Notes:
Who Was in Brown's Early Church?
The later "early Church," according to Brown's theory, is made up of the apostles
we all know—including Peter, John, Matthew, and Paul—who wrote the New
Testament, imposing their later version of things on the original, human,
Gnostic Jesus. From these apostles we get the "orthodox" Jesus, who
died for the sins of the world, who rose from the dead, who left behind Him
an empty tomb, and who was God in flesh. Gnostics say this version of Jesus
is a fabrication.
According to modern scholars who hold to the Gnostic worldview, the alleged
fabrication clearly took place when the "orthodox" Christians men
the original honed above wrote down their beliefs about Jesus in the biblical Gospels,
suppressing the original texts and the true story of Jesus, specifically by making
Him divine. This special sense of the term divine, as used by the church,
meant that Jesus was the unique mediator between the transcendent divine
Creator and sinful humanity—according to The Da Vinci Code, a lie.