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The Messianic Legacy
The startling, frighteningly convincing sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that reveals the very nature of the Messianic Legacy. 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 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?The Messianic Legacy offers enthralling new investigations into the shadowy society of the 'Prieure de Sion' - 'The Guardians of the Holy Grail' - as the authors discover the murky world of politics, finance, freemasonry, and religion that exists beneath the most solid and conservative seeming of European the Church. The ominous global conspiracy of disinformations they uncovered ensures that The Messianic Legacy us an up-to-the-minute thriller and a work of biblical detection that is even more significant than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
450 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1986
23 people are currently reading
725 people want to read
About the author
Henry Lincoln
36 books32 followersHenry Lincoln (born Henry Soskin, 1930) was an English author, television presenter, scriptwriter and former supporting actor. He co-wrote three Doctor Who multi-part serials in the 1960s, and —starting in the 1970s— authored a series of books and inspired documentaries for the British television channel BBC Two, on the alleged "mysteries" surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château. This launched a series of lectures, and in 1982, Lincoln co-wrote the pseudohistorical book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which became the inspiration for Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
March 7, 2024
A very entertaining and quite interesting book indeed!
June 15, 2022
I read this before its predecessor, the very famous (and suppressed with controversy and obfuscation) Holy Blood, Holy grail; and then had to go get that one and read it. It explained a good deal I had heard since the eighties, but more.
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.
***
About the Book
"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?"
***
"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."
***
" ... 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."
***
"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 ....
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.
***
About the Book
"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?"
***
"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."
***
" ... 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."
***
"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 ....
December 13, 2018
It is a long time since I read these books; back in the 80's?90's?
They made some interesting points, and while they were 'sensational' when they first came out I suspect that the erosion of time, fictional works like the da Vincy code and the era of short attention spans means they are unlikely to make a resurgence.
A lot of it is jesus based, a secret society that claims to be descendant from him, curious snippets of history and archaeology put together to create an intriguing hypothesis or two.
Having hung on to this book for all these years without re-reading it recently, I think it is time to let it go... Anyone want a free book?
They made some interesting points, and while they were 'sensational' when they first came out I suspect that the erosion of time, fictional works like the da Vincy code and the era of short attention spans means they are unlikely to make a resurgence.
A lot of it is jesus based, a secret society that claims to be descendant from him, curious snippets of history and archaeology put together to create an intriguing hypothesis or two.
Having hung on to this book for all these years without re-reading it recently, I think it is time to let it go... Anyone want a free book?
July 4, 2025
N-am deschis Moștenirea mesianică cu naivitatea de a crede că voi descoperi, între două coperți lucioase de librărie, secretele bine păzite ale istoriei sau ale puterii contemporane. Mai curând, am fost curios să văd cum abordează cineva un subiect atât de alunecos și, poate, să-mi îmbogățesc contextul istoric legat de figura mesianică.
Ce am primit? O reluare a ideilor din Sfântul sânge și Sfântul Graal, împănată cu teoria conspirației servită à la carte. Multă insinuare, puțină structură și mai puțină documentare solidă. Partea a doua încearcă să deschidă o fereastră spre implicațiile moderne ale acestor idei, dar se oprește brusc, de parcă autorii s-au răzgândit sau au pierdut firul.
Materialul de bază e subțire, dar întins generos, cu încercări stângace de a construi o atmosferă de profunzime. În final, cartea lasă impresia unui eseu extins prea mult, cu misterul porționat atent, ca nu cumva cititorul să plece cu ceva concret.
Un exercițiu interesant de stil și intenție, bun pentru cei care citesc cu o sprânceană ridicată și cu gust pentru ironia istoriei alternative. Ideal de savurat pe plajă cu un neuron sceptic activ.
Ce am primit? O reluare a ideilor din Sfântul sânge și Sfântul Graal, împănată cu teoria conspirației servită à la carte. Multă insinuare, puțină structură și mai puțină documentare solidă. Partea a doua încearcă să deschidă o fereastră spre implicațiile moderne ale acestor idei, dar se oprește brusc, de parcă autorii s-au răzgândit sau au pierdut firul.
Materialul de bază e subțire, dar întins generos, cu încercări stângace de a construi o atmosferă de profunzime. În final, cartea lasă impresia unui eseu extins prea mult, cu misterul porționat atent, ca nu cumva cititorul să plece cu ceva concret.
Un exercițiu interesant de stil și intenție, bun pentru cei care citesc cu o sprânceană ridicată și cu gust pentru ironia istoriei alternative. Ideal de savurat pe plajă cu un neuron sceptic activ.
March 2, 2022
exhaustive research with little resolution
This is book is thick with information and theories. The first half deals with various unorthodox splinter groups that held various beliefs about Jesus. The second half deals with secret societies with their roots in the past that purportedly safeguard a royal Merovingian bloodline that is the bloodline of Jesus Christ - though I must say there is very little about that. It is slow going. Recommended only for those who are truly into this theory.
