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The Messianic Legacy
by Henry Lincoln (Author),
Michael Baigent (Author),
& 1 More.
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Some of the facts and arguments are incontrovertible. Various names, and their meanings, for example.
While the average person of European descent has lost it - not in the smallest measure because it suits the powers that tried hard to veil information and knowledge of the faith they were corralled in - other people and other cultures, other languages, have either retained it all along, or can access it far more easily.
In any case names and their significances, words and their meanings, are really quite incontrovertible; and that leads one to other arguments and their truth.
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October 19, 2008.
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Contents
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About the Book
About the Authors
Also by
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Maps
PART ONE
THE MESSIAH
1. Scholarship and Public Understanding
2. Jesus as King of Israel
3. Constantine as Messiah
4. Jesus as Freedom-fighter
5. The Zadokite Movement of Qumran
6. The Formation of Christianity
7. The Brothers of Jesus
8. The Survival of Nazarean Teaching
9. The Last Days
PART TWO
THE QUEST FOR MEANING
10. The Activation of Symbol
11. The Loss of Faith
12. Substitute Faiths: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany 13. The Post-War Crisis and Social Desperation
14. Trust and Power
15. The Artist as Priest, the King as Symbol
16. Towards an Embrace of Armageddon
PART THREE
THE CABAL
17. Fragments in the Post
18. The British Connection
19. The Anonymous Tracts
20. The Elusive ‘American Contingent’
21. The Vista Widens
22. Resistance, Chivalry and the United States of Europe
23. The Return of De Gaulle
24. Secret Powers behind Covert Groups
Picture Section
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes and References
Index
Copyright
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About the Book
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"After the shocking revelations of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail the authors, in their quest to determine the discrepancies between early and modern ‘Christian’ thought, found that they were forced to ask such questions as:
"• Was there more than one Christ? Was Christ the founder of Christianity?
"• Were the disciples as peace-loving as it is traditionally assumed?
"• What links the Vatican, the CIA, the KGB, the Mafia, Freemasonry, P2, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar?
"• What mysterious modern crusade implicates British Industry, Churchill and de Gaulle, the EEC and Solidarity?"
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June 15, 2022 - June 15, 2022.
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About the Authors
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"MICHAEL BAIGENT was born in New Zealand in 1948 and obtained a degree in psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch. Since 1976 he has lived in England.
"RICHARD LEIGH studied at Tufts University, Boston, the University of Chicago and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
"HENRY LINCOLN was born in London in 1930. An ardent Francophile, he has long been deeply interested in French language, history and culture. He has been a writer for over forty years, having produced more than 100 television scripts. He has lectured extensively, and is best known for the presentation of his own programmes on BBC television.
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June 15, 2022 - June 15, 2022.
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Also available by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
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The Temple and the Lodge
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Deception Secret Germany: Claus von Staffenberg and the Mystical Crusade against Hitler
The Elixir and the Stone
The Inquisition
Also by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
By Michael Baigent
From the Omens of Babylon
Ancient Traces
by Henry Lincoln
The Holy Place
Key to the Scared Pattern
The Templars’ Sacred Island
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June 15, 2022 - June 15, 2022.
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Introduction
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"In 1982, some twelve years of research into a small local mystery in the south of France culminated in the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Bérenger Saunière, an obscure Languedoc priest of the late nineteenth century, had metaphorically taken us by the hand and directed us to the stones we had to turn in order to discern the pattern underlying his story. He led us to a secret, or semi-secret, society, the Prieuré de Sion, which could be traced back nearly a thousand years, which included in its membership a number of illustrious figures and which remained active in France and possibly elsewhere to the present day. The avowed objective of the Prieuré de Sion was to restore to the throne of modern France the Merovingian bloodline — a bloodline which had vanished from the stage of history more than thirteen hundred years ago. This appeared to make no sense. What could possibly be so special about the Merovingian bloodline? Why should its restoration be of interest to men such as Leonardo da Vinci and Victor Hugo — and, more recently, to men such as André Malraux, Marshal Alphonse Juin and perhaps Charles de Gaulle?
