Table of Contents
We were well aware, of course, that our scenario did not concur with established Christian teachings. But the more we researched the more apparent it became that those teachings, as they have been passed down through the centuries, represent only a highly selective compilation of fragments, subjected to stringent expurgation and revision. The New Testament, in other words, offers a portrait of Jesus and his age that conforms to the needs of certain vested interests—of certain groups and individuals who had, and to a significant degree still have, an important stake in the matter. And anything that might compromise or embarrass these interests—like the “secret” Gospel of Mark, for example—has been duly excised. So much has been excised, as a matter of fact, that a sort of vacuum has been created. In this vacuum speculation becomes both justified and necessary.
If Jesus was a legitimate claimant to the throne, it is probable that he was supported, at least initially, by a relatively small percentage of the populace—his immediate family from Galilee, certain other members of his own aristocratic social class, and a few strategically placed representatives in Judaea and the capital city of Jerusalem. Such a following, albeit distinguished, would hardly have been sufficient to ensure the realisation of his objectives—the success of his bid for the throne. In consequence he would have been obliged to recruit a more substantial following from other classes—in the same way that Bonnie Prince Charlie, to pursue a previous analogy, did in 1745.
How does one recruit a sizeable following? Obviously by promulgating a message calculated to enlist their allegiance and support. Such a message need not necessarily have been as cynical as those associated with modern politics. On the contrary it may have been promulgated in perfectly good faith, with thoroughly noble and burning idealism. But despite its distinctly religious orientation, its primary objective would have been the same as those of modern politics—to ensure the adherence of the populace. Jesus promulgated a message which attempted to do just that—to offer hope to the downtrodden, the afflicted, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. In short it was a message with a promise. If the modern reader overcomes his prejudices and preconceptions on the matter, he will discern a mechanism extraordinarily akin to that visible everywhere in the world today—a mechanism whereby people are, and always have been, united in the name of a common cause and welded into an instrument for the overthrow of a despotic regime. The point is that Jesus’s message was both ethical and political. It was directed to a particular segment of the populace in accordance with political considerations. For it would only have been among the oppressed, the downtrodden, the disenfranchised and the afflicted that he could have hoped to recruit a sizeable following. The Sadducees, who had come to terms with the Roman occupation, would have been as loath as all the Sadducees throughout history to part with what they possessed, or to risk their security and stability.
Jesus’s message, as it appears in the Gospels, is neither wholly new nor wholly unique. It is probable that he himself was a Pharisee, and his teachings contain a number of elements of Pharisaic doctrine. As the Dead Sea Scrolls attest, they also contain a number of important aspects of Essene thought. But if the message, as such, was not entirely original, the means of transmitting it probably was. Jesus himself was undoubtedly an immensely charismatic individual. He may well have had an aptitude for healing and other such “miracles”. He certainly possessed a gift for communicating his ideas by means of evocative and vivid parables which did not require any sophisticated training in his audience, but were accessible, in some sense, to the populace at large. Moreover, unlike his Essene precursors, Jesus was not obliged to confine himself to forecasting the advent of a Messiah. He could claim to be that Messiah. And this, quite naturally, would have imparted a much greater authority and credibility to his words. It is clear that by the time of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus had recruited a following. But this following would have been composed of two quite distinct elements whose interests were not precisely the same.
On the one hand there would have been a small nucleus of “initiates”—immediate family, other members of the nobility, wealthy and influential supporters, whose primary objective was to see their candidate installed on the throne. On the other hand there would have been a much larger entourage of “common people”—the “rank and file” of the movement—whose primary objective was to see the message, and the promise it contained, fulfilled. It is important to recognise the distinction between these two factions. Their political objective—to establish Jesus on the throne—would have been the same. But their motivations would have been essentially different.
When the enterprise failed, as it obviously did, the uneasy alliance between these two factions—“adherents of the message” and adherents of the family—would seem to have collapsed. Confronted by debacle and the threat of imminent annihilation, the family would have placed a priority on the single factor which, from time immemorial, has been of paramount importance to noble and royal families—preservation of the bloodline at all costs and, if necessary, in exile. For the “adherents of the message”, however, the family’s future would have become irrelevant. For them survival of the bloodline would have been of secondary consequence. Their primary objective would have been perpetuation and dissemination of the message.
Christianity, as it evolves through its early centuries and eventually comes down to us today, is a product of the “adherents of the message”. The course of its spread and development has been too widely charted by other scholars to necessitate much attention here. Suffice it to say that with Saint Paul, ’the message’ had already begun to assume a crystallised and definitive form; and this form became the basis on which the whole theological edifice of Christianity was erected. By the time the Gospels were composed, the basic tenets of the new religion were virtually complete.
The new religion was oriented primarily towards a Roman or Romanised audience. Thus the role of Rome in Jesus’s death was, of necessity, whitewashed, and guilt was transferred to the Jews. But this was not the only liberty taken with events to render them palatable to the Roman world. For the Roman world was accustomed to deifying its rulers, and Caesar had already been officially instated as a god. In order to compete, Jesus—whom nobody had previously deemed divine—had to be deified as well. In Paul’s hands he was.
Before it could be successfully disseminated from Palestine to Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, Rome and Western Europe, the new religion had to be made acceptable to the people of those regions. And it had to be capable of holding its own against already established creeds. The new god, in short, had to be comparable in power, in majesty, in repertoire of miracles, to those he was intended to displace. If Jesus was to gain a foothold in the Romanised world of his time, he had perforce to become a fully fledged god. Not a Messiah in the old sense of that term, not a priest-king, but God incarnate who, like his Syrian, Phoenician, Egyptian and classical counterparts, passed through the underworld and the harrowing of Hell and emerged, rejuvenated, with the spring. It was at this point that the idea of the Resurrection first assumed such crucial importance, and for a fairly obvious reason—to place Jesus on a par with Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris and all the other dying and reviving gods who populated both the world and the consciousness of their time. For precisely the same reason the doctrine of the virgin birth was promulgated. And the Easter festival—the festival of death and resurrection—was made to coincide with the spring.
Given the need to disseminate a god myth, the actual corporeal family of the “god”, and the political and dynastic elements in his story, would have become superfluous. Fettered as they were to a specific time and place, they would have detracted from his claim to universality. Thus, to further the claim of universality, all political and dynastic elements were rigorously excised from Jesus’s biography. And thus all references to Zealots, for example, and Essenes, were also discreetly removed. Such references would have been, at the very least, embarrassing. It would not have appeared seemly for a god to be involved in a complex and ultimately ephemeral political and dynastic conspiracy—and especially one that failed. In the end nothing was left but what was contained in the Gospels—an account of austere, mythic simplicity, occurring only incidentally in the Roman-occupied Palestine of the first century and primarily in the eternal present of all myth.
While “the message” developed in this fashion, the family and its supporters do not seem to have been idle. Julius Africanus, writing in the first century, reports that Jesus’s surviving relatives bitterly accused the Herodian rulers of destroying the genealogies of Jewish nobles, thereby removing all evidence that might challenge their claim to the throne. And these same relatives are said to have “migrated through the world”, carrying with them certain genealogies which had escaped the destruction of documents during the revolt between A.D. 66 and 74.