This is book is thick with information and theories. The first half deals with various unorthodox splinter groups that held various beliefs about Jesus. The second half deals with secret societies with their roots in the past that purportedly safeguard a royal Merovingian bloodline that is the bloodline of Jesus Christ - though I must say there is very little about that. It is slow going. Recommended only for those who are truly into this theory.
April 1, 2019
The main theme of The messianic legacy appears to be the way in which a small semi-secret society, the Prieuré de Sion, is seeking to achieve its objective of restoring a Merovingian monarch to the throne of France. The Merovingians apparently claimed descent from the Old Testament House of David, and in an earlier work, The holy blood and the holy grail, the authors put forward the hypothesis that this decent was through Jesus or his immediate family.
The Merovingians (descendants of Merovech) were kings in what is now France from the 5th to the 8th century, and they conquered the Visigoths who had sacked Rome in AD 410, bringing away treasure reputed to include the treasures of the temple at Jerusalem, which had itself been sacked by the Romans in AD 70.
Baigent et al. have written the book in three parts. The first, “The Messiah” deals with the idea of the Messiah in Judaism and early Christianity. The second, “The quest for meaning”, deals with faith and symbolism in modern Western society. The third is a bewilderingly detailed account of contacts and connections between the Prieure de Sion and various national and international figures and organisations in the twentieth century.
The connections between the three parts of the book are not at all clear, and nor it is clear how material in the first two parts contributes to the hypothesis. The authors have included a lot of material without bothering to make it clear why they have included it.
The first part, on the idea of the Messiah, seems to be intended to show that a descendant of the Jewish royal line could have gone to the Celtic area, on the Western seaboard of Europe. The authors throw in facts, fallacies, speculations and conjectures, most of which seem irrelevant to whatever point it is they are trying to make. Their knowledge of history seems shaky at several points, and they don’t even attempt to paper over the cracks.
Briefly, their thesis seems to be that Jesus went to Jerusalem intending to become king of the Jews. The attempt was foiled by his arrest and execution at the hands of the Romans and Jewish collaborators. The succession passed to his brother James, and then this Jewish royalist/nationalist movement split, with the larger part, led by Paul, severing connections with Jewish nationalism. The nationalist section continued, however, as the Ebionites, who later made an alliance with the Nestorians, who provided a kind of theological halfway house. The Nestorians were influential in Egypt, and from there spread to Ireland, where in some unspecified fashion they were linked to the Prieuré de Sion. There are too many gaps, and much of it is based on false assumptions. It simply does not make sense.
Quite a large proportion of the illustrations in the book make the point of similarities between Egyptian and Irish Christianity. The authors say that Nestorius was exiled to Egypt, and when Nestorius was condemned as a heretic in 451 the Egyptian Church refused to accept the ruling it split with “Roman Orthodoxy” and formed the Coptic Church.
This is simply a gross distortion of history, and shows that the authors did not do their homework. The majority of Egyptian Christians did not accept the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but for precisely the opposite reason that Baigent & Co hint at. They thought the Council was too Nestorian, they and preferred the teaching of their own former bishop Cyril, who was utterly opposed to Nestorius. The reason the Nestorian leaders were exiled to Egypt was quite simple: The Egyptian church was so opposed to Nestorianism that if they tried to preach it there, there would be no danger that anyone would believe them. So whatever was exported from Egypt to Ireland or anywhere else, it was not Nestorian/Ebionite teaching, but the exact opposite.
Egyptian missionaries did go to France, and Christian monasticism was first developed in Egypt. Monasticism was exported to most other parts of the Christian world, and thus provided the chief instrument for the evangelisation of Europe and part of Asia. Between 500 and 1500 most Christian missionaries were monks. Baigent et al., however, make some astoundingly naive statements – for example that the monastic movement in Egypt “represented a form of opposition to the rigidly hierarchical structures of Rome”, and that the monks were “tolerant” as opposed to the “intolerant” urban church. In fact the reverse was true. The Egyptian monks regarded the urban church as lax and effete, and they kept out of the cities for that reason.
The second part of the book deals with faith and symbols in Western European society. In some ways it is the best part. The authors are for the most part giving their own opinions, and are therefore not trying to base conclusions on “facts” that (in the first part) often turn out to be conjecture or wrong guesses. They look at the loss of faith in Western European society, and the consequent search for substitute faiths, such as Communism and Nazism. When they get on to some aspects of modern Christianity, they go off the rails again. A notable example is their attempt to make the British Israel theory a necessary part of fundamentalism, and even of South African apartheid. Now while it is true that some British Israelites might be fundamentalists, and that some supporters of apartheid were British Israelites, the British Israel theory was certainly not a part of fundamentalism, nor was it necessarily part of the thinking of those who formulated the apartheid policy. This is a failure in logic as well as in facts.
How it fits in with the third part is not clear, unless it is intended to show that monarchy is a powerful symbol that can be linked with faith. But if that is the intention, it certainly does not succeed.
