WAS THERE A DA VINCI CONSPIRACY - PART 5

                                         WAS THERE A DA           VINCI CONSPIRACY ?

          PART 5

     (copied from
       Y-Jesus.com)


Firing on the canon

The Da Vinci Code also states that Constantine suppressed all documents about Jesus, other than
those found in our current New Testament canon
(recognized by the Church as authentic eyewitness reports of the apostles), it further asserts that the New Testament accounts were altered by Constantine and the bishops to reinvent Jesus.
Another key element of the Da Vinci Code  Conspiracy was that the four  New Testament gospels were cherry-picked from a total of  "more then 80 gospels," most of which were supposedly suppressed by Constantine. 

There are two central issues here, and we need to 
address both. The first is whether Constantine altered or biased the selection of the New Testament Books. The second is whether he barred documents that should have been included in the Bible. 

Regarding the first issue, letters and documents written by second century church leaders and heretics alike confirm the wide usage of the New Testament Books. Nearly 200 years before Constantine convened  the Council of Nicaea, the heretic Marcion listed 11 of the 27 New Testament Books as being  the authentic writings of the apostles.

And about the same time, another heretic, Valentinus, alludes to a wide variety of  New Testament themes and passages. Since these two heretics were opponents of the early church leadership, they were not writing just what the bishops wanted. Yet, like the early church, they still referred to the same New Testament books we read today.

So, if the New Testament 

was already widely in use 
200 years before 
Constantine and the 
Council of Nicaea, how 
could the emperor have 
invented or altered it ?   By that time the church was widespread and encompassed  hundreds of thousands, if not millions of believers , all of whom were familiar with the  New Testament accounts.  

In his book, The Da Vinci Code Deception, an analysis of the Da Vinci Code, Dr. Erwin Lutzer remarks:
     
* Constantine did not decide which Books would       be in the canon, indeed the topic of the canon 
   did not even come up at the council of Nicaea.       By that time the early church was reading a           canon of books it had determined was the Word     of God, two hundred years earlier."

Although the official canon was still years from being finalized, the New Testament of today was
deemed  authentic more than two centuries before Nicaea.

next post  25th April