For the propagators of the new myth, the existence of this family would quickly have become more than an irrelevance. It would have become a potential embarrassment of daunting proportions. For the family who could bear first-hand testimony to what really and historically happened would have constituted a dangerous threat to the myth. Indeed, on the basis of first-hand knowledge, the family could have exploded the myth completely. Thus in the early days of Christianity all mention of a noble or royal family, of a bloodline, of political or dynastic ambitions would have had to be suppressed. And since the cynical realities of the situation must be acknowledged—the family itself, who might betray the new religion, should, if at all possible, be exterminated. Hence the need for the utmost secrecy on the part of the family. Hence the intolerance of early Church fathers towards any deviation from the orthodoxy they endeavoured to impose. And hence also, perhaps, one of the origins of anti-Semitism. In effect the “adherents of the message” and propagators of the myth would have accomplished a dual purpose by blaming the Jews and exonerating the Romans. They would not only have made the myth and “the message” palatable to a Roman audience. They would also, since the family was Jewish, have impugned the family’s credibility. And the anti-Jewish feeling they engendered would have furthered their objectives still more. If the family had found refuge in a Jewish community somewhere within the empire, popular persecution might, in its momentum, conveniently silence dangerous witnesses.
By pandering to a Roman audience, deifying Jesus and casting the Jews as scapegoats, the spread of what subsequently became Christian orthodoxy was assured of success. The position of this orthodoxy began to consolidate itself definitively in the second century, principally through Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons around A.D. 180. Probably more than any other early Church father, Irenaeus contrived to impart to Christian theology a stable and coherent form. He accomplished this primarily by means of a voluminous work, Libros Quinque Adversus Haereses (“Five Books against Heresies”). In his exhaustive opus Irenaeus catalogued all deviations from the coalescing orthodoxy, and vehemently condemned them. Deploring diversity, he maintained there could be only one valid church, outside which there could be no salvation. Whoever challenged this assertion, Irenaeus declared to be a heretic—to be expelled and, if possible, destroyed.
Among the numerous diverse forms of early Christianity, it was Gnosticism that incurred Irenaeus’s most vituperative wrath. Gnosticism rested on personal experience, personal union with the divine. For Irenaeus this naturally undermined the authority of priests and bishops, and so impeded the attempt to impose uniformity. As a result he devoted his energies to suppressing Gnosticism. To this end it was necessary to discourage individual speculation, and to encourage unquestioning faith in fixed dogma. A theological system was required, a structure of codified tenets which allowed of no interpretation by the individual. In opposition to personal experience and gnosis, Irenaeus insisted on a single “catholic” (that is universal) church resting on apostolic foundation and succession. And to implement the creation of such a church, Irenaeus recognised the need for a definitive canon—a fixed list of authoritative writings. Accordingly he compiled such a canon, sifting through the available works, including some, excluding others. Irenaeus is the first writer whose New Testament canon conforms essentially to that of the present day.
Such measures, of course, did not prevent the spread of early heresies. On the contrary, they continued to flourish. But with Irenaeus, orthodoxy—the type of Christianity promulgated by the “adherents of the message”—assumed a coherent form that ensured its survival and eventual triumph. It is not unreasonable to claim that Irenaeus paved the way for what occurred during and immediately after the reign of Constantine—under whose auspices the Roman Empire became, in some sense, a Christian empire.
The role of Constantine in the history and development of Christianity has been falsified, misrepresented and misunderstood. The spurious eighth-century “Donation of Constantine”, discussed in Chapter 9, has served to confuse matters even further in the eyes of subsequent writers. Nevertheless, Constantine is often credited with the decisive victory of the “adherents of the message”—and not wholly without justification. We were therefore obliged to consider him more closely, and in order to do so we had to dispel certain of the more fanciful and specious accomplishments ascribed to him.
According to later Church tradition, Constantine had inherited from his father a sympathetic predisposition towards Christianity. In fact this predisposition seems to have been primarily a matter of expediency, for Christians by then were numerous and Constantine needed all the help he could get against Maxentius, his rival for the imperial throne. In A.D. 312 Maxentius was routed at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, thus leaving Constantine’s claim unchallenged. Immediately before this crucial engagement Constantine is said to have had a vision—later reinforced by a prophetic dream—of a luminous cross hanging in the sky. A sentence was supposedly inscribed across it—In Hoc Signo Vinces (“By this sign you will conquer”). Tradition recounts that Constantine, deferring to this celestial portent, ordered the shields of his troops hastily emblazoned with the Christian monogram—the Greek letter Chi Rho, the first two letters of the word “Christos”. As a result Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at Milvian Bridge came to represent a miraculous triumph of Christianity over paganism.
This, then, is the popular Church tradition, on the basis of which Constantine is often thought to have “converted the Roman Empire to Christianity”. In actual fact, however, Constantine did no such thing. But in order to decide precisely what he did do, we must examine the evidence more closely.
In the first place Constantine’s “conversion”—if that is the appropriate word—does not seem to have been Christian at all but unabashedly pagan. He appears to have had some sort of vision, or numinous experience, in the precincts of a pagan temple to the Gallic Apollo, either in the Vosges or near Autun. According to a witness accompanying Constantine’s army at the time, the vision was of the sun god—the deity worshipped by certain cults under the name of “Sol Invictus”, “the Invincible Sun”. There is evidence that Constantine, just before his vision, had been initiated into a Sol Invictus cult. In any case the Roman Senate, after the Battle of Milvian Bridge, erected a triumphal arch in the Colosseum. According to the inscription on this arch, Constantine’s victory was won “through the prompting of the Deity”. But the Deity in question was not Jesus. It was Sol Invictus, the pagan sun god.
Contrary to tradition, Constantine did not make Christianity the official state religion of Rome. The state religion of Rome under Constantine was, in fact, pagan sun worship; and Constantine, all his life, acted as its chief priest. Indeed his reign was called a “sun emperorship” and Sol Invictus figured everywhere—including the imperial banners and the coinage of the realm. The image of Constantine as a fervent convert to Christianity is clearly wrong. He himself was not even baptised until 337 when he lay on his deathbed and was apparently too weakened or too apathetic to protest. Nor can he be credited with the Chi Rho monogram. An inscription bearing this monogram was found on a tomb at Pompeii, dating from two and a half centuries before.
The cult of Sol Invictus was Syrian in origin and imposed by Roman emperors on their subjects a century before Constantine. Although it contained elements of Baal and Astarte worship, it was essentially monotheistic. In effect, it posited the sun god as the sum of all attributes of all other gods, and thus peacefully subsumed its potential rivals. Moreover, it conveniently harmonised with the cult of Mithras which was also prevalent in Rome and the empire at the time, and which also involved solar worship. For Constantine the cult of Sol Invictus was, quite simply, expedient. His primary, indeed obsessive, objective was unity—unity in politics, in religion and in territory. A cult, or state religion, that included all other cults within it obviously abetted this objective. And it was under the auspices of the Sol Invictus cult that Christianity consolidated its position.
Christian orthodoxy had much in common with the cult of Sol Invictus; and thus the former was able to flourish unmolested under the latter’s umbrella of tolerance. The cult of Sol Invictus, being essentially monotheistic, paved the way for the monotheism of Christianity. And the cult of Sol Invictus was convenient in other respects as well—respects which both modified and facilitated the spread of Christianity. By an edict promulgated in A.D. 321, for example, Constantine ordered the law courts closed on ’the venerable day of the sun’, and decreed that this day be a day of rest. Christianity had hitherto held the Jewish Sabbath—Saturday—as sacred. Now, in accordance with Constantine’s edict, it transferred its sacred day to Sunday. This not only brought it into harmony with the existing regime, but also permitted it to further dissociate itself from its Judaic origins. Until the fourth century, moreover, Jesus’s birthday had been celebrated on January 6th. For the cult of Sol Invictus, however, the crucial day of the year was December 25th—the festival of Natalis Invictus, the birth (or rebirth) of the sun, when the days began to grow longer. In this respect, too, Christianity brought itself into alignment with the regime and the established state religion.