The third part is a very detailed account of meetings and connections of various members of the Prieure de Sion and possible members with insurers, spies, politicians and others. It seems to bear no relation to the other two parts, and the point it is trying to make is obscure. The authors end up by saying that they are sympathetic towards some of the objectives of the Prieuré de Sion, but sceptical or dubious about others. The trouble is that they have not made it very clear what those aims are. They do seem to think, however, that the Prieuré de Sion might be capable of producing a Messiah of the kind that the authors think Jesus actually was.
But this, like much of the rest of the book, is based on a fallacy.
The Prieuré de Sion, usually rendered in English translation as Priory of Sion or Priory of Zion, has, since 1956, been an alleged cabal featured in many conspiracy theories and works of pseudohistory. It has been characterized as anything from the most influential secret society in Western history to a modern Rosicrucian-esque ludibrium, but, ultimately, has been shown to be a hoax created by Pierre Plantard. Most of the evidence presented in support of claims pertaining to its historical existence, let alone significance, have not been considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities (from Wikipedia).
The Merovingians (descendants of Merovech) were kings in what is now France from the 5th to the 8th century, and they conquered the Visigoths who had sacked Rome in AD 410, bringing away treasure reputed to include the treasures of the temple at Jerusalem, which had itself been sacked by the Romans in AD 70.
Baigent et al. have written the book in three parts. The first, “The Messiah” deals with the idea of the Messiah in Judaism and early Christianity. The second, “The quest for meaning”, deals with faith and symbolism in modern Western society. The third is a bewilderingly detailed account of contacts and connections between the Prieure de Sion and various national and international figures and organisations in the twentieth century.
The connections between the three parts of the book are not at all clear, and nor it is clear how material in the first two parts contributes to the hypothesis. The authors have included a lot of material without bothering to make it clear why they have included it.
The first part, on the idea of the Messiah, seems to be intended to show that a descendant of the Jewish royal line could have gone to the Celtic area, on the Western seaboard of Europe. The authors throw in facts, fallacies, speculations and conjectures, most of which seem irrelevant to whatever point it is they are trying to make. Their knowledge of history seems shaky at several points, and they don’t even attempt to paper over the cracks.
Briefly, their thesis seems to be that Jesus went to Jerusalem intending to become king of the Jews. The attempt was foiled by his arrest and execution at the hands of the Romans and Jewish collaborators. The succession passed to his brother James, and then this Jewish royalist/nationalist movement split, with the larger part, led by Paul, severing connections with Jewish nationalism. The nationalist section continued, however, as the Ebionites, who later made an alliance with the Nestorians, who provided a kind of theological halfway house. The Nestorians were influential in Egypt, and from there spread to Ireland, where in some unspecified fashion they were linked to the Prieuré de Sion. There are too many gaps, and much of it is based on false assumptions. It simply does not make sense.
Quite a large proportion of the illustrations in the book make the point of similarities between Egyptian and Irish Christianity. The authors say that Nestorius was exiled to Egypt, and when Nestorius was condemned as a heretic in 451 the Egyptian Church refused to accept the ruling it split with “Roman Orthodoxy” and formed the Coptic Church.
This is simply a gross distortion of history, and shows that the authors did not do their homework. The majority of Egyptian Christians did not accept the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but for precisely the opposite reason that Baigent & Co hint at. They thought the Council was too Nestorian, they and preferred the teaching of their own former bishop Cyril, who was utterly opposed to Nestorius. The reason the Nestorian leaders were exiled to Egypt was quite simple: The Egyptian church was so opposed to Nestorianism that if they tried to preach it there, there would be no danger that anyone would believe them. So whatever was exported from Egypt to Ireland or anywhere else, it was not Nestorian/Ebionite teaching, but the exact opposite.
Egyptian missionaries did go to France, and Christian monasticism was first developed in Egypt. Monasticism was exported to most other parts of the Christian world, and thus provided the chief instrument for the evangelisation of Europe and part of Asia. Between 500 and 1500 most Christian missionaries were monks. Baigent et al., however, make some astoundingly naive statements – for example that the monastic movement in Egypt “represented a form of opposition to the rigidly hierarchical structures of Rome”, and that the monks were “tolerant” as opposed to the “intolerant” urban church. In fact the reverse was true. The Egyptian monks regarded the urban church as lax and effete, and they kept out of the cities for that reason.
The second part of the book deals with faith and symbols in Western European society. In some ways it is the best part. The authors are for the most part giving their own opinions, and are therefore not trying to base conclusions on “facts” that (in the first part) often turn out to be conjecture or wrong guesses. They look at the loss of faith in Western European society, and the consequent search for substitute faiths, such as Communism and Nazism. When they get on to some aspects of modern Christianity, they go off the rails again. A notable example is their attempt to make the British Israel theory a necessary part of fundamentalism, and even of South African apartheid. Now while it is true that some British Israelites might be fundamentalists, and that some supporters of apartheid were British Israelites, the British Israel theory was certainly not a part of fundamentalism, nor was it necessarily part of the thinking of those who formulated the apartheid policy. This is a failure in logic as well as in facts.
