The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (4 page)

Admittedly, had the Templars discovered proof that Jesus and the Magdalene were husband and wife, messianic king and queen, and had they threatened to reveal it, this
might
account for their considerable clout. But what are the chances that this is the explanation? It is a shot in the dark, seeking to explain one unknown by a bigger one. We are familiar with this logic from tabloid theories that space aliens built the pyramids. Or that we may explain the big bang by positing that God lit the fuse.

THE KNIGHTS WHO SAY . . .

Who were the Templar Knights? They were a monastic order, the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, founded some time between 1110 and 1120. Their sworn duty was to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to and from Jerusalem. For a long time, there were only nine of them, which may not seem enough to do the job, but they weren’t the only ones assigned the task. The Templars worked with the older Order of Knights Hospitallers. Over the years, as ascetic and admired religious groups tend to do, they acquired considerable fortunes and clout, eventually founding the practice of modern banking, as they used their vast funds to bail out the crowned heads of Europe. Finally, in 1308, Philip the Fair, king of France, subjected the Templars to a ruthless inquisition, stripping them of their moneys, the real object of his covetous lust. They were accused of the most abominable heresies and blasphemies, and on this basis, many of their latter-day admirers (including Dan Brown) have insisted that they
were
heretics, and more power
to
them! But the evidence of their signed confessions is worthless, precisely as in the case of the so-called witches persecuted in Europe. Tortured wretches eagerly signed any crazy-sounding confession shoved in front of them. As the witches owned up to having had sex with the devil himself, describing the great size and unnatural coldness of his Satanic majesty’s phallus, so did the beleaguered Templar Knights confess to blasphemies that included the worship of a goat-headed demon statue called Baphomet and kissing its anus, as well as ritual homosexuality, trampling the cross, and eliciting oracles from a still-living severed head! Actually, “Baphomet” is, contra Baigent and company, almost surely an Old French spelling of “Mahomet” or “Muhammad.”
⁴
This, in turn, means the accusations against the Templars reflect not actual Gnosticism or even diabolism but garbled French beliefs about Islam. In just the same way, the medieval
Song of Roland
(verses 2580-91) imagines Muslims as worshiping idols and devils, including Muhammad, Termagant, and Apollo.
⁵

The Templars became lionized in folklore and in esotericist belief as adepts who guarded heterodox secret doctrines that they had discovered, perhaps in the form of ancient manuscripts, while resident in Jerusalem. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in his spiritual allegory of the Holy Grail,
Parzifal
, so depicts the Templars. Followed by
The Da Vinci Code
, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln link the Templars with the French Cathars (or Albigensians) wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade, another Catholic-backed persecution, in 1209. These Cathars were late-medieval sectarians who had rediscovered or reinvented something like ancient Manichean Gnosticism.
⁶
But any link between the Cathars and the Templars is, again, part of the latter-day syncretism of modern occultists trying to cobble together an appearance of antiquity for their own inventions. There is no basis in fact or evidence. Only dots to be connected.

Brown and his sources want to take as much of this material as possible as factual in nature. But their “historiography” too often amounts to the reasoning of protagonists in horror movies: “But
every
legend has a basis in fact!” Not this one. It is rather simply part and parcel with the spurious lore of the Masons. And yet it is absolutely integral to the “Teabing hypothesis,” if we may call it that, using the name of Brown’s scholarly character to stand for Brown’s recycling of the fanciful pseudoscholarship of his mentors. And this means their Templar castle is built on sinking sand.