The cult of Sol Invictus meshed happily with that of Mithras—so much so, indeed, that the two are often confused. Both emphasised the status of the sun. Both held Sunday as sacred. Both celebrated a major birth festival on December 25th. As a result Christianity could also find points of convergence with Mithraism—the more so as Mithraism stressed the immortality of the soul, a future judgment and the resurrection of the dead.
In the interests of unity Constantine deliberately chose to blur the distinctions between Christianity, Mithraism and Sol Invictus—deliberately chose not to see any contradiction between them. Thus he tolerated the deified Jesus as the earthly manifestation of Sol Invictus. Thus he would build a Christian church and, at the same time, statues of the Mother Goddess Cybele and of Sol Invictus, the sun god—the latter being an image of himself, bearing his features. In such eclectic and ecumenical gestures, the emphasis on unity can be seen again. Faith, in short, was for Constantine a political matter; and any faith that was conducive to unity was treated with forbearance.
While Constantine was not, therefore, the “good Christian” that later tradition depicts, he consolidated, in the name of unity and uniformity, the status of Christian orthodoxy. In A.D. 325, for example, he convened the Council of Nicea. At this council the dating of Easter was established. Rules were framed which defined the authority of bishops, thereby paving the way for a concentration of power in ecclesiastical hands. Most important of all, the Council of Nicea decided, by vote, that Jesus was a god, not a mortal prophet. Again, however, it must be emphasised that Constantine’s paramount consideration was not piety but unity and expediency. As a god Jesus could be associated conveniently with Sol Invictus. As a mortal prophet he would have been more difficult to accommodate. In short, Christian orthodoxy lent itself to a politically desirable fusion with the official state religion; and in so far as it did so Constantine conferred his support upon Christian orthodoxy.
Thus, a year after the Council of Nicea, he sanctioned the confiscation and destruction of all works that challenged orthodox teachings—works by pagan authors that referred to Jesus, as well as works by “heretical” Christians. He also arranged for a fixed income to be allocated to the Church and installed the bishop of Rome in the Lateran Palaces. Then, in A.D. 331, he commissioned and financed new copies of the Bible. This constituted one of the single most decisive factors in the entire history of Christianity, and provided Christian orthodoxy—the “adherents of the message”—with an unparalleled opportunity.
In A.D. 303, a quarter of a century before, the pagan Emperor Diocletian had undertaken to destroy all Christian writings that could be found. As a result Christian documents—especially in Rome—all but vanished. When Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, it enabled the custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit and re-write their material as they saw fit, in accordance with their tenets. It was at this point that most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made, and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since. The importance of Constantine’s commission must not be underestimated. Of the five thousand extant early manuscript versions of the New Testament, not one pre-dates the fourth century. The New Testament, as it exists today, is essentially a product of fourth-century editors and writers—custodians of orthodoxy, “adherents of the message”, with vested interests to protect.
The Zealots
After Constantine the course of Christian orthodoxy is familiar enough and well documented. Needless to say it culminated in the final triumph of the “adherents of the message”. But if “the message” established itself as the guiding and governing principle of Western civilisation, it did not remain wholly unchallenged. Even from its incognito exile, the claims and the very existence of the family would seem to have exerted a powerful appeal—an appeal which, more often than was comfortable, posed a threat to the orthodoxy of Rome.
Roman orthodoxy rests essentially on the books of the New Testament. But the New Testament itself is only a selection of early Christian documents dating from the fourth century. There are a great many other works that pre-date the New Testament in its present form, some of which cast a significant, often controversial, new light on the accepted accounts. There are, for instance, the diverse books excluded from the Bible, which comprise the compilation now known as the Apocrypha. Some of the works in the Apocrypha are admittedly late, dating from the sixth century. Other works, however, were already in circulation as early as the second century, and may well have as great a claim to veracity as the original Gospels themselves.
One such work is the Gospel of Peter, a copy of which was first located in a valley of the upper Nile in 1886, although it is mentioned by the bishop of Antioch in A.D. 180. According to this “apocryphal” Gospel, Joseph of Arimathea was a close friend of Pontius Pilate—which, if true, would increase the likelihood of a fraudulent Crucifixion. The Gospel of Peter also reports that the tomb in which Jesus was buried lay in a place called “the garden of Joseph”. And Jesus’s last words on the cross are particularly striking: “My power, my power, why hast thou forsaken Me?”
Another apocryphal work of interest is the Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ, which dates from no later than the second century and possibly from before. In this book Jesus is portrayed as a brilliant but eminently human child. All too human perhaps—for he is violent and unruly, prone to shocking displays of temper and a rather irresponsible exercise of his powers. Indeed, on one occasion he strikes dead another child who offends him. A similar fate is visited upon an autocratic mentor. Such incidents are undoubtedly spurious, but they attest to the way in which, at the time, Jesus had to be depicted if he were to attain divine status amongst his following.
In addition to Jesus’s rather scandalous behaviour as a child, there is one curious and perhaps significant fragment in the Gospel of the Infancy. When Jesus was circumcised, his foreskin was said to have been appropriated by an unidentified old woman who preserved it in an alabaster box used for oil of spikenard. And “This is that alabaster box which Mary the sinner procured and poured forth the ointment out of it upon the head and the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here, then, as in the accepted Gospels, there is an anointing which is obviously more than it appears to be—an anointing tantamount to some significant ritual. In this case, however, it is clear that the anointing has been foreseen and prepared long in advance. And the whole incident implies a connection—albeit an obscure and convoluted one—between the Magdalene and Jesus’s family long before Jesus embarked on his mission at the age of thirty. It is reasonable to assume that Jesus’s parents would not have conferred his foreskin on the first old woman to request it—even if there were nothing unusual in so apparently odd a request. The old woman must therefore be someone of consequence and/or someone on intimate terms with Jesus’s parents. And the Magdalene’s subsequent possession of the bizarre relic—or, at any rate, of its container—suggests a connection between her and the old woman. Again we seem to be confronted by the shadowy vestiges of something that was more important than is now generally believed.
Certain passages in the books of the Apocrypha—the flagrant excesses of Jesus’s childhood, for example—were undoubtedly embarrassing to later orthodoxy. They would certainly be so to most Christians today. But it must be remembered that the Apocrypha, like the accepted books of the New Testament, was composed by “adherents of the message”, intent on deifying Jesus. The Apocrypha cannot therefore be expected to contain anything that might seriously compromise the “message”—which any mention of Jesus’s political activity, still more of his possible dynastic ambitions, manifestly would. For evidence on such controversial matters as those, we were obliged to look elsewhere.
The Holy Land in Jesus’s time contained a bewildering number of diverse Judaic groups, factions, sects and sub-sects. In the Gospels, only two of these, the Pharisees and Sadducees, are cited, and both are cast in the roles of villains. However, the role of villain would only have been appropriate to the Sadducees, who did collaborate with the Roman administration. The Pharisees maintained a staunch opposition to Rome; and Jesus himself, if not actually a Pharisee, acted essentially within the Pharisee tradition. In order to appeal to a Romanised audience, the Gospels were obliged to exonerate Rome and blacken the Jews. This explains why the Pharisees had to be misrepresented and deliberately stigmatised along with their genuinely culpable countrymen, the Sadducees. But why is there no mention in the Gospels of the Zealots—the militant nationalistic “freedom fighters” and revolutionaries who, if anything, a Roman audience would only too eagerly have seen as villains? There would seem to be no explanation for their apparent omission from the Gospels unless Jesus was so closely associated with them that this association could not possibly be disowned, only glossed over and thereby concealed. As Professor Brandon argues: “The Gospels’ silence about Zealots… must surely be indicative of a relationship between Jesus and these patrons which the Evangelists preferred not to disclose.”