How it fits in with the third part is not clear, unless it is intended to show that monarchy is a powerful symbol that can be linked with faith. But if that is the intention, it certainly does not succeed.
The third part is a very detailed account of meetings and connections of various members of the Prieure de Sion and possible members with insurers, spies, politicians and others. It seems to bear no relation to the other two parts, and the point it is trying to make is obscure. The authors end up by saying that they are sympathetic towards some of the objectives of the Prieuré de Sion, but sceptical or dubious about others. The trouble is that they have not made it very clear what those aims are. They do seem to think, however, that the Prieuré de Sion might be capable of producing a Messiah of the kind that the authors think Jesus actually was.
But this, like much of the rest of the book, is based on a fallacy.
The Prieuré de Sion, usually rendered in English translation as Priory of Sion or Priory of Zion, has, since 1956, been an alleged cabal featured in many conspiracy theories and works of pseudohistory. It has been characterized as anything from the most influential secret society in Western history to a modern Rosicrucian-esque ludibrium, but, ultimately, has been shown to be a hoax created by Pierre Plantard. Most of the evidence presented in support of claims pertaining to its historical existence, let alone significance, have not been considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities (from Wikipedia).
June 8, 2013
If Michael Baigent didn't stir the pot enough with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, nearly tipped it over with this one. With constant references to controversial pieces that challenged religion, Baigent slowly begins to build an argument that highlights flaws in many of the sacred texts. I found it interesting that early 1900's philosophers that wrote texts concerning the life, and death, of Jesus Christ faced intense hatred from those of religious beliefs, similar to those who challenged religion during the Renaissance.
November 25, 2014
The sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", the part about the historical Jesus is by far the most accurate account of the life of the man - not the semi-god. Even as an atheist, I found this extremely interesting and helpful.
September 19, 2023
THE SEQUEL TO THEIR CONTROVERSIAL BOOK, ‘HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL’
Authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln wrote in the Introduction to this 1986 book, “In 1982, some twelve years of research … culminated in the publication of ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail.’ … an obscure priest of the late nineteenth century, had metaphorically taken us by the hand … 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?... A partial, but crucial, answer to this question emerged when we discovered that the Merovingians themselves claimed direct lilneal 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… It prompted us to suggest a provocative hypothesis---that Jesus had been a legitimate king of Israel, that these children had perpetuated his bloodline until. Some three and half centuries later, it merged with the Merovingian dynasty of France.” (Pg. xi-xii)
They continue, “For many of our readers, the primary… 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 was 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… was not generally shared. All such discoveries was 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… was it the most important one.” (Pg. xii)
They go on, “What was the Prieuré’s true raison d’etre? If restoration of the Merovingian bloodline was the ultimate end, what were the means to be?... How…. did they propose to implement their objectives? The answer… seemed to lie in areas such as mass psychology, political power and high finance… what WAS the Prieuré doing today? What traces could be found of its contemporary activity, of its involvement in current affairs?... how might they seek to turn to account the claim of a lineal descent from the Merovingians, and/or Jesus, and/or the Old Testament House of David? And what, in the modern world, might be the social and political repercussions of such a claim? 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… What might constitute time’s ‘rightness’? Only social and political factors, and perhaps a ‘psychological climate.’” (Pg. xiii)
They add, “Previously, we had sought evidence attesting to a sacred bloodline. This time, we would have to concentrate primarily on the concept of Jesus as Messiah… 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. Secondly, we would have to try to establish how the concept of Messiahship could be applied in practice today… Finally… we would be bound to pursue our own personal contacts with the Prieuré de Sion itself… And we learned that so apparently rarefied, ethereal and mystic a concept as ‘Messiahship’ could indeed figure in the practical world of twentieth-century society and politics.” (Pg. xiii-xv
In the first chapter, they explain, “We certainly are not deliberately trying to shake people’s faith. In ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail.’ Our motivation was … We had a story to tell… We had been involved in an historical adventure as gripping as any detective tale… At the same time, the adventure had also proved immensely informative… which we and our readers might not otherwise have had occasion to explore…. Our conclusions about Jesus were an integral part of our adventure…” (Pg. 11-12) Later, they add, “We ourselves… had no desire to assume the role of iconoclasts; we were simply caught in the conflict between fact and faith… Moreover, we were not alone… virtually all our suggestions were very much in the mainstream of contemporary biblical scholarship.” (Pg. 18)
