week-3

Recently Dan Brown the author of the Da Vinci Code won a landmark legal victory. The whole idea of copyright, so seems to me, is never on sure grounds. ( There is nothing new under the sun. Ideas are of the public domain. Only that each expresses it differently.)
The idea of human Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene is not anything new. ( Dan needn’t have bothered to think that up.) Wasn’t there also some question mark surrounding his birth? These petty controversies and scandals alike have been part of our oral tradition.
It begins at first as gossip passed around among men in the street and works its way up gradually into ivory towers where some drudge puts it to paper; lo and behold it has in course of time, become scholarship. Granted that Dan Brown did write a first-class religious thriller, are we to believe it added anything new?
Now coming to my main point: Surely there were some 30 gospels extant till Iranaeus the Bishop of Lyons thought of establishing four of these as canonical text? None of these four were written by the disciples with whose names, they have now come inseparably attached. Mark, Matthew, Luke and John have as much claim to the real Jesus as Judas or Thomas. How come then the gospel of Thomas or Judas are non-canonical while that of John is? ( Your guess is as good as mine.) I can only say for those who didn’t make it that they got a bad press.
benny