Whatever Jesus’s possible association with the Zealots, there is no question but that he was crucified as one. Indeed the two men allegedly crucified with him are explicitly described as lestai—the appellation by which the Zealots were known to the Romans. It is doubtful that Jesus himself was a Zealot. Nevertheless, he displays, at odd moments in the Gospels, an aggressive militarism quite comparable to theirs. In one awkwardly famous passage, he announces that he has come “not to bring peace, but a sword”. In Luke’s Gospel, he instructs those of his followers who do not possess a sword to purchase one (Luke 22:36); and he himself then checks and approves that they are armed after the Passover meal (Luke 22:38). In the Fourth Gospel Simon Peter is actually carrying a sword when Jesus is arrested. It is difficult to reconcile such references with the conventional image of a mild pacifist saviour. Would such a saviour have sanctioned the bearing of arms, particularly by one of his favourite disciples, the one on whom he supposedly founded his church?
If Jesus was not himself a Zealot, the Gospels—seemingly despite themselves—betray and establish his connection with that militant faction. There is persuasive evidence to associate Barabbas with Jesus; and Barabbas is also described as a lestes. James, John and Simon Peter all have appellations which may hint obliquely at Zealot sympathies, if not Zealot involvement. According to modern authorities, Judas Iscariot derives from “Judas the Sicarii”—and “Sicarii” was yet another term for Zealot, interchangeable with lestes. Indeed the Sicarii seem to have been an elite within the Zealot ranks, a crack cadre of professional assassins. Finally there is the disciple known as Simon. In the Greek version of Mark, Simon is called Kananaios—a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic word for Zealot. In the King James Bible, the Greek word is mistranslated and Simon appears as “Simon the Canaanite”. But the Gospel of Luke leaves no room for doubt. Simon is clearly identified as a Zealot, and even the King James Bible introduces him as “Simon Zelotes”. It would thus seem fairly indisputable that Jesus numbered at least one Zealot among his followers.
If the absence—or, rather, apparent absence—of the Zealots from the Gospels is striking, so too is that of the Essenes. In the Holy Land of Jesus’s time, the Essenes constituted a sect as important as the Pharisees and Sadducees, and it is inconceivable that Jesus did not come into contact with them. Indeed, from the account given of him, John the Baptist would seem to have been an Essene. The omission of any reference to the Essenes seems to have been dictated by the same considerations that dictated omission of virtually all references to the Zealots. In short Jesus’s connections with the Essenes, like his connections with the Zealots, were probably too close and too well known to be denied. They could only be glossed over and concealed.
From historians and chroniclers writing at the time, it is known that the Essenes maintained communities throughout the Holy Land and, quite possibly, elsewhere as well. They began to appear around 150 B.C., and they used the Old Testament, but interpreted it more as allegory than as literal historical truth. They repudiated conventional Judaism in favour of a form of Gnostic dualism which seems to have incorporated elements of sun worship and Pythagorean thought. They practised healing and were esteemed for their expertise in therapeutic techniques. Finally they were rigorously ascetic, and readily distinguished by their simple white garb.
Most modern authorities on the subject believe the famous Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran to be essentially Essene documents. And there is no question that the sect of ascetics living at Qumran had much in common with Essene thought. Like Essene teaching, the Dead Sea Scrolls reflect a dualist theology. At the same time they lay a great stress on the coming of a Messiah—an “anointed one” descended from the line of David. They also adhere to a special calendar, according to which the Passover service was celebrated not on Friday, but on Wednesday—which agrees with the Passover service in the Fourth Gospel. And in a number of significant respects they coincide, almost word for word, with some of Jesus’s teaching. At the very least it would appear that Jesus was aware of the Qumran community and, to some extent at any rate, brought his own teachings into accord with theirs. One modern expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls believes that they “give added ground for believing that many incidents [in the New Testament] are merely projections into Jesus’ own history of what was expected of the Messiah.”
Whether the Qumran sect were technically Essenes or not, it seems clear that Jesus—even if he did not undergo formal Essene training—was well versed in Essene thought. Indeed, many of his teachings echo those ascribed to the Essenes. And his aptitude for healing likewise suggests some Essene influence. But a closer scrutiny of the Gospels reveals that the Essenes may have figured even more significantly in Jesus’s career.
The Essenes were readily identifiable by their white garments which, paintings and cinema notwithstanding, were less common in the Holy Land at the time than is generally believed. In the suppressed “secret” Gospel of Mark, a white linen robe plays an important ritual role—and it recurs later even in the accepted authorised version. If Jesus was conducting mystery school initiations at Bethany or elsewhere, the white linen robe suggests that these initiations may well have been Essene in character.
What is more, the motif of the white linen robe recurs later in all four Gospels. After the Crucifixion Jesus’s body “miraculously” disappears from the tomb—which is found to be occupied by at least one white-clad figure. In Matthew it is an angel in “raiment white as snow” (28:3). In Mark it is “a young man in long white garment” (16:5). Luke reports that there were “two men… in shining garments” (24:4), while the Fourth Gospel speaks of “two angels in white” (20:12). In two of these accounts the figure or figures in the tomb are not even accorded any supernatural status. Presumably, these figures are thoroughly mortal and yet, it would appear, unknown to the disciples. It is certainly reasonable to suppose that they are Essenes. And given the Essenes’ aptitude for healing, such a supposition becomes even more tenable. If Jesus, on being removed from the cross, was indeed still alive, the services of a healer would clearly have been required. Even if he were dead, a healer is likely to have been present, if only as a “forlorn hope”. And there were no more esteemed healers in the Holy Land at the time than the Essenes.
According to our scenario a mock Crucifixion on private ground was arranged, with Pilate’s collusion, by certain of Jesus’s supporters. More specifically it would have been arranged not primarily by “adherents of the message”, but by adherents to the bloodline—immediate family, in other words, and/or other aristocrats and/or members of an inner circle. These individuals may well have had Essene connections or have been Essenes themselves. To the “adherents of the message”, however—the “rank and file” of Jesus’s following, epitomised by Simon Peter—the stratagem would not have been divulged.
On being carried to Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, Jesus would have required medical attention, for which an Essene healer would have been present. And afterwards, when the tomb was found to be vacant, an emissary would again have been necessary—an emissary unknown to the “rank and file” disciples. This emissary would have had to reassure the unsuspecting “adherents of the message”, to act as intermediary between Jesus and his following and to forestall charges of grave-robbing or grave desecration against the Romans, which might have provoked dangerous civic disturbances.
Whether this scenario was accurate or not, it seemed to us fairly clear that Jesus was as closely associated with the Essenes as he was with the Zealots. At first this might seem somewhat odd, for the Zealots and the Essenes are often imagined to have been incompatible. The Zealots were aggressive, violent, militaristic, not averse to assassination and terrorism. The Essenes, in contrast, are frequently depicted as divorced from political issues, quietist, pacifist and gentle. In actual fact, however, the Zealots included numerous Essenes in their ranks—for the Zealots were not a sect but a political faction. As a political faction they drew support not only from the anti-Roman Pharisees, but from the Essenes as well—who could be as aggressively nationalistic as anyone else.
The association of the Zealots and the Essenes is especially evident in the writings of Josephus, from whom much of the available information on Palestine at the time derives. Joseph ben Matthias was born into the Judaic nobility in A.D. 37. On the outbreak of the revolt in A.D. 66 he was appointed governor of Galilee, where he assumed command of the forces aligned against the Romans. As a military commander he seems to have proved signally inept, and was promptly captured by the Roman Emperor Vespasian. Thereupon he turned Quisling. Taking the Romanised name of Flavius Josephus, he became a Roman citizen, divorced his wife and married a Roman heiress, and accepted lavish gifts from the Roman emperor—which included a private apartment in the imperial palace, as well as land confiscated from Jews in the Holy Land. Around the time of his death in A.D. 100, his copious chronicles of the period began to appear.
