was also divinely inspired as God’s witness to us of his Son and of himself. So that we would not be left in the dark, but so that the world might know and believe the truth about him.