ERROR NO. 3-- Constantine was the bad guy who suppressed the earlier Gospels and imposed the canonical Gospels and the doctrine of the divinity of Christ on the church. In fact already well before Constantine and before the Gnostic Gospels we not only have the four canonical Gospels circulating together as authoritative sources in the Church (probably as early as 125 A.D since Irenaeus knows of this fact), but in fact we have the Muratorian canon list which lists these Gospels as authoritative in and for the church.

ERROR NO. 6-- The Dead Sea Scrolls along with the Nag Hammadi documents are called the earliest Christian records (p. 245, see also p. 234). This is so false, it is what the British would call a howler. It’s an error that even a student who had only taken an introductory course in the NT would know is false. The Dead Sea Scrolls are purely Jewish documents. There is nothing Christian about them. There is also no evidence any of the Nag Hammadi documents ever existed before the late second century A.D. With the exception of the Gospel of Thomas (early 2nd cent.).

Brown correctly points out that "the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven." Indeed, the Bible's composition and consolidation may appear a bit too human for the comfort of some Christians. But Brown overlooks the fact that the human process of canonization had progressed for centuries before Nicea, resulting in a nearly complete canon of Scripture before Nicea or even Constantine's legalization of Christianity in 313.

Sir Leigh Teabing says, ‘To fully understand the Grail, we must first understand the Bible … The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven … [it] is a product of man … not God … and it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History never had a definitive version of the book. … Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence … his life was recorded by thousands of followers … more than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament … Who chose which gospels to include? … The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine’ (p.231). The plethora of historical fallacies continues unabated but this one-page sample is sufficient to illustrate the point.

The Bible testifies of itself that it is indeed ‘God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:16). Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God (2 Peter 1:21), and Jesus said ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’ (Matthew 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33). Neither has its meaning been lost or corrupted through ‘countless translations.’ The original languages were Hebrew (OT, with a few sections in Aramaic) and Greek (NT). Modern English versions, for example, are based on meticulously prepared composites of ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, of which thousands are extant. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that copies of OT books from the first century BC were almost identical to the previously earliest Hebrew manuscripts from a thousand years later, so copying errors have not been a significant problem.

The gathering of the New Testament documents began within the first century. Paul referred to Luke’s Gospel as ‘scripture’—graphè (1 Tim 5:18 cites both Deut. 25:4 and Luke 10:7 as such). Peter recognized that Paul’s writings were ‘scripture’—in 2 Peter 3:15–17 he refers to them as authoritative and then refers to ‘the other scriptures,’ and he warns his readers to beware of those who twist the meanings to their own destruction.

This process of recognizing the true and separating it from the false gained momentum in the second century when the heretic Marcion produced his own, very reduced, list of authorized books. Since the caricature always comes after the original, this implies that the main features of the NT collection were in place at that time. By the time of the Council of Nicea in AD 325 (which Constantine convened, but it was the gathering of 318 bishops that made the decisions) the issue was not even debated. The deliberations of the Council focused on the deity of Christ, and the authority of the four gospels on that subject was taken for granted by all the bishops present. The final statements regarding formal recognition of the 27 books of the New Testament that we have today (what we call the Canon) were made at African synods (at Hippo and Carthage) in AD 393 and 397.

It’s important to note that the Canon was decided by God and merely recognized by man. Leading NT scholar F.F. Bruce put it well:

‘The NT books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, …. [Church] councils [did] not impose something new upon the Christian communities but codif[ied] what was already the general practice of those communities.’

One of the world’s greatest authorities on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger, pointed out:

‘You have to understand that the canon was not the result of a series of contests involving church politics. … . You see, the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books. These documents didn't derive their authority from being selected; each one was authoritative before anyone gathered them together.’

For the more knowledgeable, the story really falls apart when Brown claims the Gospel of Mary Magdalene to be an ‘unaltered’ (p.248) and therefore true account of these events (yet even the words he quotes from it betray its fraudulence). However, this Gnostic ‘gospel’ is known only from three fragmentary manuscripts, and dates from the middle of the second century at the earliest. Before this or any other Gnostic ‘gospel’ was written, the church far and wide recognized the authority of the four canonical gospels. But a less knowledgeable soul might easily be duped.