"A partial, but crucial, answer to this question emerged when we discovered that the Merovingians themselves claimed direct lineal descent from the Old Testament House of David — and that that claim was acknowledged to be valid by the dynasty which supplanted them, by other monarchs and by the Roman Church of the time. Gradually, the evidence assembled itself, as if with a momentum of its own. It led us into the sensitive territory of biblical scholarship. It prompted us to suggest a provocative hypothesis — that Jesus had been a legitimate king of Israel, that he had been married and had sired children, that these children had perpetuated his bloodline until, some three and a half centuries later, it merged with the Merovingian dynasty of France.
"Our conclusions, as they crystallised, were initially as startling to us as they subsequently proved to our readers. But for us, the import of what we were uncovering had become apparent only by degrees, seeping into our consciousness piecemeal over a period of years. For our readers, the same process of discovery was compressed into the confines of a single book, and its effect was therefore more sudden, more unexpected and more disturbing — or more exhilarating. It involved no slow, painstaking, week-by-week and month-by-month assembly of facts, correlation of data and shuffling of confused jig-saw pieces into a coherent picture. On the contrary, it occurred with the disorienting abruptness of a detonation. Given the sphere in which this detonation occurred, the results were perhaps inevitable. For many of our readers, the primary — if not, indeed the only — point of discussion in our book was ‘the Jesus material’.
"Jesus projected our work on to front pages around the world and invested it with an element of ‘sensationalism’. So far as the media in particular were concerned, everything else we had written took second place, if it was assigned a place at all. The excitement we had felt when, for instance, we discovered a new dimension to the Crusades, a new fragment of information concerning the creation of the Knights Templar or new evidence about the source of the notorious Protocols of Sion, was not generally shared. All such discoveries were eclipsed by the shadow of Jesus and our hypothesis about him.
"For us, however, our hypothesis about Jesus was by no means the only aspect of our research. Nor, ultimately, was it the most important one. Even while the media, and many readers, were concentrating on our biblical conclusions, we could perceive the direction in which our subsequent investigations would have to move. Our attention would have to be focused upon the Prieuré de Sion today.
"What was the Prieuré’s true raison d’être? If restoration of the Merovingian bloodline was the ultimate end, what were the means to be? Individuals such as Malraux and Juin were neither naïve idealists nor religious fanatics. This applied equally to the members of the Order whom we had met personally. How, then, did they propose to implement their objectives? The answer, quite patently, seemed to lie in areas such as mass psychology, political power and high finance. We were dealing with people active in the ‘real world’, and it was in terms of the ‘real world’ of the 1980s that we had to make sense of their centuries-old history."
"It seemed clear that the Prieuré was working to some kind of ‘grand design’ or ‘master plan’ for the future of France, ultimately for the future of Europe as a whole, and perhaps even beyond. This, certainly, had been the implication attending the various hints, suggestions and fragments of information which had come our way. Nor could we forget the flat, categorical, matter-of-fact way in which the man subsequently to become the Prieuré’s Grand Master told us that the Order actually possessed the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem. It would be returned to Israel, he said, ‘when the time is right’. What might constitute time’s ‘rightness’? Only social and political factors, and perhaps a ‘psychological climate’."
" ... It was impossible, for example, not to notice the insistence with which the Merovingian dynasty was repeatedly described in language usually reserved for Messianic figures. We would have to determine precisely what the idea of the ‘Messiah’ meant in Jesus’s time, how it had altered in the ensuing centuries and how the ancient and modern ideas might conceivably be reconciled."
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June 15, 2022 - June 15, 2022.
