Readers of this post can find more information in "Did Constantine Choose Which Gospels Got In The New Testament And Which Did Not?" For a similar display Biblical illiteracy by Christoper Hitchens, see "On Not Knowing The Difference Between a 'Synoptic' And A 'Canonical' Gospel" (more to come)
Ah. Richard Dawkins has written yet another book. He is a writer of a type well known through history and well described by John Wesley who observed: "Free-thinkers, so called, are seldom close thinkers."(Journal May 17, 1768). This is certainly true of Dawkins. Here again as in his former books we find Dawkins evidencing very little interest in describing things he despises fairly or accurately. This in turn reveals that his intended audience aren't people informed in the subjects he talks about. In a way one would wish Dawkins would stay in the lab where he is not required to venture much beyond weighing and measuring and marking down numbers in columns. He is certainly out of his depth when he tries to talk about history, philosophy, theology, or anything else that requires measured judgment. In this he stands in the line of writers that included Tom Paine, Constantin Volney, and even long before that the second-century writer Celsus, whose clumsy and pretentious book True Doctine, called forth one of the great apologetic books in the history of the Church, Origen of Alexandria's magnificent Contra Celsum. In that book Origen observes concerning Celsus, something that is true of all his successors up to and including Dawkins:
“For passion and hatred have no orderly method, and people who are in a rage and have some personal hostility say whatever comes into their heads when they attack those whom they hate, since they are prevented by their passion from stating their accusations carefully and in order. (Origen, Contra Celsum, 1.40).
One of the characteristics of Dawkins is that he does not bother to learn the facts before making his case, and he does not apparently admit his error and correct them afterward. He uncritically snatches up whatever he can lay his hands on to throws at religion confident that some of it will stick. His sources are often dubious and of a sort that no one with a credible education in the areas he's talking about would take seriously. And even when he does appeal to real authorities, he does not stay with them long enough to learn from them what he would need to know if he wants to make an intelligent argument.
So in the new book, for example, which he calls Outgrowing God (A Beginner's Guide), Dawkins repeats the erroneous claim that the Canon of Scripture was decided at the Council of Nicaea, and that books like the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas and 20+ others were rejected by the council in favor of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In reality there is no evidence whatever that the subject of the canon even came up as an issue at the Council of Nicaea. This is more a fantasy that gained currency through the promotion of Madam Blavatsky and the Theosophists. Scholars make no such claim.
In the book Dawkins resents himself as having studied and learned from Bart Ehrman. Yet one of the things he would have learned had he read Ehrman's work, was that neither the Council of Nicaea under the emperor Constantine, nor Constantine in any context acted to decide the boundaries of the Canon. Hence Ehrman says in one place, that the “emperor Constantine had nothing to do with the formation of the canon of scripture: he did not choose which books to include or exclude, and he did not order the destruction of the Gospels that were left out of the canon.”*
As for books like The Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Thomas, these were never seriously considered or even discussed for potential inclusion in the New Testament. Indeed their very existence was scarcely noticed outside the little sects that created them.
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*Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74.
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