In The Jewish War Josephus offers a detailed account of the revolt between A.D. 66 and 74. Indeed, it was from Josephus that subsequent historians learned most about that disastrous insurrection, the sack of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple. And Josephus’s work also contains the only account of the fall, in A.D. 74, of the fortress of Masada, situated at the south-western corner of the Dead Sea.
Like Montsegur some twelve hundred years later, Masada has come to symbolise tenacity, heroism and martyrdom in defence of a lost cause. Like Montsegur it continued to resist the invader long after virtually all other organised resistance had ceased. While the rest of Palestine collapsed beneath the Roman onslaught, Masada continued to be impregnable. At last, in A.D. 74, the position of the fortress became untenable. After sustained bombardment with heavy siege machinery, the Romans installed a ramp which put them into a position to breach the defences. On the night of April 15th they prepared for a general assault. On that same night the 960 men, women, and children within the fortress committed suicide en masse. When the Romans burst through the gate the following morning, they found only corpses amid the flames.
Josephus himself accompanied the Roman troops who entered the husk of Masada on the morning of April 16th. He claims to have witnessed the carnage personally. And he claims to have interviewed three survivors of the debacle—a woman and two children who supposedly hid in the conduits beneath the fortress while the rest of the garrison killed themselves. From these survivors Josephus reports that he obtained a detailed account of what had transpired the night before. According to this account the commander of the garrison was a man named Eleazar—a variant, interestingly enough, of Lazarus. And it seems to have been Eleazar who, by his persuasive and charismatic eloquence, led the defenders to their grisly decision. In his chronicle Josephus repeats Eleazar’s speeches, as he claims to have heard them from the survivors. And these speeches are extremely interesting. History reports that Masada was defended by militant Zealots. Josephus himself uses the words “Zealots” and “Sicarii” interchangeably. And yet Eleazar’s speeches are not even conventionally Judaic. On the contrary, they are unmistakably Essene, Gnostic and dualist:
Ever since primitive man began to think, the words of our ancestors and of the gods, supported by the actions and spirit of our forefathers, have constantly impressed on us that life is the calamity for man, not death. Death gives freedom to our souls and lets them depart to their own pure home where they will know nothing of any calamity; but while they are confined within a mortal body and share its miseries, in strict truth they are dead. For association of the divine with the mortal is most improper. Certainly the soul can do a great deal even when imprisoned in the body: it makes the body its own organ of sense, moving it invisibly and impelling it in its actions further than mortal nature can reach. But when, freed from the weight that drags it down to earth and is hung about it, the soul returns to its own place, then in truth it partakes of a blessed power and an utterly unfettered strength, remaining as invisible to human eyes as God Himself. Not even while it is in the body can it be viewed; it enters undetected and departs unseen, having itself one imperishable nature, but causing a change in the body; for whatever the soul touches lives and blossoms, whatever it deserts withers and dies: such a superabundance it has of immortality.
And again:
They are men of true courage who, regarding this life as a kind of service we must render to nature, undergo it with reluctance and hasten to release their souls from their bodies; and though no misfortune presses or drives them away, desire for immortal life impels them to inform their friends that they are going to depart.
It is extraordinary that no scholar, to our knowledge, has ever commented on these speeches before, for they raise a multitude of provocative questions. At no point, for example, does orthodox Judaism ever speak of a ‘soul’—still less of its “immortal” or “imperishable” nature. Indeed, the very concept of a soul and of immortality is alien to the mainstream of Judaic tradition and thought. So, too, is the supremacy of spirit over matter, the union with God in death, and the condemnation of life as evil. These attitudes derive, quite unequivocally, from a mystery tradition. They are patently Gnostic and dualist; and, in the context of Masada, are characteristically Essene.
Certain of these attitudes, of course, may also be described as in some sense “Christian”. Not necessarily as that word subsequently came to be defined, but as it might have been applied to Jesus’s original followers—those, for example, who wished to join Lazarus in death in the Fourth Gospel. It is possible that the defenders of Masada included some adherents to Jesus’s bloodline. During the revolt of A.D. 66 to 74 there were numerous “Christians” who fought against the Romans as vigorously as did the Jews. Many Zealots, in fact, were what would now be called “early Christians”; and it is quite likely that there were some of them at Masada.
Josephus, of course, suggests nothing of this sort—although even if he once did, it would have been excised by subsequent editors. At the same time, one would expect Josephus, writing a history of Palestine during the first century, to make some mention of Jesus. Granted, many later editions of Josephus’s work do contain such references; but these references conform to the Jesus of established orthodoxy, and most modern scholars dismiss them as spurious interpolations dating from no earlier than the time of Constantine. In the nineteenth century, however, an edition of Josephus was discovered in Russia which differed from all others. The text itself, translated into Old Russian, dated from approximately 1261. The man who transcribed it was not an orthodox Jew, because he retained many ‘pro-Christian’ allusions. And yet Jesus, in this version of Josephus, is described as human, as a political revolutionary and as a “king who did not reign”. He is also said to have had “a line in the middle of his head in the manner of the Nazireans.”
Scholars have expended much paper and energy disputing the possible authenticity of what is now called the “Slavonic Josephus”. All things considered, we were inclined to regard it as more or less genuine—a transcription from a copy or copies of Josephus which survived the destruction of Christian documents by Diocletian and eluded the editorial zeal of the reinstated orthodoxy under Constantine. There were a number of cogent reasons for our conclusion. If the Slavonic Josephus was a forgery, for example, whose interests would it have served? Its description of Jesus as a king would hardly have been acceptable to a thirteenth-century Jewish audience. And its depiction of Jesus as human would hardly have pleased thirteenth-century Christendom. What is more, Origen, a Church father writing in the early third century, alludes to a version of Josephus which denies Jesus’s Messiahship. This version—which may once have been the original, authentic and “standard” version—could well have provided the text for the Slavonic Josephus.
The Gnostic Writings
The revolt of A.D. 66-74 was followed by a second major insurrection some sixty years later, between 132 and 135. As a result of this new disturbance all Jews were officially expelled from Jerusalem, which became a Roman city. But even as early as the first revolt history had begun to draw a veil over events in the Holy Land, and there are virtually no records for another two centuries. Indeed the period is not dissimilar to Europe at various points during the so-called “Dark Ages”. Nevertheless it is known that numerous Jews remained in the country, though outside Jerusalem. So, too, did a number of Christians. And there was even one sect of Jews, called the Ebionites, who, while adhering generally to their faith, at the same time revered Jesus as a prophet—albeit a mortal one.
Nevertheless the real spirit of both Judaism and Christianity moved away from the Holy Land. The majority of Palestine’s Jewish population dispersed in a diaspora like that which had occurred some seven hundred years before, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. And Christianity, in a similar fashion, began to migrate across the globe—to Asia Minor, to Greece, to Rome, to Gaul, to Britain, to North Africa. Not surprisingly conflicting accounts of what had happened in or around A.D. 33 began to arise all over the civilised world. And despite the efforts of Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus and their ilk, these accounts—officially labelled ‘heresies’—continued to flourish. Some of them undoubtedly derived from some sort of first-hand knowledge, preserved both by devout Jews and by groups like the Ebionites, Jewish converts to one or another form of Christianity. Other accounts were patently based on legend, on rumour, on an amalgamation of current beliefs such as Egyptian, Hellenistic and Mithraic mystery traditions. Whatever their specific sources, they caused much disquiet to the “adherents of the message”, the coalescing orthodoxy which was endeavouring to consolidate its position.