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SCHOLARSHIP AND PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING
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" ... Gospels, for example, were written between the years 65 and 100. That means the Church was founded, and was able to carry on, without them. Think of it! More than sixty years after Christ’s birth! It’s as if someone today wanted to write down Napoleon’s words and deeds without being able to consult a single written document, only vague memories and anecdotes.1"
" ... In fact the words are from a novel, Jean Barois by Roger Martin du Gard, published in 1912, and in that novel they elicit the response:
". . . Before long all theologians of any intellectual standing will have reached these conclusions. In fact, they’ll be amazed that nineteenth-century Catholics contrived to believe for so long in the literal truth of those poetic legends.2"
" ... In the early sixteenth century, Pope Leo X is on record as declaring: ‘It has served us well, this myth of Christ.’ ... Thus, between 1744 and 1767, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor at Hamburg, had argued that Jesus was nothing more than a failed Judaic revolutionary whose body was removed from its tomb by his disciples. ... The thrust of German research was eventually to culminate in a position summarised by Rudolf Bultmann of the University of Marburg, one of the most important, most famous and most esteemed of twentieth-century biblical commentators:
"I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary.3"
They aren't - for some reason - mentioning "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined", the work of German author Dr. David Friedrich Strauss on the subject, translated into English by George Eliot. But it was seemingly fitting right into the niche they look at, attempting to search for facts and critical of mythology of church on the subject.
" ... And the majority of Modernists, it should be noted, were working within the framework of the Church — until, that is, they were officially condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907 and an anti-Modernist oath was introduced in 1910."
" ... 1916, the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore published his own fictionalised account of Jesus in The Brook Kerith. Moore caused considerable scandal by depicting Jesus as surviving the Crucifixion, and being nursed back to health by Joseph of Arimathea. ... 1946, Robert Graves published his ambitious fictional portrait, King Jesus, in which Jesus again survives the Cross. And in 1954, Nikos Kazantzakis, the Nobel Prize-winning Greek author, caused an international rumpus with The Last Temptation. In contrast to the Jesus figures in Moore and Graves, Kazantzakis’s protagonist does die on the Cross. Before he does so, however, he has a vision of what his life should and would have been had he not voluntarily submitted himself to his final sacrifice. In this vision — a kind of ‘flash-forward’ in fantasy — Jesus sees himself married to the Magdalene (for whom he has lusted all through the book) and fathering a family upon her."
" ... Two hundred years ago, a novel dealing with scriptural material would have been unthinkable. Even poetry would not address such matters except in the more or less orthodox, more or less devotional form of Paradise Lost. ... "
" ... And in 1979 Elaine Pagels attracted the world’s attention, and an immense readership, with The Gnostic Gospels — a study of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, discovered in Egypt in 1945, which offered a radical new interpretation of Christian teaching and tradition.
"Biblical scholarship has made enormous advances during the last forty years, aided immensely by the discovery of new primary sources, material unavailable to researchers in the past. The most famous of these sources, of course, are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 in the ruins of the ascetic Essene community of Qumran. In addition to such major discoveries, many parts of which have not yet been published, other sources have gradually been coming to light or, after long suppression, are being circulated and studied.
" ... Palestine at the advent of the Christian era is no longer a nebulous place belonging more to myth than to history. On the contrary, we now know a great deal about Jesus’s milieu, and far more than most practising Christians realise about Palestine in the first century — its sociology, its economy, its politics, its cultural and religious character, its historical actuality. Much of Jesus’s world has emerged from the haze of conjecture, speculation and mythic hyperbole, and is clearer and better documented than, say, the world of King Arthur. And although Jesus himself remains to a significant degree elusive, it is as possible to deduce plausible information about him as it is to deduce such information about Arthur, or Robin Hood."
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"The Failure of Biblical Scholarship
"Despite all this, the hopeful prophecy which we quoted at the beginning of this book has not been fulfilled. Theologians of intellectual standing have not — at least, not publicly — come to share those conclusions, nor to be amazed at the credulity of their nineteenth-century predecessors. In certain quarters, dogma is, if anything, more entrenched than ever. Despite the current problem of over-population, the Vatican can still impose its strictures on birth control and abortion — not on social or moral grounds, but on theological. A fire, caused by a bolt of lightning at York Minster, can still be regarded as evidence of divine wrath at the appointment of a contentious bishop. This bishop’s ambiguous statements on aspects of Jesus’s biography can still provoke outrage among people who refuse to believe anything but that their saviour was conceived by the Holy Spirit of a virgin. And in American communities, major works of literature can be banned from schools and libraries — or even, occasionally, burnt — for challenging traditional scriptural accounts, while a new current of fundamentalism can actually influence American politics through the support of millions eager to be raptured away to a heaven more or less interchangeable with Disneyland.
