Roman Emperor Constantine

Fiction

Constantine is next on the list in Brown’s revisionism. Paul Maier calls Brown’s work on Constantine “the most concerted falsification of a historical personality that I have ever encountered in either fiction or nonfiction.”[1] The first Christian Roman Emperor is depicted as thus in Brown’s work: “The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever” (page 124). Brown claims that Constantine eliminated goddess worship in the Roman Empire, collated the Bible, used Christianity for political gain, moved Christian worship from Saturday to Sunday, and decided that Jesus should be made into a deity in order to suit his own purposes.

FACT

The first Christian emperor did many things for church and society in the early fourth century, but not one of these claims is among them. According to Brown’s character Leigh Teabing, Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike” (234). This is totally false. Most of the canon was well known and in use nearly two centuries before Constantine, a time when the early church had already dismissed the many apocryphal gospels that arose later in the second century. The rejected gospels, far from containing the real truth about Jesus, were all distortions derived from the first-century canonical Gospels and laced with fanciful aberrations.

For Brown, Constantine “was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest” (232). FALSE. While Constantine was a flawed individual, historians agree that he certainly abjured paganism, became a genuine Christian convert, repaid the church for its terrible losses during the persecutions, favored the clergy, built many churches throughout his empire, convened the first ecumenical council at Nicea – underwriting the expenses of clergy to attend it – and desired baptism near death. As for the last, he was only following the custom at the time (innocent though mistaken) of delaying baptism until the end of life because it wiped your solate clean of preceding sins.

Did Constantine shift worship from Sat. to Sun. “to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the Sun” (232-233)? No. The earliest Christians started worshiping on the first day of the week, Sunday, which they called “the Lord’s Day,” to honor the day on which Christ rose from the dead. This is obvious both from the New Testament (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2; Revelation 1:10), as well as in the writings of the earliest church fathers like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, the Didache, and even the pagan author Pliny the Younger.

The Council of Nicea (in Brown’s revisionism) deified Jesus. Before that, “Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetherless,” not the Son of God (233). Wrong! Jesus’ deity was attested by many New Testament passages, as well as by the earliest Christians and all the church fathers, even if there was some disagreement as to the precise nature of that deity. The Council of Nicea did not debate over whether Jesus was divine or only mortal, but whether he was coeternal with the Father. Still, Brown says it was by “a relatively close vote” that the Council of Nicea endorsed Jesus’ deity (233). In fact, the vote was 300 to 2…and the 2 dissenters were followers of Arius, the heretic (see sheet from Who’s Who in Christian History regarding Arius).

[1] The Da Vinci Code: fact or fiction?, p. 13.