"TITTER YE NOT"
********************
Jesus said to Peter,
"Come forth and I will give you eternal glory."
Peter came fifth and won a toaster.
********************
Jesus walks into a bar and
asks for a glass of water which he then turns into wine.
The barman says,
"Oy, what do you think you are doing?"
Jesus replies, "I'm not paying your fucking prices."
********************
If this Jesus bloke is as
good as he's supposed to be can he put a fruit pastille in his mouth without chewing it?
**********************
What did Jesus say to his
12 apostles as he was being nailed to the cross?
"Don't touch my fucking Easter eggs, I'll be back on Monday."
********************
BLOODLINE
Jesus Christ And Mary Magdalene
The penitent Mary Magdalene, by
Francesco Hayez.
Is there proof Jesus married and had two sons?
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (retitled Holy Blood, Holy
Grail in the United States) is a book by Michael Baigent,
Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
The book was first published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in
London, as an unofficial follow-up to three BBC Two TV
documentaries that were part of the Chronicle series. The
paperback version was first published in 1983 by Corgi books.
A sequel to the book, called The Messianic Legacy, was
originally published in 1986. The original work was reissued in an illustrated hardcover version
with exclusive new material in 2005. One of the books that the authors claim Influenced the
project was L’Or de Rennes (later re-published as Le Trésor Maudit), a 1967 book by Gérard
de Sède, with the collaboration of Pierre Plantard.
In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the authors put forward a hypothesis, that the historical
Jesus married Mary Magdalene, had one or more children, and that those children or their
descendants emigrated to what is now southern France. Once there, they intermarried with
the noble families that would eventually become the Merovingian dynasty, whose special
claim to the throne of France is championed today by a secret society called the Priory of Sion.
They concluded that the legendary Holy Grail is simultaneously the womb of saint Mary
Magdalene and the sacred royal bloodline she gave birth to.
An international bestseller upon its release, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail spurred
interest in a number of ideas related to its central thesis. Response from professional
historians and scholars from related fields was universally negative. They argued that the
bulk of the claims, ancient mysteries, and conspiracy theories presented as facts are pseudo
historical. Nevertheless, these ideas are considered blasphemous enough for the book to be
banned in some Roman Catholic-dominated countries such as the Philippines.
In a 1982 review of the book for The Observer, literary critic Anthony Burgess wrote:
"It is
typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvellous theme for a novel"
(because it was historically unrealistic). Indeed, the theme was later used by Margaret
Starbird in her 1993 novel The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and by Dan Brown in his 2003
novel The Da Vinci Code.
After reading Le Tresor Maudit, Henry Lincoln persuaded BBC Two's factual television series of the 1970s, Chronicle, to make a series of documentaries, which became quite popular and generated thousands of responses. Lincoln then joined forces with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh for further research. This led them to the pseudo historical Dossiers Secrets at the Bibliothèque nationale de France which, though alleging to portray hundreds of years of medieval history, were actually all written by Pierre Plantard and Philippe de Chérisey under the pseudonym of "Philippe Toscan du Plantier". Unaware that the documents had been forged, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln used them as a major source for their book.
Comparing themselves to the reporters who uncovered the Watergate scandal, the authors maintain that only through speculative "synthesis can one discern the underlying continuity, the unified and coherent fabric, which lies at the core of any historical problem. "To do so, one must realise that "it is not sufficient to confine oneself exclusively to facts."
In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln presented the following as facts to support their
hypotheses:
there is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, which has a long history starting in 1099, and had illustrious Grand Masters including Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton it created the Knights Templar as its military arm and financial branch it is devoted to installing the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Franks from 457 to 751, on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe.
The authors re-interpreted the Dossiers Secrets in the light of their own interest in undermining the Roman Catholic Church's institutional reading of Judeo-Christian history. Contrary to Plantard's initial Franco-Israelist claim that the Merovingians were only descended from the Tribe of Benjamin, they asserted that:
the Priory of Sion protects Merovingian dynasties because
they are the lineal descendants of the historical Jesus and his alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, traced further back to King David, the legendary Holy Grail is simultaneously the womb of saint Mary Magdalene and the sacred royal bloodline she gave birth to. The Church tried to kill off all remnants of this bloodline and their supposed guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, an order for popes to hold the episcopal throne through the apostolic succession of Peter without fear of it ever being usurped by an antipope from the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene.