"However unorthodox its presentation of Jesus, Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is a passionately religious, passionately devotional, passionately Christian work. Nevertheless, the novel was banned in many countries, including the author’s native Greece, and Kazantzakis himself was excommunicated. Among non-fiction works, Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, despite immense sales, provoked much bitter hostility.
"In 1983, David Rolfe, working for London Weekend Television and Channel 4, began work on a three-part television documentary entitled Jesus: the Evidence. The series took no position of its own, endorsed no particular point of view. It simply endeavoured to survey the field of New Testament studies and to assess the value of various theories proposed. Yet even before the project got under way, British pressure groups were lobbying to have the enterprise suppressed. When it was finished, in 1984, it had to be screened, in a private showing, to a number of Members of Parliament before it could be cleared for transmission. And although subsequent reviews found it thoroughly sane and quite uncontroversial, clerics of the Church of England publicly announced that they would be on standby alert to deal with any members of their congregation upset by the programmes.
"Jesus: the Evidence had sought to bring some of the advances in New Testament scholarship to the attention of the lay public. Apart from The Passover Plot, virtually none of this scholarship has found its way into popular consciousness. A few works, such as Jesus the Magician and The Gnostic Gospels, have been widely reviewed, discussed and distributed, but their readership has been largely confined to people with a particular interest in their subject matter. Most of the work done in recent years has impinged only on specialists. Much of it is also written specifically for specialists, being virtually impenetrable to the uninitiated reader.
"So far as the general public is concerned, as well as the churches which minister to that public, the works cited above might never have been produced. George Moore’s depiction of Jesus as having survived the Crucifixion followed on from a contention maintained not only by some of the oldest heresies, but also by the Koran, and thus widely accepted throughout Islam and the Islamic world. And yet the same claim, when promulgated by Robert Graves, then by Dr Schonfield in The Passover Plot, attracted as much scandal and incredulity as if it had never been broached before. In the field of New Testament studies, it is as if each new discovery, each new assertion, is swallowed up as quickly as it can be made. Each must constantly be presented anew, only to disappear again. Many people reacted to certain assertions in our own book as if The Passover Plot, or Graves’s King Jesus, or Moore’s The Brook Kerith — or, for that matter, the Koran itself — had never been written.
"This is an extraordinary situation, perhaps unique in the entire spectrum of modern historical research. In every other sphere of historical enquiry, new material is acknowledged. It may be disputed. Attempts may be made to suppress it. Alternatively, it may be digested and assimilated. But at least people know what has already been discovered, what has already been said twenty or fifty or seventy years ago. There is some species of genuine advance, whereby old discoveries and contentions provide a basis for new discoveries and contentions, and a corpus of knowledge comes into being. Revolutionary theories may be accepted or discarded, but least cognisance is at taken of them and of what preceded them. A context exists. Cumulative contributions by successive generations of researchers create an increased and increasing understanding. Thus do we acquire our knowledge of history in general, as well as of specific epochs and events. Thus do we acquire a coherent image of such figures as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Jeanne d’Arc. These images are constantly growing, constantly mutating, constantly being augmented by new material as it becomes available.
"So far as the general public is concerned, New Testament history offers a striking contrast. It remains static, unaffected by new developments, new discoveries, new findings. Each controversial assertion is treated as if it were being made for the first time. Thus the Bishop of Durham’s theological pronouncements produce as much of a shock-horror reaction as if the Bishop’s own acknowledged precursor, Archbishop Temple, had never lived, never presided over the Anglican Church between the wars and never made essentially similar pronouncements.
"Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again.
"Why should this be? Why should biblical scholarship, which is pertinent to so many lives, be thus immune to evolution and development? Why should the great mass of believing Christians in fact know less about the figure they worship than about historical figures of far less relevance? In the past, when such knowledge was inaccessible or dangerous to promulgate, there might have been some justification. The knowledge today is both accessible and safely promulgated. Yet the practising Christian remains as ignorant as his predecessors of centuries ago; and he subscribes essentially to the same simplistic accounts he heard when he himself was a child.