They state, “Jesus must be seen as the Gospels themselves acknowledge him to be---a claimant to the throne of David, a rightful king, whose sceptre, like David’s, implied both spiritual and temporary sovereignty. And if he involved himself in military activity, he would simply have been discharging the martial duty expected of him as a royal liberator. Armed resistance to Rome was implicit in the title and the status he had assumed.” (Pg. 35) Later, they add, “even the New Testament … bears witness, if one looks at it closely, to Jesus as a military and political Messiah… as a would-be precursor of Constantine.” (Pg. 47)
They observe, “What remains indeterminate is whether Jesus was truly convinced that he himself had literally to die, or whether it was sufficient that he APPEAR to die…. The truth… is unlikely ever to be known. But it is certainly possible… that he survived the Cross---if, indeed, it was he who was on it in the first place, rather than the substitute claimed by the Koran and by many early heresies… one cannot help wondering whether Judas was privy to the plan.” (Pg. 89)
They argue, “There is no specific mention of a descent from James, but James is described repeatedly as a fervent adherent of the law, and one of the dictates of the law was to marry, be fruitful and multiply… Eusebius reports that … the descendants of Jesus’s family and possibly of Jesus himself---survived to become leaders of various Christian churches, according… to strict dynastic succession.” (Pg. 100)
They suggest, “It was from this turbulent welter of emotions that the Messianic movement of Jesus’s time derived its emphasis… Belief in the imminent end of the world helped to provoke the revolt of A.D. 66. And with the… destruction of the Temple… and the near extermination of Judaism in the Holy Land, the world did indeed end… so far as the Jews at the time were concerned. On the other hand, the survival of a small and loyal elect had been forecast… by seeing themselves as an elect whose survival had been promised buy God, they proceeded… to transform themselves into what they imagined themselves to be.” (Pg. 129-130)
They assert, “Insofar as we…. Have come to know the Prieuré, we have encountered an organization which … activates, manipulates and exploits archetypes… It seeks to orchestrate and regulate outsiders’ perceptions of itself as an archetypal cabal… It can convey the impression of being what it wishes people to think it is… we are thus dealing with an organization of extraordinary psychological subtlety and sophistication.” (Pg. 186) They continue, “Society will continue to seek short cuts. Society will continue to avail itself of one or another ‘crutch.’ This being the case, it is a matter of choosing one’s ‘crutches’ wisely. What remains to be established is the kind of crutch … that the Prieuré de Sion might have to offer.” (Pg. 223)
They state "During 1984… we kept a close watch on events in France. Nothing happened that seemed in any way relevant to the Prieuré de Sion... But so far as the Prieuré de Sion’s own internal affairs were concerned, 1984 was to prove a year of major upheaval.” (Pg. 241)
They report, “information from the Prieuré de Sion itself dried up completely…We could not credit the allegations linking the Prieuré with P2 and the Mafia. There was no evidence whatsoever to support such claims… Nevertheless, it had become increasingly clear that the Prieuré de Sion … DID conduct activities, in a … sphere where Christian Democratic parties of Europe… royalist cliques… freemasonic sects, the CIA, the Knights of Malta and the Vatican swirled together… then disengaged again. The primary question was where… the Prieuré fitted into the web of loosely associated organizations and interests… Or was it indeed one of the forces that pulled the strings?” (Pg. 311)
They summarize, “According to all the evidence we have been able to cull… the Prieuré de Sion seeks a United States of Europe partly as a bulwark against the Soviet imperium, but primarily as a separate power bloc… capable of holding the balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States.” (Pg. 344) Later, they add, “We had reached the inescapable conclusion that some other agency was involved---that we had blundered inadvertently into the middle of an invisible feud between the Prieuré de Sion and someone else. But might it have been the Knights of Malta?... It is impossible not to wonder whether this factor might be the Order of Malta, acting on someone else’s behalf or on its own.” (Pg. 364)
They conclude, “If monarchy itself continues to exercise such appeal, how might that appeal be augmented if a specific monarch … could also claim, in strict conformity with the original meaning of the term, to be a Messiah?... our age appears determine to embrace one or another form of Messianic myth in order to obtain a sense of meaning… we would prefer to see a mortal Messiah presiding over a united Europe than a supernatural messiah presiding over Armageddon… if we are correct in our assessments, it would seem that the Prieuré de Sion can provide a Messiah of the kind that Jesus himself, as an historical personage, actually was.” (Pg. 374-375)
Much less interesting than ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail,’ this book may still appeal to many who enjoyed the first book.
Authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln wrote in the Introduction to this 1986 book, “In 1982, some twelve years of research … culminated in the publication of ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail.’ … an obscure priest of the late nineteenth century, had metaphorically taken us by the hand … 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?... A partial, but crucial, answer to this question emerged when we discovered that the Merovingians themselves claimed direct lilneal 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… It prompted us to suggest a provocative hypothesis---that Jesus had been a legitimate king of Israel, that these children had perpetuated his bloodline until. Some three and half centuries later, it merged with the Merovingian dynasty of France.” (Pg. xi-xii)
They continue, “For many of our readers, the primary… 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 was 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… was not generally shared. All such discoveries was 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… was it the most important one.” (Pg. xii)
They go on, “What was the Prieuré’s true raison d’etre? If restoration of the Merovingian bloodline was the ultimate end, what were the means to be?... How…. did they propose to implement their objectives? The answer… seemed to lie in areas such as mass psychology, political power and high finance… what WAS the Prieuré doing today? What traces could be found of its contemporary activity, of its involvement in current affairs?... how might they seek to turn to account the claim of a lineal descent from the Merovingians, and/or Jesus, and/or the Old Testament House of David? And what, in the modern world, might be the social and political repercussions of such a claim? 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… What might constitute time’s ‘rightness’? Only social and political factors, and perhaps a ‘psychological climate.’” (Pg. xiii)
They add, “Previously, we had sought evidence attesting to a sacred bloodline. This time, we would have to concentrate primarily on the concept of Jesus as Messiah… 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. Secondly, we would have to try to establish how the concept of Messiahship could be applied in practice today… Finally… we would be bound to pursue our own personal contacts with the Prieuré de Sion itself… And we learned that so apparently rarefied, ethereal and mystic a concept as ‘Messiahship’ could indeed figure in the practical world of twentieth-century society and politics.” (Pg. xiii-xv
In the first chapter, they explain, “We certainly are not deliberately trying to shake people’s faith. In ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail.’ Our motivation was … We had a story to tell… We had been involved in an historical adventure as gripping as any detective tale… At the same time, the adventure had also proved immensely informative… which we and our readers might not otherwise have had occasion to explore…. Our conclusions about Jesus were an integral part of our adventure…” (Pg. 11-12) Later, they add, “We ourselves… had no desire to assume the role of iconoclasts; we were simply caught in the conflict between fact and faith… Moreover, we were not alone… virtually all our suggestions were very much in the mainstream of contemporary biblical scholarship.” (Pg. 18)
They state, “Jesus must be seen as the Gospels themselves acknowledge him to be---a claimant to the throne of David, a rightful king, whose sceptre, like David’s, implied both spiritual and temporary sovereignty. And if he involved himself in military activity, he would simply have been discharging the martial duty expected of him as a royal liberator. Armed resistance to Rome was implicit in the title and the status he had assumed.” (Pg. 35) Later, they add, “even the New Testament … bears witness, if one looks at it closely, to Jesus as a military and political Messiah… as a would-be precursor of Constantine.” (Pg. 47)
They observe, “What remains indeterminate is whether Jesus was truly convinced that he himself had literally to die, or whether it was sufficient that he APPEAR to die…. The truth… is unlikely ever to be known. But it is certainly possible… that he survived the Cross---if, indeed, it was he who was on it in the first place, rather than the substitute claimed by the Koran and by many early heresies… one cannot help wondering whether Judas was privy to the plan.” (Pg. 89)
They argue, “There is no specific mention of a descent from James, but James is described repeatedly as a fervent adherent of the law, and one of the dictates of the law was to marry, be fruitful and multiply… Eusebius reports that … the descendants of Jesus’s family and possibly of Jesus himself---survived to become leaders of various Christian churches, according… to strict dynastic succession.” (Pg. 100)
They suggest, “It was from this turbulent welter of emotions that the Messianic movement of Jesus’s time derived its emphasis… Belief in the imminent end of the world helped to provoke the revolt of A.D. 66. And with the… destruction of the Temple… and the near extermination of Judaism in the Holy Land, the world did indeed end… so far as the Jews at the time were concerned. On the other hand, the survival of a small and loyal elect had been forecast… by seeing themselves as an elect whose survival had been promised buy God, they proceeded… to transform themselves into what they imagined themselves to be.” (Pg. 129-130)
They assert, “Insofar as we…. Have come to know the Prieuré, we have encountered an organization which … activates, manipulates and exploits archetypes… It seeks to orchestrate and regulate outsiders’ perceptions of itself as an archetypal cabal… It can convey the impression of being what it wishes people to think it is… we are thus dealing with an organization of extraordinary psychological subtlety and sophistication.” (Pg. 186) They continue, “Society will continue to seek short cuts. Society will continue to avail itself of one or another ‘crutch.’ This being the case, it is a matter of choosing one’s ‘crutches’ wisely. What remains to be established is the kind of crutch … that the Prieuré de Sion might have to offer.” (Pg. 223)
They state "During 1984… we kept a close watch on events in France. Nothing happened that seemed in any way relevant to the Prieuré de Sion... But so far as the Prieuré de Sion’s own internal affairs were concerned, 1984 was to prove a year of major upheaval.” (Pg. 241)
They report, “information from the Prieuré de Sion itself dried up completely…We could not credit the allegations linking the Prieuré with P2 and the Mafia. There was no evidence whatsoever to support such claims… Nevertheless, it had become increasingly clear that the Prieuré de Sion … DID conduct activities, in a … sphere where Christian Democratic parties of Europe… royalist cliques… freemasonic sects, the CIA, the Knights of Malta and the Vatican swirled together… then disengaged again. The primary question was where… the Prieuré fitted into the web of loosely associated organizations and interests… Or was it indeed one of the forces that pulled the strings?” (Pg. 311)
They summarize, “According to all the evidence we have been able to cull… the Prieuré de Sion seeks a United States of Europe partly as a bulwark against the Soviet imperium, but primarily as a separate power bloc… capable of holding the balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States.” (Pg. 344) Later, they add, “We had reached the inescapable conclusion that some other agency was involved---that we had blundered inadvertently into the middle of an invisible feud between the Prieuré de Sion and someone else. But might it have been the Knights of Malta?... It is impossible not to wonder whether this factor might be the Order of Malta, acting on someone else’s behalf or on its own.” (Pg. 364)
They conclude, “If monarchy itself continues to exercise such appeal, how might that appeal be augmented if a specific monarch … could also claim, in strict conformity with the original meaning of the term, to be a Messiah?... our age appears determine to embrace one or another form of Messianic myth in order to obtain a sense of meaning… we would prefer to see a mortal Messiah presiding over a united Europe than a supernatural messiah presiding over Armageddon… if we are correct in our assessments, it would seem that the Prieuré de Sion can provide a Messiah of the kind that Jesus himself, as an historical personage, actually was.” (Pg. 374-375)
Much less interesting than ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail,’ this book may still appeal to many who enjoyed the first book.