The Teabing hypothesis posits an underground stream of esoteric knowledge passed on, ultimately, from the ancient Gnostics and the monastic Jewish sect of the Essenes. And it has always been irresistible to speculate whether Jesus and/or John the Baptist may have been connected with the Essenes and/or Dead Sea Scrolls community. Another advocate of the Templar Jesus scenario, Laurence Gardner, cleverly appropriates the work of Dr. Barbara Thiering in order to gain new plausibility for this connection.
⁷
Dr. Thiering has advanced a controversial theory about Jesus that does happen to parallel two cardinal features of the Teabing hypothesis. The first of these is that Jesus, a messiah-designate of the Qumran Essenes, did marry Mary Magdalene and beget an heir, also born to royal pretensions. The second is that Jesus survived crucifixion thanks to Essene allies. Neither notion is absurd, despite the unwillingness of mainstream scholars to entertain them seriously. Dr. Thiering is well aware of the need to buttress such claims with evidence, and she has provided it in the form of a complex body of work that subjects the gospels to the same sort of “pesher” (decoding) exegesis used by the Qumran scribes on their own scriptures. Her unique mastery of the textual, hermeneutical, and calendrical lore involved has left her a voice crying in the wilderness, as none of her critics so far seems to be in a position to evaluate her theories competently, either positively or negatively. Suffice it to say that Dr. Thiering’s reconstruction of the cult-political connections of Jesus would come in very handy for the Teabing hypothesis. But Dr. Thiering vociferously repudiates the connection, pointing out in some detail how Gardner selectively misrepresents her work, then gratuitously extends it.
⁸
If Gardner even understands why Thiering says what she does, he does not attempt to explain where he derives the rest of his “insights” on the connections between Jesus, Magdalene, and the Essenes.

BRIDE OF KONG

As I say, there is nothing historically implausible about Jesus having been married (and later I will try to show how the idea should not be theologically embarrassing either), but that by itself does not make it probable. Short of going the whole way with Professor Thiering’s decoding method (too large a topic to pursue here), one must ask what early (i.e., gospel or gospel-era) evidence there might be on either side of the question. A number of scholars have argued in an a priori fashion that, lacking specific statements on the issue in the gospels, the best the historian can do is to look at the
kind
of figure Jesus would have been in the religious and social categories of his time to see whether that would imply anything re his marital status. The next step is to note that ancient Judaism considered it incumbent upon every capable man to get busy being fruitful and multiplying, propagating the House of Israel. If he didn’t, he was suspected of being a homosexual or a gigolo. Rabbis, in particular, we are told, were nearly always married. Thus, since marriage was the norm, it is a man’s being married, not his being single, that would be taken for granted in a biographical account of him. If he had been single, this must have been an anomaly, even if for a good reason, that would require explanation. If Jesus, or any other man, had been single, we would surely hear of it. And his being some kind of rabbi clinches it—at least in the minds of some. But this is a silly argument.

First, one can never deduce a historical fact about an individual from general historical or social factors, since all such are generalizations, never universals. Otherwise we could argue that, since most Jews in the first century were not crucified, Jesus probably wasn’t either! By the same homogenizing logic, one could argue that Jesus had nothing distinctive to say, since most contemporary Jewish teachers did not say things like “Turn the other cheek” or “Sell your possessions and give to the poor.” We cannot simply assume that any individual member of a group shares all the characteristics of that group. That is known as the Division Fallacy: “Since Matilda is a member of a very smart family, she must get straight A’s.” Well, maybe she does; maybe she doesn’t. We’ll have to look at her report card to tell, and perhaps she will be reluctant to show us if she is the black sheep of the family. So, even if most Jewish men, and rabbis in particular, were married, this tells us absolutely nothing about Jesus’s marital status.

Second, Jesus is being compared to the wrong template in this argument. Our biographical data about the Jewish rabbis comes mostly from the late first through the third centuries. It is gratuitous, in this matter as in so many others, to ascribe to first-century Jewish thinking what we only know to have been true generations later. Were Jews really so enamored of universal matrimony in Jesus’s day? Or could it be that the decimating Jewish wars against Rome (67-73, 116, and 132-136 CE) might have provided new reasons not existing in Jesus’s day for second-century Jews to encourage men to father children?