"A fundamentalist might well assert that the situation bears witness to the resilience and tenacity of Christian faith. We do not find such an explanation satisfactory. The Christian faith may indeed be resilient and tenacious. History has proved it to be so. But we are not talking about faith — which must necessarily be an intensely private, intensely subjective affair. We are talking about documented historical facts."
Authors aren't looking at centuries of Inquisition and the terror deeply rooted in subconscious of West, so much so, even scientists adhere to church diktats in face of every evidence to the contrary, in humanities far more so than in science, but also to some extent in latter. Big Bang Theory, for example, is far more comfortable for those brought up on creation, than any alternative possibilities.
"In the wake of the television series mentioned above, a panel discussion on the subject was transmitted. A number of distinguished commentators, most of them ecclesiastics, were assembled to evaluate the programmes and their implications. During the course of this panel discussion, several of the contributors agreed on one telling point. In the last year, the same point has been echoed not only by the Bishop of Durham, but also by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was also a focus of debate at a subsequent synod of the Church of England.
"According to several participants, the prevailing ignorance of New Testament scholarship is in large part the fault of the churches themselves and of the ecclesiastical establishment. Anyone in the ministry, anyone training for the ministry, is, as a matter of course, confronted with the latest developments in biblical research. Any seminarian today will learn at least something of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, of the history and evolution of New Testament studies, of the more controversial statements made by both theologians and historians. Yet this knowledge has not been passed on to the laity. In consequence, a gulf has opened between ecclesiastics and their congregations. ... "
Was this not always so? Church burnt at stake everyone, anyone presumed to know or think, on any subjectfrom history to medicineto astronomy, without explicitly being permitted by church to do so, for centuries. It's hardly surprising that those who now do think often claim to have been brought up in faith but left it.
" ... Among themselves, ecclesiastics have become eminently sophisticated and erudite. They react to the latest discoveries with blasé aplomb, remaining unruffled by theological controversy. They may find contentions such as those we have made questionable, but not surprising or scandalous. Yet nothing of this sophistication has been transmitted to their flock. The flock receives virtually no historical background from its shepherd — who is believed to be the definitive authority on such matters. When, in consequence, such background is presented by writers like ourselves, rather than by the official shepherd, it can often produce a reaction amounting to trauma, or a personal crisis of faith. Either we become regarded as gratuitously destructive iconoclasts, or the shepherd himself becomes suspect for having withheld information. The overall effect is precisely the same as if there were an organised conspiracy of silence among churchmen."
" ... The modern, more or less well-read cleric is acutely aware, for example, of the distinction between what is in the New Testament itself and what is an accretion of later tradition. He is aware of precisely how much — or, to be more accurate, how little — the scriptures actually say. He is aware of how much latitude, indeed, of how much necessity, there is for interpretation. For such a cleric, the contradictions between fact and faith, between history and theology, were personally confronted and resolved long ago. Such a cleric has long recognised that his personal belief is not the same thing as historical evidence, and he has effected some kind of personal reconciliation between the two — a reconciliation which, to a greater or lesser degree, manages to accommodate both. Such a cleric has generally ‘heard it all before’. He is unlikely to be startled by the kind of evidence or hypothesis presented by us and by other writers. It will already have been familiar to him, and he will have formed his own conclusions long ago.
"In contrast to the learned shepherd, the flock has not had occasion either to familiarise itself with the evidence in question or to confront the inconsistencies between scriptural accounts and the actual historical backdrop. For the devout Christian, there has been no need to reconcile fact and faith, history and theology, simply because he has never had any reason to believe that a distinction between them might exist. He may not even have thought consciously of Palestine two thousand years ago as a very real place, precisely situated in space and time, subject to a confused welter of social, psychological, political, economic and religious factors — the same factors that operate in any ‘real’ locality, past or present. On the contrary, the story in the Gospels is often utterly divorced from all historical context — a narrative of stark, timeless, mythic simplicity enacted in a sort of limbo, a never-never-land of long ago and far away. Jesus, for example, appears now in Galilee, now in Judaea; now in Jerusalem, or on the banks of Jordan. For the modern Christian, however, there is often no awareness of the geographical and political relation between these places, how far they might be from each other, how long a journey from one to the other might take. The titles of various official functionaries are often meaningless. Romans and Jews mill confusingly in the background, like extras on a film set, and if one has any concrete image of them at all, it generally derives from one or another Hollywood spectacular — Pilate complete with Brooklynese accent.
