Fascinating but Flawed

"Holy Blood, Holy Grail" presents substanial amounts of opinion and speculation as fact. Some claims the authors make contradict the New Testament without citing remotely reliable sources from the early Christian era.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail

Are you ready? I've been reading again, and there's one book that I really want to share with you. It is "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", published by Delta Trade Paperbacks, and penned collaboratively by the authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincolingualln.

"On January 18, 1982 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published in England. Five weeks later, on February 26, it appeared in the United States. During the month attending publication in each country we found ourselves amid what seemed at times a kind of circus."

This is the passage with which the authors begin their Introduction to the Paperback Edition, and once you have made your way through to the end of the volume, you can understand perfectly why there would have been a Ringling Brothers feel to the whole thing. That is, if you didn't already have an inkling just from the cover, which informs you that the book will deal with the "Secret History of Christ" and the "Shocking Legacy of the Grail".

The book is presented in three sections: The Mystery, The Secret Society, and the Bloodline. Be forewarned, if you are considering picking up a copy. There is a great deal of incredibly dry text you will have to slog your way through.

The Mystery carries on about Berenger Sauniere, the parish priest assigned to the French village of Rennes-le-Chateau in 1885, and his mysterious, sudden acquisition of wealth most unbefitting his station. It looks at the history of the Knights Templar and seeks any connection between the secret supposedly discovered by Sauniere, and the long ago defunct order. We are told of this priest and given multiple historical references to him and his actions, and then told that two searches of vatican archives found no mention of the man. The plot thickens! The text mentions documents extant, and refers to supposed promises to reveal "incontrovertible proof" of incredible secrets, promises that were never kept. The whole section leaves you wondering what all the blather is about. At this point in the book, I continued to read, not because of any great fascination with what they had been saying, but because of a determination to make my way through to the end so that I would learn more about part of the great fuss roused by "The DaVinci Code".

The Secret Society deals with the Priory of Sion, looking at it from every possible angle allowed by history. Any document ever created that alludes to the Order in any way is examined here. It is, indeed, historical fact that such an organization existed, but their exact purpose remains as much a question by their end of the research as it was before the beginning. The great thrust of these 172 pages of text is to inform the reader that the order is out there, and that rumour has it that they have existed through the centuries, primarily to guard some potentially earth-shattering secret.

Finally, the last section, The Bloodline, deals with the theory that Jesus was a mortal who did not, in fact, die on the cross, and that he had offspring with the woman he married, Mary of Magdala. This is the "explosive" section, simply because they theorize events that would upset far too many christian applecarts. The bombshells, so to speak, are right in your face most of the time. There are others that some might miss in their hurry to get to the obvious ones and lap them up, or fume in righteous indignation over them, whichever seems right to any given reader at the time. For instance, while the authors tell us that they were subjected to a litany of complaints from high ranking theologians, they also inform us that the majority of the whiners were protestant. The Roman Catholic church, apparently, "remained essentially silent". This is the point at which the reader needs to keep on registering the content in front of them. If you let your mind wander off to begin pondering this strange action and start seeing it as being part of some conspiracy, you might miss the next sentence in which they tell you that "... Dr. Malachi Martin, one of the leading authorities on Vatican affairs and former member of the Vatican's Pontifical Institute, conceded that there was ultimately no real theological objection to a married Jesus."

Out of interest, when I read that statement, I grabbed my omnipresent dictionary and looked up 'pontifical'. It told me that the word meant "Pompously dogmatic or self-important; pretentious" Of course, I looked up 'dogmatic' next. There I learned that dogmatic means "Characterized by an authoritative, arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles" That's the RC church alright, arrogant and authoritarian in its assertion of unprovable principles. They've been that way through centuries of the abuse of power that saw them burning at the stake thousands who dared to argue with them, or even just who dared to be, when the church wanted them not to be.

That statement was a bombshell for me. How could such a statement be made by a high ranking official and not immediately result in an overhaul of the incredibly outmoded institution that is the church? How can they go on insisting that priests must remain celibate, if they do not even dispute that Jesus might have been married? How can they go on insisting on any of the things they are sticklers about?

