The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (7 page)

4
Ibid., p. 138.

5
Robert Harrison, trans.,
The Song of Roland
(New York: New American Library, 1970), pp. 129-30.

6
Steven Runciman,
The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy
(New York: Viking Press, 1961), pp. 116-70.

7
Laurence Gardner,
Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed
(Rockport, MA: Element, 1996); Barbara Thiering,
Jesus the Man: A New Interpretation from the Dead Sea Scrolls
(London: Corgi, 1993).

8
Barbara Thiering, “The Date and Unity of the Gospel of Philip,”
Journal of Higher Criticism
2, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 102-11.

9
Robert M. Price,
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, eds.,
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus
(New York: Macmillan, 1993).

10
Rene Girard,
The Scapegoat
, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 24-44.

11
Ioan P. Couliano,
The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

12
William Marrion Branham,
An Exposition of the Seven Church Ages
(Jefferson, IN: William Marrion Branham, n.d.), pp. 98-99;
Divine Principle
(New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1973), pp. 72-73.

13
H. P. Lovecraft to E. Hoffmann Price, 24 March 1933, MS in the John Hay Library, Brown University. Thanks to David C. Schultz for tracking down the reference.

14
Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas,
The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus
(Rockport, MA: Element, 1997).

15
Jacques Maccoby,
The Albigensian Crusade: An Historical Essay
, trans. Barbara Wall (New York: Fordham University Press, 1967), p. 127.

16
Robert Graves,
The Nazarene Gospel Restored
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954); Edgar Johnson Goodspeed,
Famous Biblical Hoaxes: Originally Entitled, Modern Apocrypha
, Twin Brooks Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1956).

17
Karen Ralls,
The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest
(Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House/Quest Books, 2003), p. 145.

18
Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger,
The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery
(London: Little, Brown, 1996).

19
Robert A. diCurcio,
Vermeer’s Riddle Revealed: The Sphinx, the Jester, and the Grail Geometry: Robert A. diCurcio’s Analysis of Vermeer’s Pictorial Compositions
(Nantucket, MA: Aeternium, 2002).

20
Ferdinand Christian Baur,
Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings
, 2 vols. in 1, trans. A. Menzies (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003).

21
Ernst +Käsemann, “Paul and Early Catholicism,” in Käsemann,
New Testament Questions of Today
, trans. W. J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), pp. 236-51.

Chapter 2

THE HOLY GRAIL

Whom Does It Serve?

A
bsolutely central to
The Da Vinci Code
is the legend of the Holy Grail. Brown uses it as a metaphor for the remains of Mary Magdalene and the documents buried with her, but he also uses it in a more general, overarching way to stand for the quest theme of the novel as a whole. As everyone knows, the term
grail
or
Holy Grail
denotes whatever it is that someone desires most and seeks most fervently. The Holy Grail of physicists is the Unified Field Theory. The Holy Grail of a book collector might be a rare first edition of his favorite author’s work. And so on. We get this figure of speech from the numerous sagas and romances of the grail connected to the King Arthur legend cycle. In them, various knights, notably Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, and Perceval, seek to find the grail against all odds, enduring every trial and temptation. And precisely what is it they are looking for with such indefatigable devotion? This, as we will see, is the great question, and to fail to ask it is to fail in the quest itself.

GRADUALLY, THE GRAIL

The word, originally
graal
, comes from the Old French
gra
(
d
)
al
, from the medieval Latin
gradalis
, referring to some kind of dish. We usually think of the Holy Grail as the cup from which the disciples drank at the Last Supper. According to some forms of the legend, the risen Jesus appeared to Joseph of Arimathea, imprisoned as a disciple of the executed ringleader, and entrusted the cup to him. In other versions, Joseph had earlier gained possession of the vessel and used it to collect the shed blood of Jesus from the wound in his side (heart?) once Jesus’s side was pierced. At any rate, Joseph is said to have taken the cup and made his way to Brittany with his companions, where they established the second table for the grail’s repose, the first having been the table of the Last Supper. From there the grail is taken to Britain, where King Arthur prepares the famous Round Table to be the third table of the grail.

The question of the grail is very fascinating in its own right and for its own sake. It is a powerful spiritual symbol, perhaps more so than it is usually credited for. But our discussion here is of course prompted by the claims made by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh (
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
) and followed by numerous other recent writers, including Dan Brown. The favorite theory of all these writers is that the Holy Grail (
San Greal
) always functioned as code for the continuing royal bloodline (
Sang Real
) of Jesus, eventuating in the Merovingian dynasty of France. I want to take a closer look at the origin and evolution of the grail concept to see whether the data lends itself naturally to their theory, or to what I like to call the Teabing hypothesis.