October 17, 2022
Largely amusing for the way the authors manage to paint themselves into a corner, forcing themselves to rigorously defend the claims of Pierre Plantard because their entire thesis has ended up dependent on them, despite encountering substantial reasons to believe that he was - as he proved to be - an utter hoaxer. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
July 13, 2018
A little too far fetched on the ideas for my liking.
January 7, 2019
Good
This was interesting but a torturous read at the same time. I enjoyed the facts but not the authors need to give their moral views over and over again.
This was interesting but a torturous read at the same time. I enjoyed the facts but not the authors need to give their moral views over and over again.
January 13, 2019
On the beginning are very interesting parallels of the Messiahs and the old religions. At the end we get again the story of the conspiration theories about the first book Holy Blood, Holy Grail .
January 13, 2019
يضم معلومات شيقة لمن يريد أن يقرأ دون النظر للمسيحية... فهو يكشف معلومات سياسية جديدة ومهمة عن الحكم الروماني وعن اليهود الأوائل..
February 19, 2019
Assuming the information it contains is true - fascinating and thought-provoking. A tortuous read in places - not set out in an easy-to-read style. Worth sticking with.
November 19, 2019
Worth reading to challenge views and understand that there are gaps in the information that informs our perspective.
November 6, 2012
This book goes into the meaning of Messiahship, where
its predecessor, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
examined the bloodline of Jesus and asked whether it flowed in the veins of the Merovingian Kings of France.
The Messianic Lewgacy aims to present the Jesus of history, the man who lived and breathed in the seething cockpit of Palestine around the year 33 A.D. The gentle Jesus they told us about in school, he seemed to be in Disneyland. That tale had grown stale, and suddenly the first century in Palestine becomes interesting again..
Like the Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, this book breathes life into the debate and makes Christianity seem a vital topic again, vivid and exciting.
You also get an examination of the quasi-religious
iconography of Communism and Fascism. In a way the scope here seems too wide. OK, there was a distrust of
irrationality after the Nazis--but where are the
Templars? Where is the Prieuré de Sion?
Did you know that King David was a Messiah? And his son, King Solomon? Did Jesus have a twin brother called
Judas Thomas?
From the middle onwards the book gets bogged down in stuff which is fairly interesting--about how politicians are 'sold' to the public. But where are the Templars?
And the Cathars?
The last stretch has us stuck in a lot of boring legal stuff about Prieuré de Sion documents in Lloyds Bank. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers gets some coverage too. We want some more stuff about the Templars and Berenger Saunière.
All in all, it doesn't keep up the energy as its predecessor did, but it's worth reading for the way out facts it presents, particularly in the first half.
its predecessor, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
examined the bloodline of Jesus and asked whether it flowed in the veins of the Merovingian Kings of France.
The Messianic Lewgacy aims to present the Jesus of history, the man who lived and breathed in the seething cockpit of Palestine around the year 33 A.D. The gentle Jesus they told us about in school, he seemed to be in Disneyland. That tale had grown stale, and suddenly the first century in Palestine becomes interesting again..
Like the Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, this book breathes life into the debate and makes Christianity seem a vital topic again, vivid and exciting.
You also get an examination of the quasi-religious
iconography of Communism and Fascism. In a way the scope here seems too wide. OK, there was a distrust of
irrationality after the Nazis--but where are the
Templars? Where is the Prieuré de Sion?
Did you know that King David was a Messiah? And his son, King Solomon? Did Jesus have a twin brother called
Judas Thomas?