Information on the early “heresies” is meagre. Modern knowledge about them derives largely from the attacks of their opponents, which naturally makes for a distorted picture—like the picture that might emerge of the French Resistance, for instance, from Gestapo documents. On the whole, however, Jesus seems to have been viewed by the early “heretics” in one of two ways. For some he was a fully fledged god, with few, if any, human attributes. For others he was a mortal prophet, not essentially different from, say, the Buddha or, half a millennium later, Muhammad.
Among the most important of the early heresiarchs was Valentinus, a native of Alexandria who spent the latter part of his life (A.D. 136-65) in Rome. In his time Valentinus was extremely influential, numbering such men as Ptolemy among his following. Claiming to possess a body of “secret teachings” of Jesus, he refused to submit to Roman authority, asserting that personal gnosis took precedence over any external hierarchy. Predictably enough Valentinus and his adherents were among the most belaboured targets of Irenaeus’s wrath.
Another such target was Marcion, a wealthy shipping magnate and bishop who arrived in Rome around 140 and was excommunicated four years later. Marcion posited a radical distinction between “law” and “love”, which he associated with the Old and New Testaments respectively; certain of these Marcionite ideas surfaced a full thousand years later in such works as the Perlesvaus. Marcion was the first writer to compile a canonical list of Biblical books which, in his case, excluded the whole of the Old Testament. It was in direct response to Marcion that Irenaeus compiled his canonical list, which provided the basis for the Bible as we know it today.
The third major heresiarch of the period—and in many ways the most intriguing—was Basilides, an Alexandrian scholar writing between A.D. 120 and 130. Basilides was conversant with both Hebrew scriptures and Christian Gospels. He was also steeped in Egyptian and Hellenistic thought. He is supposed to have written no less than twenty-four commentaries on the Gospels. According to Irenaeus, he promulgated a most heinous heresy indeed. Basilides claimed that the Crucifixion was a fraud, that Jesus did not die on the cross, and that a substitute—Simon of Cyrene—took his place instead. Such an assertion would seem to be bizarre. And yet it has proved to be extraordinarily persistent and tenacious. As late as the seventh century, the Koran maintained precisely the same argument—that a substitute, traditionally Simon of Cyrene, took Jesus’s place on the cross. And the same argument was upheld by the priest from whom we received the mysterious letter discussed in Chapter 1—the letter that alluded to “incontrovertible proof” of a substitution.
If there was any one region where the early heresies most entrenched themselves, it was Egypt, and more specifically Alexandria—most learned and cosmopolitan city in the world at the time, the second largest city in the Roman Empire and a repository for a bewildering variety of faiths, teachings and traditions. In the wake of the two revolts in Judaea, Egypt proved the most accessible haven for both Jewish and Christian refugees, vast numbers of whom thronged to Alexandria. It was thus not surprising that Egypt yielded the most convincing evidence to support our hypothesis. This was contained in the so-called “Gnostic Gospels”, or, more accurately, the Nag Hammadi Scrolls.
In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant, digging for soft and fertile soil near the village of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, exhumed a red earthenware jar. It proved to contain thirteen codices—papyrus books or scrolls—bound in leather. Unaware of the magnitude of the discovery, the peasant and his family used some of the codices to stoke their fire. Eventually, however, the remainder attracted the attention of experts; and one of them, smuggled out of Egypt, was offered for sale on the black market. Part of this codex, which was purchased by the C. G. Jung Foundation, proved to contain the now famous Gospel of Thomas.
In the meantime the Egyptian government nationalised the remainder of the Nag Hammadi collection in 1952. Only in 1961, however, was an international team of experts assembled to copy and translate the entire corpus of material. In 1972 the first volume of the photographic edition appeared. And in 1977 the entire collection of scrolls appeared in English translation for the first time.
The Nag Hammadi Scrolls are a collection of Biblical texts, essentially Gnostic in character, which date, it would appear, from the late fourth or early fifth century—from about A.D. 400. The scrolls are copies, and the originals from which they were transcribed date from much earlier. Certain of them—the Gospel of Thomas, for example, the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of the Egyptians—are mentioned by the very earliest of Church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus and Origen. Modern scholars have established that some if not most of the texts in the scrolls date from no later than A.D. 150. And at least one of them may include material that is even older than the four standard Gospels of the New Testament.
Taken as a whole, the Nag Hammadi collection constitutes an invaluable repository of early Christian documents—some of which can claim an authority equal to that of the Gospels. What is more, certain of these documents enjoy a claim to a unique veracity of their own. In the first place they escaped the censorship and revision of later Roman orthodoxy. In the second place they were originally composed for an Egyptian, not a Roman, audience, and are not therefore distorted or slanted to a Romanised ear. Finally they may well rest on first-hand and/or eyewitness sources—oral accounts by Jews fleeing the Holy Land, for instance, perhaps even personal acquaintances or associates of Jesus, who could tell their story with an historical fidelity the Gospels could not afford to retain.
Not surprisingly the Nag Hammadi Scrolls contain a good many passages that are inimical to orthodoxy and the “adherents of the message”. In one undated codex, for example, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Jesus speaks in the first person, escaping his death on the cross by dint of an ingenious substitution:
I did not succumb to them as they had planned… And I did not die in reality but in appearance, lest I be put to shame by them… For my death which they think happened [happened] to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death… It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns… And I was laughing at their ignorance.
With convincing consistency, certain other works in the Nag Hammadi collection bear witness to a bitter and ongoing feud between Peter and the Magdalene—a feud that would seem to reflect a schism between the “adherents of the message” and the adherents to the bloodline. Thus, in the Gospel of Mary, Peter addresses the Magdalene as follows: “Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember which you know but we do not.” Later Peter demands indignantly of the other disciples: “Did he really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?” And later still, one of the disciples replies to Peter: “Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.”
In the Gospel of Philip the reasons for this feud would appear to be obvious enough. There is, for example, a recurring emphasis on the image of the bridal chamber. According to the Gospel of Philip, “the Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber.” Granted, the bridal chamber, at first glance, might well seem to be symbolic or allegorical. But the Gospel of Philip is more explicit: “There were three who always walked with the Lord; Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion.” According to one scholar, the word “companion” is to be translated as ‘spouse’. There are certainly grounds for doing so, for the Gospel of Philip becomes more explicit still:
And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Saviour answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her?”
The Gospel of Philip elaborates on the matter: “Fear not the flesh nor love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you. If you love it, it will swallow and paralyse you.” At another point, this elaboration is translated into concrete terms: “Great is the mystery of marriage! For without it the world would not have existed. Now the existence of the world depends on man, and the existence of man on marriage.” And towards the end of the Gospel of Philip, there is the following statement: “There is the Son of man and there is the son of the Son of man. The Lord is the Son of man, and the son of the Son of man is he who is created through the Son of man.”
The Grail Dynasty
On the basis of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls alone, the possibility of a bloodline descended directly from Jesus gained considerable plausibility for us. Certain of the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” enjoyed as great a claim to veracity as the books of the New Testament. As a result the things to which they explicitly or implicitly bore witness—a substitute on the cross, a continuing dispute between Peter and the Magdalene, a marriage between the Magdalene and Jesus, the birth of a “son of the Son of Man”—could not be dismissed out of hand, however controversial they might be. We were dealing with history, not theology. And history, in Jesus’s time, was no less complex, multi-faceted and oriented towards practicalities than it is today.