The authors therefore concluded that the modern goals of the Priory of Sion are:
the public revelation of the tomb and shrine of Sigebert IV as well as the lost treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem, which supposedly contains genealogical records that prove the Merovingian dynasty was of the Davidic line, to facilitate Merovingian restoration in France; to back up the Davidic claim, Charlemagne asked the Jewish Exilarch in Bagdad to send him one of his own sons, who took the name Theodoric upon his arrival, whom he made prince of a Jewish principality of Septimania, with his capital at Narbonne, France.
Unfortunately, this Theodoric's son Otigen converted to Christianity making him eligible on herita Jewish principality, and Charlemagne accepted Otigen as one of his knights. Otigen adopted a Christian cross saltyre within a Jewish Star of David as his personal symbol.
The re-institutionalization of chivalry and the promotion of pan-European nationalism the establishment of a theocratic
a Holy European Empire politically and religiously unified through the imperial cult of a Merovingian Great Monarch who occupies both the throne of Europe and the Holy See the actual governance of Europe residing with the Priory of Sion through a single-party European Parliament.
The authors also incorporated the anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic tract known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into their story, concluding that it was actually based on the master plan of the Priory of Sion. They presented it as the most persuasive piece of evidence for the existence and activities of the Priory of Sion by arguing that:
the original text on which the published version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was based had nothing to do with Judaism or an "international Jewish conspiracy". It was issued from a Masonic body practicing the Scottish Rite which incorporated the word "Zion" in
its name the original text was not intended to be released publicly, but was a program for gaining control of Freemasonry as
part of a strategy to infiltrate and reorganise church and state according to esoteric Christian principles after a failed attempt to gain influence in the court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Sergei Nilus changed the original text to forge an inflammatory tract. In 1903 in order to discredit the esoteric clique around Papus by implying they were Judeo-Masonic conspirators some esoteric Christian elements in the original text were ignored by Nilus and hence remained unchanged in the antisemitic canard he published.
The 1973 book The Jesus Scroll by Donovan Joyce was a attempt by an author to claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married and had children, and in the 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco it mentions Jesus and Mary Magdalene hypothesis in passing (a quote from the book is one of the chapter headings).
However, Eco, a secular humanist, takes a negative stance on such
conspiracy theories. Foucault's Pendulum is a strong debunking of themes found in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail the medium of satire.
The 1991 controversial non fiction book The Dead Sea Scrolls by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh promotes a conspiracy theory accusing the Roman Catholic Church of having suppressed the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The comic book series Preacher (1996–2000), by Garth Ennis and
Steve Dillon, includes a secret organization called The Grail, which has been protecting the Jesus bloodline for millennia.
The 1996 novel The Children of the Grail by Peter Berling incorporates the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a central part of the plot.
R.E.M. - Losing My Religion
The 1996 video game Broken Sword:
The Shadow of the Templars references the book in dialogue when the player asks what a character knows of the Templars.
The 1999 third instalment of the Gabriel Knight series, Gabriel Knight 3:
Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, used the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children as one of the basic structures of the storyline, tying it together with a number of other myths in an original story. "Et in Arcadia ego" is also an important object, with the characters finding important clues in the picture.
The 2001 film Revelation uses the Rennes-le-Château setting and parts of the Merovingian bloodline and Magdalene elements, within the search for a relic related to the Crucifixion of Jesus.
The 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown makes reference to this book, also liberally using most of the above claims as key plot elements; indeed, in 2005 Baigent and Leigh unsuccessfully sued Brown's publisher, Random House, for plagiarism, on the grounds that Brown's book makes extensive use of their research and that one of the characters is named Leigh, has a surname (Teabing) which is an anagram of Baigent, and has a physical description strongly resembling Henry Lincoln. In his novel, Brown also mentions Holy Blood, Holy Grail as an acclaimed international bestseller and claims it as the major contributor to his hypothesis. Perhaps as a result of this mention, the authors (minus Henry Lincoln) of Holy Blood sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement.
They claimed that the central framework of their plot had been stolen for the writing of The Da Vinci Code. The claim was overturned by High Court Judge Peter Smith on the 6th of April, 2006, who ruled that "their argument was vague and shifted course during the trial and was always based on a weak foundation." It was found that the publicity of the trial had
significantly boosted sales of Holy Blood (according to figures provided by Nielsen Book Scan and Bookseller magazine). The court ruled that, in effect, because it was published as a work of (alleged) history, its premises legally could be freely interpreted in any subsequent fictional work without any copyright infringement.
