12. Gnostic Beliefs About Jesus Are Misrepresented
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown claimed that Constantine, the emperor of Rome who legalized Christianity and all but made it a state religion, destroyed the Gnostic gospels because they depicted Jesus as being a merely human prophet. He promoted the canonical gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – because they portray Jesus as the divine Son of God. Doing this would make Christianity more appealing to pagans, whom he supposedly believed wanted a religious figure rather than a prophet.
While Constantine has undoubtedly been misrepresented in many history books and his relationship with paganism has not been fully appreciated by historians, particularly church historians, the idea that Brown put forth has the major flaw of not accurately representing the Jesus of the Gnostic gospels. While the Gnostic depiction of Jesus is indeed different than the canonical representation, He is never shown to be merely a mortal. In fact, the Gnostics made Him out to be entirely divine, so much so that some believed that His body was just an illusion, while the canonical gospels made Him out to be both human and divine. Central to Gnostic belief was the separation between flesh and spirit, human and divine. And if forced to choose whether Jesus was human or whether He was divine, the early Gnostics would have said that He was divine.