Did the Roman Emperor Constantine choose which Gospels to include in the Bible?
Did the Roman Emperor Constantine cherry-pick which Gospels he wanted to be included in the Bible? Dan Brown says that
More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament. (p. 231)
And
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. The earlier Gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned. (p. 234)
This is how the four Gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, got into our Bible today. However, this is not what actually happened.
Constantine did commission fifty copies of the New Testament. But there was nothing subversive or sinister about this, and to say that there was is just spin-doctoring.
The four Gospels had been widely accepted from very early in the Church's history - and only these four.
The first Christians believed that their message was about things that had really happened in history - that Jesus really was the Son of God, that he really died on the cross, and that he really rose again from the dead. Because these were real historical events, reliable testimony about them was tremendously important. Such testimony had to come from eyewitnesses.
So it mattered to the early Church that their official documents originated with Jesus's inner circle of followers. We have seen previously that the Gospels that are in the Bible were all written during the last quarter of the first century. This is not the place to go into the details of who wrote them. But the early Church was confident that they had come from people who were either eye-witnesses, or in very close contact with eye-witnesses. And that is why they accepted them as authoritative and reliable.
By the end of the second century, the four Gospels were being widely circulated, and widely accepted as authoritative - and only these four.
By the time of the Council of Nicaea, the four Gospels had already been accepted for almost two hundred years. The idea that at the beginning of the fourth century there were eighty different Gospels around just does not stand up to examination.
So where do the Gnostic Gospels come in? We have seen previously that these were documents from the second and third centuries. We have also seen that the Gnostic Gospels do not actually say what Dan Brown says - they do not exalt the sacred feminine, and they do not describe Jesus as merely a mortal man. If anything, he comes over as more supernatural in the Gnostic Gospels than in the Bible's Gospels.
The Church didn't suppress the Gnostic Gospels. They were widely available, and were read by Christians all across the civilised world, for more than a century. The church fathers wrote plenty about what they said.
The Church did not suppress them. But neither did it recognise them as authoritative, and there was a good reason for this: they did not have the same reliable historical roots as the Gospels that are in our Bibles.
Not authorising a document is not the same thing as suppressing it. These people were teaching something that they believed was wrong, and what they did was to argue against them - sometimes in boring detail.