CANONICAL CUP

One cannot simply presuppose some idea as to what the grail was supposed to be and then measure individual grail texts against it like paper edges against a yardstick. Rather, one must first examine the sources that tell us anything about the grail and then decide, if we can, whether a given grail concept arises naturally from these texts or rather has been forced upon them. The earliest grail texts (though that word does not appear in them) are the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Mark 14:22-25, Matthew 26:26-29, and Luke 22:17-20. (John’s gospel contains a Last Supper sequence, chapters 13-17, but there is no reference in it to the bread and the cup, though Eucharistic material about the body and blood of Christ does appear in a different setting in chapter 6). You will recall that
The Da Vinci Code
lays great store by Leonardo’s classic depiction of this gospel scene, so it deserves our attention. The specific mentions of the cup are as follows:

In the same way also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” (1 Cor. 11:25)

And he took a cup, and, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the [new] covenant, which is poured out for many.” (Mark 14:23-24)

And he took a cup, and, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the [new] covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Matt. 26:27-28)

And he took a cup, and, when he had given thanks, he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves.” (Luke 22:15)

Why do the texts differ in detail? For example, why does the 1 Corinthians version mandate that readers repeat the eating and drinking? It is no doubt making explicit what is implicit in the others. Why does only Matthew have the element of “forgiveness of sins”? He is probably trying to explain to the reader the point of the “covenant” embodied in the bread and cup. The point is the same as in Acts 13:38-39: “Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone that believes is justified from everything from which you could not be justified through the Law of Moses.”

Why is the word
new
in brackets in the Matthew and Mark versions? Because some ancient manuscripts of each gospel lack the word, which then begins to look like someone’s gloss (explanatory comment). Or maybe some scribes were trying to make it look more like the wording in the 1 Corinthians version. Who knows? But the major point we have to infer is that all of these versions are not primarily historical reports. They may contain an element of reporting, but as we read them, they are surely liturgical texts. They were part of the early Christian Holy Communion service. If you have ever taken the trouble to visit other churches than your usual congregation on a Communion Sunday, you may have noticed how the wording differs from one denomination to the next. Roman Catholics add “new
and eternal
covenant,” for example. Scholars surmise that this process of local customizing had already begun by the time the various gospels were written.

That means that each gospel writer (and the author of 1 Corinthians 11) is passing on the particular version of the Communion liturgy he was familiar with.
¹

THE SHAPE OF THE CUP

What sort of cup is presupposed in this scene? Artistic representations often take the license of making it a beautiful and elaborate vessel, something one might see in an art museum. What has happened here is that the artist is externalizing the theological significance of the cup, intimating the redemptive blood of Christ by transfiguring its container’s appearance to match. A good example from a text that does this would be
The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
by the visionary nun Anna Katharina Emmerich, a collection of pious fever dreams that forms the basis of Mel Gibson’s epic film
The Passion of the Christ
.
²
In the book, the cup is described as an elaborate piece somewhere between a silver samovar and a punch bowl with attached cups. But we are probably closer to the truth in the depiction of the cup in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
; the intrepid archaeologist finds himself amid a gallery of chalices, each more bejeweled and spectacular than the one before it. One of them is the fabled cup of the Last Supper. His life depends upon choosing the right one. How is he to decide? He asks himself, “Which one is the cup of a carpenter?” And sure enough, there is one, and only one, made of glazed clay.

Why do the gospel versions (and 1 Cor. 11) not do what Anna Katharina Emmerich did, especially if, like hers, theirs are documents more of faith than of history? Simply because they are in essence liturgical directions intended to provide a script for the reader, and when they say “he took
a
cup,” what they are saying is, “Use
any
cup.” Who among the early Christian communities would have been able to afford elaborate chalices? It will be interesting to see how the conception of the cup transforms in later grail literature.

The Da Vinci Code
and
The Hiram Key
profess to see great significance in the fact that in his great painting of the Last Supper Leonardo neglected to depict any cup at all. This is supposed to mean that he understood the cup, or the grail, to refer to something symbolic, something that would not have been visible to the physical eye, perhaps the holy seed of the Christ. But isn’t there another explanation ready to hand? What if he is just painting
John
’s version of the supper? That one has no reference to the Eucharistic cup and bread, as we have already observed. In fact, we can be sure this is what he was doing because of the depiction of the youthful (supposedly effeminate) disciple John sitting next to him, an arrangement peculiar to John’s gospel (13:23, 25). So much for that.