If you drink deeply from the Pierian spring that flows through these pages, you may come away with more than you bargained for. If you're a christian who can slam your mind shut to the possibilities presented here, you'll be fine. If you are open to learning and questioning, you may have problems with the answers you'll need to find once you finish this book. Ignorance truly can be bliss, and has been so for countless millions of christians through the centuries. Not many would know, for instance, that the fathers of the early church actually took a vote at the council of Nicea in AD 325 to decide whether or not Jesus was a mortal prophet or a a god. The decision was NOT unanimous. Two voted against. It was not until AD 384 that the Bishop of Rome was first called Pope, and the doctrine of papal infallibility was not declared until July 18, 1870. That all means that there was no "pope" at the council, and only heaven knows whether or not the naysayers were the ones who cast their votes with infallibility. A little historical knowledge can indeed be anathema to unquestioning religious belief, and this book presents its readers with more than a few little known facts.

The details they present about the Roman custom of crucifixion are certainly not presented to many congregations during the Easter services. Neither is the average christian well informed about the compilation of the books of the bible.

Whether Jesus married or not would seem to me to be a moot point. My dictionary states that a "moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value", and that is exactly right. Why should it matter if he had someone to share his nights and be there to break the night's fast with him, in the morning? Why should it even matter if anyone chooses to believe in him, or not? As long as we can believe as we choose and extend to others the right to do the same, any belief that strengthens and comforts people on their journey through life is a valid belief. What has no validity is the institutionalized intervention between people and their perceived god by an organization dedicated to the acquisition and wielding of power totally out of character with the man/god they purport to emulate.

The authors end by declaiming that their assertions are heretical in any way, saying that they do not feel they "have desecrated or even diminsihed Jesus". They aver once again that they see no reason for his divinity to be dependent on sexual chastity, a statement that for many will ring with the strident tones of a bomb raid siren. For me, however, the cracks opened in the edifice of the great and mighty church, the corrupt promulgators of the "good news" are the real bombshells dropped by this book.

Also posted at: http://www.aka-alias.net/2005/05/holy-blood-holy-grail.html

Interesting speculations for the open-minded

This is a fairly peculiar book.

Already in the Introduction, the authors state the potential weaknesses their book has. They recognize that some of their findings are somehow speculative and can't be fully proven. In addition, they state that, since the book encompasses legends and facts through 19 centuries, with sources as varied as the Bible, legends, apocryph biblical manuscripts, poems from the Middle Ages, the Gospels, and anonymous documents that have "appeared" in the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, they have chosen to show their findings in a readable and accesible form.

From then on, they take you on a tour through history and legend. Their approach is somehow linear. Their intention is to present how they progressed in their research, which started as an investigation in the misterious life of a priest in the French village of Rennes at the end of the XIX century. Trying to find an explanation for the sudden enrichment of this priest, the authors jump back to the 1200s to research the Cathars, which link them to the Templars and the Crusades in the 1100s. Back to the future, and using as their main reference some "Dossier secrets" (from an anonymous source, that appeared in Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale in the 1960s), they find out about the Prieuré of Sion and its history as a secret society. Then they link the Prieuré with the Merovingian dynasty (which started in the 400s) and try to descifer the history and evolution of these monarchs.

After finishing the "Merovingian chapter", the authors realize that many of their researched subjects mention or are somehow related to the Holy Grail. A new investigation goes on, trying to find out what exactly this is. It moves to the literature field when they use Parzival, a Grail romance, for this purpose. Somehow they get to speculate, without concrete evidence (though many indirect hints do exist) that the Holy Grail could be related to the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalen, which could have gone into exile in France after the Crucifixion and perpetuated itself through the Merovingians.

And this starts the last and most interesting chapter of the book. Here, the authors analyze the New Testament Gospels (between them and against other historical documents) and come forward with a plethora of interesting speculations regarding Jesus Christ, his divinity, his life, and even his death.

The latter chapter of this book really makes of it a worthwhile reading. But beware, you should read this book if you are willing to challenge your traditional Christian beliefs (assuming you are Christian / Catholic) without trying to "prove the authors wrong". Personally, I think they overstretched their speculations in some matters, but in others they just put enough (apparent) facts to create a shadow of doubt.

If you're behavior depends on the real, historical truthfulness of your religion, this might not be a book for you. If you know that your values and day-to-day behavior are beyond those details, and you cherish the chance of challenging the conventional interpretation of history, you will like this book a lot.

The truth of the matter is: we will never truly know what really happened, and it just does not matter.

Before I finish, I would like to state that I gave this book a 4-star rating because the Holy Grail and Perzival chapter is truly boring and because there should be a less convoluted way of presenting the findings than the "jumpy" form in which the authors did it. It was almost dizzying to move back and forth through time and through sources.