The feud in the Nag Hammadi Scrolls between Peter and the Magdalene apparently testified to precisely the conflict we had hypothesised—the conflict between the “adherents of the message” and the adherents to the bloodline. But it was the former who eventually emerged triumphant to shape the course of Western civilisation. Given their increasing monopoly of learning, communication and documentation, there remained little evidence to suggest that Jesus’s family ever existed. And there was still less to establish a link between that family and the Merovingian dynasty.
Not that the “adherents of the message” had things entirely their own way. If the first two centuries of Christian history were plagued by irrepressible heresies, the centuries that followed were even more so. While orthodoxy consolidated itself theologically under Irenaeus, politically under Constantine, the heresies continued to proliferate on a hitherto unprecedented scale. However much they differed in theological details, most of the major heresies shared certain crucial factors. Most of them were essentially Gnostic or Gnostic-influenced, repudiating the hierarchical structure of Rome and extolling the supremacy of personal illumination over blind faith. Most of them were also, in one sense or another, dualist, regarding good and evil less as mundane ethical problems than as issues of ultimately cosmic import. Finally most of them concurred in regarding Jesus as mortal, born by a natural process of conception—a prophet, divinely inspired perhaps but not intrinsically divine, who died definitively on the cross or who never died on the cross at all.
In their emphasis on Jesus’s humanity, many of the heresies referred back to the august authority of Saint Paul, who had spoken of “Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3). Perhaps the most famous and profoundly radical of the heresies was Manichaeanism—essentially a fusion of Gnostic Christianity with skeins of earlier Zoroastrian and Mithraic traditions. It was founded by an individual named Mani, who was born near Baghdad in A.D. 214 to a family related to the Persian royal house. As a youth Mani was introduced by his father into an unspecified mystical sect—probably Gnostic—which emphasised asceticism and celibacy, practised baptism and wore white robes. Around A.D. 240 Mani commenced to propagate his own teachings and, like Jesus, was renowned for his spiritual healing and exorcisms. His followers proclaimed him “the new Jesus” and even credited him with a virgin birth—a prerequisite for deities at the time. He was also known as “Saviour”, “Apostle”, “Illuminator”, “Lord”, “Raiser of the Dead”, “Pilot” and “Helmsman”. The last two designations are especially suggestive, for they are interchangeable with “Nautonnier”, the official title assumed by the Grand Master of the Prieure de Sion.
According to later Arab historians Mani produced many books in which he claimed to reveal secrets Jesus had mentioned only obscurely and obliquely. He regarded Zarathustra, Buddha and Jesus as his forerunners and declared that he, like them, had received essentially the same enlightenment from the same source. His teachings consisted of a Gnostic dualism wedded to an imposing and elaborate cosmological mythology. Like the Gnostics before him and the Cathars after him, Mani posited a radical distinction between the principles of light and darkness; and the most important battlefield for these two opposed principles was the human soul. Like the later Cathars, Mani espoused the doctrine of reincarnation. Like the Cathars, too, he insisted on an initiate class, an “illuminated elect”. He referred to Jesus as the “Son of the Widow”—a phrase subsequently appropriated by Freemasonry. At the same time he declared Jesus to be mortal or, if divine at all, divine only in a symbolic or metaphorical sense, by virtue of enlightenment. And Mani, like Basilides, maintained that Jesus did not die on the cross, but was replaced by a substitute.
In A.D. 276, by order of the king, Mani was imprisoned, flayed to death, skinned and decapitated; and, perhaps to preclude a resurrection, his mutilated body was put on public display. His teachings, however, only gained impetus from his martyrdom; and among his later adherents, at least for a time, was Saint Augustine. With extraordinary rapidity, Manichaeanism spread throughout the Christian world. Despite ferocious endeavours to suppress it, it managed to survive, to influence later thinkers and to persist up to the present day. In Spain and in the south of France Manichaean schools were particularly active. By the time of the Crusades these schools had forged links with other Manichaean sects from Italy and Bulgaria. It now appears unlikely that the Cathars were an offshoot of the Bulgarian Bogomils. On the contrary, the most recent research suggests that the Cathars arose from Manichaean schools long established in France. In any case the Albigensian Crusade was essentially a crusade against Manichaeanism; and despite the most assiduous efforts of Rome, the word “Manichaean” has survived to become an accepted part of our language and vocabulary.
In addition to Manichaeanism, of course, there were numerous other heresies. Of them all, it was the heresy of Arius which posed the most dangerous threat to orthodox Christian doctrine during the first thousand years of its history. Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria around 318, and died in 335. His dispute with orthodoxy was quite simple and rested on a single premise—that Jesus was wholly mortal, was in no sense divine, and in no sense anything other than an inspired teacher. By positing a single omnipotent and supreme God—a God who did not incarnate in the flesh, and did not suffer humiliation and death at the hands of his creation—Arius effectively embedded Christianity in an essentially Judaic framework. And he may well, as a resident of Alexandria, have been influenced by Judaic teachings there—the teachings of the Ebionites, for example. At the same time the supreme God of Arianism enjoyed immense appeal in the West. As Christianity came to acquire increasingly secular power, such a God became increasingly attractive. Kings and potentates could identify with such a God more readily than they could with a meek, passive deity who submitted without resistance to martyrdom and eschewed contact with the world.
Although Arianism was condemned at the Council of Nicea in 325, Constantine had always been sympathetic towards it, and became more so at the end of his life. On his death, his son and successor, Constantius, became unabashedly Arian; and under his auspices councils were convened which drove orthodox Church leaders into exile. By 360 Arianism had all but displaced Roman Christianity. And though it was officially condemned again in 381, it continued to thrive and gain adherents. When the Merovingians rose to power during the fifth century, virtually every bishopric in Christendom was either Arian or vacant.
Among the most fervent devotees of Arianism were the Goths, who had been converted to it from paganism during the fourth century. The Suevi, the Lombards, the Alans, the Vandals, the Burgundians and the Ostrogoths were all Arian. So were the Visigoths, who, when they sacked Rome in 480, spared Christian churches. If the early Merovingians, prior to Clovis, were at all receptive to Christianity, it would have been the Arian Christianity of their immediate neighbours, the Visigoths and Burgundians. Under Visigoth auspices, Arianism became the dominant form of Christianity in Spain, the Pyrenees and what is now southern France.
If Jesus’s family did indeed find refuge in Gaul, their overlords, by the fifth century, would have been the Arian Visigoths. Under the Arian regime, the family is not likely to have been persecuted. It would probably have been highly esteemed and might well have intermarried with Visigoth nobility before its subsequent intermarriage with the Franks to produce the Merovingians. And with Visigoth patronage and protection, it would have been secure against all threats from Rome. It is thus not particularly surprising that unmistakably Semitic names—Bera, for instance—occur among Visigoth aristocracy and royalty. Dagobert II married a Visigoth princess whose father was named Bera. The name Bera recurs repeatedly in the Visigoth-Merovingian family tree descended from Dagobert II and Sigisbert IV.
The Roman Church is said to have declared that Dagobert’s son had converted to Arianism, and it would not be very extraordinary if he had done so. Despite the pact between the Church and Clovis, the Merovingians had always been sympathetic to Arianism. One of Clovis’s grandsons, Chilperic, made no secret of his Arian proclivities.
If Arianism was not inimical to Judaism, neither was it to Islam, which rose so meteorically in the seventh century. The Arian view of Jesus was quite in accord with that of the Koran. In the Koran Jesus is mentioned no less than thirty-five times, under a number of impressive appellations including “Messenger of God” and “Messiah”. At no point, however, is he regarded as anything other than a mortal prophet, a forerunner of Muhammad and a spokesman for a single supreme God. And like Basilides and Mani, the Koran maintains that Jesus did not die on the cross, “they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did.” The Koran itself does not elaborate on this ambiguous statement, but Islamic commentators do. According to most of them, there was a substitute—generally, though not always, supposed to have been Simon of Cyrene. Certain Muslim writers speak of Jesus hiding in a niche of a wall and watching the Crucifixion of a surrogate—which concurs with the fragment already quoted from the Nag Hammadi Scrolls.
