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Old theories on the Holy Grail
The Da Vinci Code and the Grail
The Grail and the Bloodline of Christ
The Truth about the Holy Grail
Find the Grail with spiritual purity
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Outline
The book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an unofficial follow-
In the book, the authors hypothesise that Jesus, a true figure was married to Mary Magdelene, and they had a number of children. Those children, it is claimed in the book, or their descendants emigrated to southern France. They then married into noble families that would become the Merovingian Dynasty. This dynasty makes a special claim to the throne of France today and is championed by an alleged secret society called the Priory of Sion.
The Priory of Sion was eventually revealed to be a hoax organisation created by the French men Pierre Plantard and Gérard de Sède. In 1953 Plantard was arrested and convicted for the fraud.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was an international best seller upon its release, and generated great interest in a number of themes which it addressed. However, professional historians and scholars from related fields universally dismissed the work. They claimed that the ancient mysteries and conspiracies which were presented as facts were in fact pseudo history. The book was similarly slammed by some Catholic Churches which banned the book in some Catholic countries, including the Philippines.
The literary critic Anthony Burgess reviewed the book , he said: "It is typical of
my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel."
It was a prophetic statement, for 21 years later the book was fictionalised in the
massively successful novel by Dan Brown -
The book claims to reveal the Grail due to a linguistic twist in the ancient French
words for Holy Grail. The book claims that the old French for Holy Grail was san
graal. This was allegedly a corruption of the term for Holy Blood sang real -
Criticism
There has been much investigation and criticism sparked by the claims of the book over the years, including numerous documentaries shown on 60 Minutes, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, Time, and the BBC. These studies concluded that the book’s claims are neither credible nor verifiable.
Pierre Plantard, creator of the Priory of Sion commented in a radio interview, 18 February 1982: “I admit that 'The Sacred Enigma' (French title for 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail') is a good book, but one must say that there is a part that owes more to fiction than to fact, especially in the part that deals with the lineage of Jesus. How can you prove a lineage of four centuries from Jesus to the Merovingians? I have never put myself forward as a descendant of Jesus Christ.”
The Priory of Sion documents make no reference to the bloodline of Christ, and the connection is there only as a hypothesis put forward by Leigh, Baigent and Lincoln.
A documentary on The Da Vinci Code, Conspiracies On Trial, stated: “The authors of
the 1980s bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail re-
Pierre Plantard claimed that the Merovingians were descendants of the Tribe of Benjamin, but the bloodline of Christ idea found in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail made an alternative hypothesis that the Merovingians were descended from the Davidic line of the Tribe of Judah.
When The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail was first published, the historian Marina Warner went on record as saying: “Of course there's not much harm in thinking that Jesus was married (nor are these authors the first to suggest it), or that his descendants were King Pippin and Charles Martel. But there is harm in strings of lurid falsehoods and distorted reasoning. The method bends the mind the wrong way, an insidious and real corruption”
Other historians similarly slammed the book. The British historian Richard Barber,
said: “The Templar-
A Channel 4 documentary for the UK, narrated by Tony Robinson looked into the arguments of Brown, Leigh, Baigent and Lincoln. There were lengthy interviews with the chief protagonists. The son of Garard de Sede, one of the originators of the Priory of Sion, stated categorically that his father and Pierre Plantard had made up the organisation, and went so far as to describe the story as “piffle”. The documentary drew the conclusion that the claims about the blood line of Christ were built on a foundation of guesses.
The Priory of Sion continued to be debunked by scholars and journalists as one of the most successful hoaxes of the 20th century. The plethora of books, websites and films which were inspired by the hoax have fuelled the problem of conspiracy theories, and pseudo history.
The Observer newspaper’s literary editor, Robert McCrum was quoted as saying: “There
is something called historical evidence -
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