Holy Moly

A review of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" 

This is the book Dan Brown's bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" is based on. Indeed, Michael Baigent et.al. have even sued Brown in court, charging him with plagiarizing their book. The ideas behind "The Da Vinci Code" have been exposed as completely bogus by many real historians. Obviously, this exposure affects "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" as well.

This book is methodologically flawed. It claims that Jesus survived the crucifixion and sired children with Mary Magdalene. But if this happened, there should be ancient documents telling us about it. There are essentialy only three ancient views of Jesus: the Christian, the Judeo-Christian and the Gnostic. None of them includes the notion that Jesus married and had children with Mary Magdalene. It simply isn't serious to reject the ancient documents in favor of modern texts of questionable value, as Michael Baigent does. Of course, a conspiracy theorist might claim that the ancient documentation is lacking due to a massive cover-up. But such an argument, compelling as it may sound, is worthless to the historian, who must work with the real evidence, meager as it may be. A claim that can neither be proven or disproven is of little help. Besides, how many sects or cults have managed to keep their esoteric secrets? Very few indeed. There is always a defector or infiltrator somewhere. The idea that the biggest secret of all times was revealed by a confused French right-wing extremist only 40 years ago is very hard to take seriously. Indeed, the fact that not even heretical groups like the Gnostiscs claimed that Jesus had sired children, is good evidence against the claim. The Gnostics, after all, made all kinds of peculiar statements. But not this one. Why?

Why are books like "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" so popular? Perhaps they say what many people want to hear. That in itself is somewhat damning, I think. For how many people want to hear the truth?