"For the lay congregation, scriptural accounts are regarded as literal history, a self-contained story no less true for being divorced from an historical context. Never having been taught otherwise by his spiritual mentors, many a devout believer has had no need to question the problems posed by such a context. When these problems are suddenly posed by a book such as ours, they will quite understandably assume the form of revelation, or of sacrilege. And we ourselves will instinctively be perceived as ‘anti-Christian’, as writers engaged in a fully fledged crusade which pits us, as militant adversaries, against the ecclesiastical establishment — as if we were personally bent on toppling the edifice of Christendom (and so naïve as to think such a feat possible)."
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"Our Conclusion in Perspective
" ... In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, our motivation was really quite simple. We had a story to tell, and the story seemed eminently worth the telling. We had been involved in an historical adventure as gripping as any detective tale or spy thriller. At the same time, the adventure had also proved immensely informative, uncovering vast tracts of our civilisation’s past — and not just biblical — which we and our readers might not otherwise have had occasion to explore. It is a truism that a good story requires telling; it seems to have a life and momentum of its own, which demand expression. We wished to share our story, in much the same way that one might tug a friend’s arm and call his or her attention to a striking landscape, or a spectacular sunset.
"Our conclusions about Jesus were an integral part of our adventure. Indeed, the adventure itself led us to them. We simply invited our readers to witness the process whereby it had done so. ‘These are the conclusions we reached,’ we said in effect. ‘They are our conclusions, based on our own research, our own predispositions, our own framework, our own lack of preconceptions. We are not trying to foist them upon you. If they make sense to you, well and good. If not, feel free to discard them and draw your own. In the meantime, we hope you found your sojourn with us interesting, entertaining and informative.’ And yet it was inevitable, given our subject matter, that we should find ourselves caught in the inherent conflict between fact and faith. ... "
"In 1520, Hernán Cortés, advancing on the ancient Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán, was regarded as a god by the Aztecs. Never having seen firearms or horses before, the Aztecs regarded these things not only as supernatural, but as confirmation of Cortés’s divine status — of his identity as an avatar of their supreme god, Quetzalcoatl. Today, of course, it is understandable how such a misconception can have occured. Even to a Western European at the time, it would have been comprehensible. It is quite clear that there was nothing in any way divine about Cortés. And yet it is equally clear that in the minds of those who believed in his divinity, he was indeed a god.
"Let us suppose that a modern Mexican Indian, perhaps with vestiges of an Aztec heritage, asserts that he believes in Cortés’s divinity. It might seem to us somewhat peculiar, but we could not presume to challenge his belief — especially if his background, his education, his upbringing, his culture had all conduced to foster it. Moreover, his ‘faith’ might entail something much more profound than a mere conviction of Cortés’s divinity. He might assert that he experienced Cortés within him, that he communed personally with Cortés, that Cortés appeared to him in visions, that through Cortés he approached oneness with God or with the sacred. How could we possibly challenge such assertions? What a man experiences in the privacy of his psyche must of necessity remain inviolate and inviolable. And there are a great many people, quite sane, quite balanced, quite worthy of respect, who, in the privacy of their psyches, believe in things far stranger than the divinity of Hernán Cortés."
Stranger than church teachings, hardly! As for Spain across South Atlantic, or even in Mexico, one does indeed see the need to disable people who were looted, if they believe it was by a god.