From the middle onwards the book gets bogged down in stuff which is fairly interesting--about how politicians are 'sold' to the public. But where are the Templars?
And the Cathars?
The last stretch has us stuck in a lot of boring legal stuff about Prieuré de Sion documents in Lloyds Bank. The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers gets some coverage too. We want some more stuff about the Templars and Berenger Saunière.
All in all, it doesn't keep up the energy as its predecessor did, but it's worth reading for the way out facts it presents, particularly in the first half.
March 31, 2023
Convinced me more than ever that the top religious authorities are NOT to be trusted.
The Vatican has its own secret intelligence organization!?!? They are working in cahoots with the Priory of Sion, the Knights of Malta and the CIA!!!!!! Among other organizations!! . . . for crying out loud! Pope Alexander VI - "...it has served us well, this myth of Christ". "MYTH OF CHRIST" - from the pope's mouth! Cardinal Spellman of NYC was also a CIA operative!!!
Not to be trusted! Any of them!!
That said, Part One, the first third of the book, is an excellent collection of research that clearly puts Jesus and all of the elements of current religions into a context that is much more rational and trustworthy.
The Vatican has its own secret intelligence organization!?!? They are working in cahoots with the Priory of Sion, the Knights of Malta and the CIA!!!!!! Among other organizations!! . . . for crying out loud! Pope Alexander VI - "...it has served us well, this myth of Christ". "MYTH OF CHRIST" - from the pope's mouth! Cardinal Spellman of NYC was also a CIA operative!!!
Not to be trusted! Any of them!!
That said, Part One, the first third of the book, is an excellent collection of research that clearly puts Jesus and all of the elements of current religions into a context that is much more rational and trustworthy.
December 31, 2011
Highly disappointing! I have read a few books from the same authors, and thoroughly enjoyed them. The same can not be said for the Messianic Legacy. Although it contains some very interesting (but largely ludicrous) theories, the going is far harder than in their other books, A couple of times I found myself getting bored and skipping on the next heading. I know the authors had a big falling out at some point, I can only assume it was somewhere between starting to write this book, and finishing it. It is probably worth a read, but just don't expect it to be of the same standard as the other books from the same authors.
September 9, 2008
More lovely nonsense from the folks that brought us the Da Vinci Code but didn't get paid for it. (Note: use more supermarket-find-a-word-level puzzles next time. Make the rubes feel smarter.) This one isn't as seamless as HBHG; the leaps in logic grow ever larger. However, should the heir of Jesus rise to claim his rightful position (Gen. Secretary of UN? Prime Minister of France? Commissioner of Major League Baseball?) he's got my vote.
October 1, 2007
Michael Baigent going a little too far this time trying to force a connection of the grail's issue with politics.
Yes we all know that ancient Messianic movement was political movement but i think its too much if Baigent over extending the world of this secret Merovingian things with so many medern day political and counter intelligent groups.
Yes we all know that ancient Messianic movement was political movement but i think its too much if Baigent over extending the world of this secret Merovingian things with so many medern day political and counter intelligent groups.
February 11, 2008
The continuation to Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This one delves more into philosophy and interpretations of the Bible, which I liked a lot. Exploring how the world has been shaped by the influence of religion and power. Such topics, as Hitler's rise to power, being fueled by religion and his self proclamation as the next Messiah.
June 16, 2013
I bought this book because I thought it was about me.
Seriously folks - I gave this five stars, but just as I said in my review of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" let me go on record that those 5 stars are based on the entertainment value of this book.
I usually stay away from conspiracy books & crazy people, but this is well written and well researched.
Seriously folks - I gave this five stars, but just as I said in my review of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" let me go on record that those 5 stars are based on the entertainment value of this book.
I usually stay away from conspiracy books & crazy people, but this is well written and well researched.
February 22, 2014
I have an active interest in the subject of the books by these guys and found this one extremely illuminating although it was tough going at times. It certainly raises more questions than it answers in most cases and showed how much is still kept from modern day citizens for various reasons be they right or wrong
September 11, 2014
Holy Blood Holy Grail was an amazing book, but also amazingly dry until the information was eventually popularised and trivialised by Dan Brown. Messianic Legacy was just OK, but still had very interesting bits about Jesus' siblings and twin(s), how and why Christianity was created from Judaism, the birth of the EU, and humanity's search for meaning.
June 22, 2015
The follow up book to The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail separating fact from fiction that first spawned the stream of books including the da Vinci Code and its huge success in its revelations of the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's child, a story now contained and continued in the tale of Francis Bacon, the writer of Shakepeare, and Tudor genius, as in The Royal Secret.
June 21, 2009
Another ground breaking research from the authors of Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Also a possible insight into the ancient secret society and the keepers of the bloodline of Jesus, Prieure De Sion (Priory of Sion)
April 14, 2025
title in German:
Das Vermächtnis des Messias
Das Vermächtnis des Messias
May 1, 2008
Interesting...
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