On the other hand, we do know of a first-century Jewish group where celibacy was highly prized, namely, the Essenes. Josephus tells us that many Essenes foreswore marriage, not because they thought it morally wrong, but just because domestic duties were incompatible with the sort of hundred-per-center religious devotion they required. We find the same idea in 1 Corinthians 7:32-34a: “I just want you to be free of worries. The unmarried man is preoccupied with the Lord’s business, how he may win his Lord’s approval. But the married man is perforce preoccupied with mundane matters, with pleasing his wife, and his focus is divided.” Oh, the irony that many of the same authors who want to link Jesus with the Essenes appeal to the precedent of “family man” rabbis to argue that Jesus couldn’t have been celibate! Now, we don’t know that he
was
an Essene. But he sure does appear, like John the Baptist, to have moved more in a sectarian orbit than that of the later rabbis.

Third, Jesus is actually portrayed in Matthew 19:12 as advocating celibacy! “Some men are born eunuchs. Others have been castrated. Still others have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Whoever is up to the challenge, let him accept it!” Of course, it is a devilishly tricky business determining which among the gospel sayings may actually go back to Jesus. I have devoted a whole book (
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
) to the task, and the collaborative work of the Jesus Seminar on the question is on display in the marvelous compendium
The Five Gospels
.
⁹
Jesus may or may not have advocated celibacy and for who knows what reason. But the good possibility that he said it, or even that someone felt it not incongruous to ascribe such a sentiment to him, implies that the ancients need not have taken it for granted that Jesus was married. Nor can we, no matter what hay it might make for our pet theories.

TEMPLARS REVEALED—OR EXPOSED

One of the books Dan Brown shows on Professor Teabing’s bookshelf is the 1996 work by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,
The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
. Obviously, Brown is tipping his hat to one of his major sources by mentioning it in this way.

Since the publication of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
, the builders, so to speak, have rejected their prized cornerstone, the Priory Documents or Secret Dossier. These papers have been utterly debunked by the confession of the forger himself, a member of the far-right sect of Pierre Plantard. But authors Picknett and Prince remain largely undaunted. In the manner of all polemicists boxing with one arm tied behind them, they plead that bad evidence might as well be treated as good anyway. They argue cleverly, if not convincingly, that the Priory of Sion must be up to
something
to go to all the trouble of faking those documents! The Priory claims to have some sort of shocking information that could blow the lid off Christianity. So maybe they do! So there
is
a secret to hunt down after all! And so
what
if the Priory of Sion that exists today is not the same as the one that was connected to the Templars many centuries ago? There might still be some sort of underground connection . . . or something.

The next step in the argument is to try and forge a link between the Templars and the Cathars. The authors invoke interests apparently held in common by the two movements, including, paramountly, an interest in John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. They start spreading out the pushpins across the map and come to the conclusion that there was a significant overlap in France between Templar-related sites, centers of devotion to Mary Magdalene in local village churches, and the presence of the Black Madonna statues, which some scholars hypothesize may have originally represented Isis or some such pagan goddess. They will soon be drawing the net closed, with the conclusion that the Templars worshiped Mary Magdalene as Isis. And as if that gratuitous leap were not daring enough, Picknett and Prince focus briefly on the Alchemists, interpreting them as Tantric-style sex mystics who preserved the rites of
hieros gamos
, the archaic intercourse ritual performed by the pagan faithful. The pagan pious (including Old Testament Baal worshipers) would ritually play the roles of the god and goddess, their sexual intercourse aping and magically stimulating Baal’s fertilizing the womb of Anath (Mother Earth) with good crops. This precarious argument is the basis for the ceremonial sex orgies central to the plot of
The Da Vinci Code
. Remember how Sophie had fled from her grandpa when she chanced upon him having sex amid a torch-lit ceremony in a secret cave? She thought they were just having fun, but it was all on the up-and-up! It was a kind of Gnostic Mass, a la Aleister Crowley. As if this weren’t plenty nutty enough, right? Would poor Sophie have calmed down had her priapic gramps sat her down and explained it? My guess is, she’d have run all the faster! I know I would have!