"But the times in which Cortés lived, like the times in which Jesus lived, are documented. We know quite a bit about the historical context, the world in which both figures existed. This knowledge is not a matter of personal belief, but of a simple historical fact. And if a man permits his personal belief to distort, alter or transform historical fact, he cannot expect others, whether or not they share his belief, to condone the process. The same principle obtains if a man permits his personal belief to derange dramatically the laws of probability and what we know of human nature. We could not, as we said, challenge a man who believed in Cortés’s divinity, or who, in some manner or form ‘experienced’ Cortés within him. We could, however, challenge a man who asserted that, as a matter of historical fact, Cortés (like Quetzalcoatl) was born of an eagle and a serpent, or that Cortés was ordained to save the world, or that Cortés never died and now bides his time in some underground crypt awaiting a propitious moment to return and proclaim his sovereignty over Mexico. We could challenge a man who asserted that Cortés, even without his armour, was immune to spears and arrows, that he rode a horse through sea or sky, or that he used weapons which in reality were not invented until two centuries later."
And yet an innocent woman in India is because she said things acclaimed as facts by adherents of a faith, threatened with beheading and worse, by those of that faith!"
"Jesus poses a problem essentially analogous. We have no desire to challenge anyone’s personal faith, anyone’s personal belief. We are not dealing with the Christ or Christos of theology, the figure who enjoys a very real and very puissant existence in the psyches and consciences of the faithful. We are dealing with a different figure, someone who actually walked the sands of Palestine two thousand years ago, just as Cortés trod the stones of the Mexican desert in 1519. We are dealing, in short, with the Jesus of history — and history, however vague and uncertain it may sometimes be, will still often brazenly defy our wishes, our myths, our mental images, our preconceptions."
"Indeed, it can be argued that the wisdom of believing or dis-believing is itself questionable. ‘Belief’ may well be a dangerous word, implying, as it does, an act of faith which may often be unwarranted. People are prepared to kill all too readily in the name of belief. At the same time, to disbelieve is as much an act of faith, as much an unsubstantiated assumption, as belief. Disbelief — as exemplified by the militant atheist or rationalist, for instance — is in itself another form of belief. To say that one does not believe in telepathy, or in ghosts, or in God is as much an act of faith as believing in them."
" ... In the absence of truly definitive knowledge about Jesus, it seems to us more likely, more probable, more in accord with our experience of humanity, that a man should have been married and tried to regain his rightful throne than that he should have been born of a virgin, walked on water and risen from his grave. And yet this conclusion, too, must, of necessity, remain tentative. It is a conclusion acknowledged as a more likely possibility, not embraced as a creed."
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" ... The Gospels, indeed the whole of the Bible, are sketchy documents, which no responsible scholar would for a moment consider absolutely reliable as historical testimony. Given this situation, one must perforce hypothesise, if one is not to remain mute. Granted, one must not hypothesise wildly; one must confine one’s speculation to the framework of known historical data and probabilities. Within this framework, however, it is perfectly valid, and indeed necessary, to speculate — to interpret the meagre, opaque and often contradictory evidence that does exist. Most biblical scholarship involves some degree of speculation. So, for that matter, do theology and the teachings of the churches. But while historical research speculates on the basis of historical fact, theology and clerical teachings speculate almost entirely on the scriptures themselves — often without any relation to historical fact.
"People have argued and slaughtered each other, have waged wars throughout the course of the last two thousand years over the way in which particular passages should be understood. In the coalescence of Christian tradition, this is one principle that has remained constant. In the past, when Church Fathers or other individuals were confronted with one of the various biblical ambiguities and contradictions, they speculated about its meaning. They attempted to interpret it. Once accepted, the conclusion of their speculation — that is, their interpretation — would become enshrined as dogma. Over the centuries, it then came to be regarded as established fact. Such conclusions are not fact at all. On the contrary, they are speculation and interpretation congealed into a tradition, and it is this tradition which is constantly mistaken for fact.
" ... According to all four Gospels, Pilate affixes to Jesus’s cross an inscription bearing the title ‘King of the Jews’. Apart from this, the Gospels tell us virtually nothing. ... We are given no real indication of whether the title was warranted or not, official or not, recognised or not. Nor are we given any indication of how, precisely, Pilate intended the appellation to be understood. What was his motivation? What was his action intended to achieve?