The comic Rex Mundi, written by Arvid Nelson and published by Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics, (2003-2009) is set in an alternate timestream and utilises themes and names from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
The 2008 documentary film Bloodline by Bruce Burgess, a filmmaker with an interest in paranormal claims, expands on the "Jesus bloodline" hypothesis and other elements of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Accepting as valid the testimony of
an amateur archaeologist code named "Ben Hammott" relating to his discoveries made in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château since 1999; Burgess claims to have found the treasure of Bérenger Saunière:
several mummified corpses (one of which is allegedly Mary Magdalene) in three underground tombs created by the Knights Templar under the orders of the Priory of Sion. By 21 March 2012 Ben Hammott confessed and apologised on Podcast interview (using his real name Bill Wilkinson) that everything to do with the tomb and related artifacts was a hoax; revealing that the actual tomb was now destroyed, being part of a full sized set located in a warehouse in England.
The ink used on the Gospel of Jesus's Wife papyrus fragment has now been analysed more thoroughly and as of April the 10th, 2014 has been deemed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be "more likely ancient than fake." These scientists say that
even using their various microscopic instruments it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. Although the papyrus does include the words ‘My wife...she will be able to be my disciple" this latest round of testing proves only that it is not a fake. It's an ancient papyrus with ancient ink, but it doesn't necessarily prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women. Dr. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who first presented the papyrus in Rome in 2012, has said its contents prove only that early Christians wrote about celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.
The Gnostics portrayed Mary Magdalene
as a mystic visionary & leader.
The claims made in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have been the source of much investigation and criticism over the years, with many independent investigators such as 60 Minutes, Channel 4, Discovery Channel, Time Magazine, and the BBC concluding that many of the book's claims are not credible or verifiable.
Pierre Plantard stated on the Jacques Prade radio interview on 'France
Inter',18th of 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.
While Pierre Plantard claimed that the Merovingians were descended from the Tribe of Benjamin, the Jesus bloodline hypothesis found in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail instead hypothesized that the Merovingians were descended from the Davidic line of the Tribe of Judah. Historian Marina Warner commented on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when it was first published:
“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."
Prominent British historian Richard Barber, wrote:
“The Templar-Grail myth … is at the heart of the most notorious of all the Grail pseudo-histories, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, which is a classic example of the conspiracy theory of history…
It is essentially a text which proceeds by innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate… Essentially, the whole argument is an
ingeniously constructed series of suppositions combined with forced readings of such tangible facts as are offered.
In 2005, Tony Robinson narrated a critical evaluation of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. The Real Da Vinci Code, shown on Channel 4. The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the protagonists. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of a 1,000 year old Priory of Sion, and described the story as "piffle." The programme concluded that, in the opinion of the presenter and researchers, the claims of Holy Blood were based on little more than a series of guesses.
Historian Ken Mondschein ridiculed the idea of a Jesus bloodline, writing:
“The idea of keeping the family tree pruned to bonsai-like proportions is also completely fallacious. Infant mortality in pre-modern times was ridiculously high, and you'd only need one childhood accident or disease in 2000 years to wipe out the bloodline; if, however, even one extra sibling per generation survived to reproduce, the numbers of descendants would increase at an exponential rate; keep the children of Christ marrying each other, on the other hand, and eventually they'd be so inbred that the sons and daughters of God would have flippers for feet."
Quoting Robert McCrum, literary editor of The Observer newspaper, about The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail:
“There is something called historical evidence – there is something called the historical method – and if you look around the shelves
of bookshops there is a lot of history being published, and people mistake this type of history for the real thing."
These kind of books do appeal to an enormous audience who believe them to be 'history',
but actually they aren't history, they are a kind of parody of history. Alas, though,
I think that one has to say that this is the direction that history is going today…
The material on this site does not necessarily reflect the views of What If? Tees.
The Images and Text are not meant to offend but to Promote Positive Open Debate and Free Speech.
The material on this site does not reflect the views of What If? Tees.
The Images and Text are not meant to offend but to Promote Positive Open Debate and Free Speech.