"At some point in the past, it was assumed, on the basis of speculative interpretation, that Pilate must have intended the title mockingly. To have assumed otherwise would have been to raise a number of awkward questions. Today, most Christians blindly accept, as if it were a matter of established fact, that Pilate used the title in derision. But this is not established fact at all. If one reads the Gospels themselves, with no preconceptions whatever, there is nothing to suggest that the title was not used in all seriousness — was not perfectly legitimate and acknowledged as such by at least some of Jesus’s contemporaries, including Pilate. So far as the Gospels themselves are concerned, Jesus may indeed have been King of the Jews — and/or been so regarded. It is only tradition that has persuaded people otherwise. To suggest that Jesus may actually have been King of the Jews, is not, therefore, to stand at variance with the evidence. It is merely to stand at variance with a long established tradition — a long established system of beliefs based ultimately on someone’s speculative interpretation. If anything stands at variance with the evidence, it is this system of beliefs. For in Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth, the three ‘wise men’ ask, ‘where is the infant King of the Jews?’ If Pilate intended the title to be derisive, what is one to make of the question of the magi? Did they, too, intend it as derisive? Surely not. Yet if they were referring to a legitimate title, why should not Pilate have been doing so as well?
"The Gospels are documents of a stark, mythic simplicity. They depict a world stripped to certain bare essentials, a world of a timeless, archetypal, almost fairy-tale character. But Palestine, at the advent of the Christian era, was not a fairy-tale kingdom. On the contrary, it was an eminently real place, peopled by real individuals, such as one might find anywhere else in the world at any other time in history. Herod was not a king of obscure legend. He was a very real potentate, whose reign (37 to 4 B.C.) extends beyond its biblical context to overlap those of well known secular figures — of Julias Caesar, for instance, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Augustus and other personages familiar to us from schoolbooks and even from Shakespeare. ... "
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" ... We were not concocting a cranky, hare-brained thesis calculated to produce an ‘instant best-seller’. On the contrary, virtually all our suggestions were very much in the mainstream of contemporary biblical scholarship, and it was from precisely this scholarship that much of our research derived. We consulted the acknowledged experts in the field, many of whom were not known to the general public; and for the most part we did little more than synthesise their conclusions in a readily digestible fashion. These conclusions were already familiar enough to the ecclesiastical establishment, many of whom readily accepted them. What they had failed to do was pass them on to the laity.
"In private discussions, we met churchmen of many denominations. Few expressed any hostility to the conclusions in our book. Certain of them took issue with us on one or another specific point, but most found our general thesis plausible, even in some cases probable, and in no way diminishing the stature of Jesus or the Christian faith. Among lay Christians, however, the same conclusions seemed to entail blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege and almost every other religious sin on the register. It was this discrepancy of reaction that we found particularly striking and instructive. Churchmen, whom one would expect to be most militant about the matter, responded with anything from sceptical but unsurprised indifference to outright endorsement. Their flock responded with anything from horrified disillusion to vociferous outrage. Nothing could have made so apparent the failure of the churches to keep their congregations abreast of developments in the field of biblical scholarship."
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The Messianic Legacy
by Henry Lincoln (Author), Michael Baigent (Author), & 1 More
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October 19, 2008.
June 11, 2022 - June , 2022.
Format: Kindle Edition
Kindle Edition
Publisher: Cornerstone Digital; New Ed edition
(31 May 2013)
Language: English
ASIN:- B00CA88GC4
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Kindle Edition
Format: Kindle Edition
Publisher: Cornerstone Digital; New Ed edition
(31 May 2013)
Language: English
ASIN:- B00CA88GC4
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1538353835
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About the Authors
"MICHAEL BAIGENT was born in New Zealand in 1948 and obtained a degree in psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch. Since 1976 he has lived in England.
"RICHARD LEIGH studied at Tufts University, Boston, the University of Chicago and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
"HENRY LINCOLN was born in London in 1930. An ardent Francophile, he has long been deeply interested in French language, history and culture. He has been a writer for over forty years, having produced more than 100 television scripts. He has lectured extensively, and is best known for the presentation of his own programmes on BBC television."
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