Judaism and the Merovingians
It is worth noting the tenacity, even in the face of the most vigorous persecution, with which most of the heresies—and especially Arianism—insisted on Jesus’s mortality and humanity. But we found no indication that any of them necessarily possessed any first-hand knowledge of the premise to which they so persistently adhered. Still less was there any evidence, apart from the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, to suggest their awareness of a possible bloodline. It was possible, of course, that certain documents did exist—documents akin to the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, perhaps even genealogies and archives. The sheer virulence of Roman persecution might well suggest a fear of such evidence and a desire to ensure that it would never see the light. But if that was the case, Rome would appear to have succeeded.
The heresies, then, provided us with no decisive confirmation of a connection between Jesus’s family and the Merovingians, who appeared on the world stage some four centuries later. For such confirmation we were obliged to look elsewhere—back to the Merovingians themselves. At first glance the evidence, such as it was, seemed to be meagre. We had already considered the legendary birth of Merovee, for example—child of two fathers, one of whom was a mysterious aquatic creature from across the sea—and guessed that this curious fable might have been intended simultaneously to reflect and conceal a dynastic alliance or intermarriage. But, while the fish symbolism was suggestive, it was hardly conclusive. Similarly the subsequent pact between Clovis and the Roman Church made considerably more sense in the light of our scenario; but the pact itself did not constitute concrete evidence. And while the Merovingian royal blood was credited with a sacred, miraculous and divine nature, it was not explicitly stated anywhere that this blood was in fact Jesus’s.
In the absence of any decisive or conclusive testimony, we had to proceed cautiously. We had to evaluate fragments of circumstantial evidence, and try to assemble these fragments into a coherent picture. And we had first to determine whether there were any uniquely Judaic influences on the Merovingians.
Certainly the Merovingian kings do not seem to have been anti-Semitic. On the contrary they seem to have been not merely tolerant, but downright sympathetic to the Jews in their domains—and this despite the assiduous protests of the Roman Church. Mixed marriages were a frequent occurrence. Many Jews, especially in the south, possessed large landed estates. Many of them owned Christian slaves and servants. And many of them acted as magistrates and high-ranking administrators for their Merovingian lords. On the whole the Merovingian attitude towards Judaism seems to have been without parallel in Western history prior to the Lutheran Reformation.
The Merovingians themselves believed their miraculous power to be vested, in large part, in their hair, which they were forbidden to cut. Their position on this matter was identical to that of the Nazorites in the Old Testament, of whom Samson was a member. There is much evidence to suggest that Jesus was also a Nazorite. According to both early Church writers and modern scholars his brother, Saint James, indisputably was.
In the Merovingian royal house, and in the families connected with it, there were a surprising number of specifically Judaic names. Thus, in 577, a brother of King Clotaire II was named Samson. Subsequently one Miron ’le Levite’ was count of Besalou and bishop of Gerona. One count of Roussillon was named Solomon, and another Solomon became king of Brittany. There was an Abbot Elisachar—a variant of “Eleazar” and “Lazarus”. And the very name “Merovee” would seem to be of Middle Eastern derivation.
Judaic names became increasingly prominent through dynastic marriages between the Merovingians and the Visigoths. Such names figure in Visigoth nobility and royalty; and it is possible that many so-called “Visigoth” families were in fact Judaic. This possibility gains further credence from the fact that chroniclers would frequently use the words “Goth” and “Jew” interchangeably. The south of France and the Spanish marches—the region known as Septimania in Merovingian and Carolingian times—contained an extremely large Jewish population. This region was also known as “Gothic” or “Gothia”, and its Jewish inhabitants were thus often called “Goths”—an error which may, on occasion, have been deliberate. By dint of this error, Jews could not be identified as such, save perhaps by specific family names. Thus Dagobert’s father-in-law was named Bera, a Semitic name. And Bera’s sister was married to a member of a family named Levy.
Granted, names and a mystical attitude towards one’s hair were not necessarily a solid basis on which to establish a connection between the Merovingians and Judaism. But there was another fragment of evidence which was somewhat more persuasive. The Merovingians were the royal dynasty of the Franks—a Teutonic tribe which adhered to Teutonic tribal law. In the late fifth century this law, codified and couched in a Roman framework, became known as Salic Law. In its origins, however, Salic Law was ultimately Teutonic tribal law and predated the advent of Roman Christianity in Western Europe. During the centuries that followed it continued to stand in opposition to the ecclesiastical law promulgated by Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages it was the official secular law of the Holy Roman Empire. As late as the Lutheran Reformation the German peasantry and knighthood included, in their grievances against the Church, the latter’s disregard for traditional Salic law.
There is one entire section of the Salic Law—Title 45, “De Migrantibus”—which has consistently puzzled scholars and commentators, and been the source of incessant legal debate. It is a complicated section of stipulations and clauses pertaining to circumstances whereby itinerants may establish residence and be accorded citizenship. What is curious about it is that it is not Teutonic in origin, and writers have been driven to postulate bizarre hypotheses to account for its inclusion in the Salic Code. Only recently, however, it has been discovered that this section of the Salic Code derives directly from Judaic Laws. More specifically, it can be traced back to a section in the Talmud. It can thus be said that Salic Law, at least in part, issues directly from traditional Judaic law. And this in turn suggests that the Merovingians under whose auspices Salic Law was codified were not only versed in Judaic law, but had access to Judaic texts.
The Principality in Septimania
Such fragments were provocative, but they provided only tenuous support for our hypothesis that a bloodline descended from Jesus existed in the south of France, that this bloodline intermarried with the Merovingians and that the Merovingians, in consequence, were partly Judaic. But while the Merovingian epoch failed to provide us with any conclusive evidence for our hypothesis, the epoch which immediately followed it did. By means of this “retroactive evidence” our hypothesis suddenly became tenable.
We had already explored the possibility of the Merovingian bloodline surviving after being deposed from its thrones by the Carolingians. In the process we had encountered an autonomous principality that existed in the south of France for a century and a half—a principality whose most famous ruler was Guillem de Gellone. Guillem was one of the most revered heroes of his age. He was also the protagonist of the Willehalm by Wolfram von Eschenbach, and is said to have been associated with the Grail family. It was in Guillem and his background that we found some of our most surprising and exciting evidence.
At the apex of his power Guillem de Gellone included among his domains north-eastern Spain, the Pyrenees and the region of southern France known as Septimania. This area had long contained a large Jewish population. During the sixth and seventh centuries this population had enjoyed extremely cordial relations with its Visigoth overlords, who espoused Arian Christianity—so much so, in fact, that mixed marriages were common, and the words “Goth” and “Jew” were often used interchangeably.
By 711, however, the situation of the Jews in Septimania and north-eastern Spain had sadly deteriorated. By that time Dagobert II had been assassinated and his lineage driven into hiding in the Razes—the region including and surrounding Rennes-le-Chateau. And while collateral branches of the Merovingian bloodline still nominally occupied the throne to the north, the only real power resided in the hands of the so-called Mayors of the Palace—the Carolingian usurpers who, with the sanction and support of Rome, set about establishing their own dynasty. By that time, too, the Visigoths had themselves converted to Roman Christianity and begun to persecute the Jews in their domains. Thus, when Visigoth Spain was overrun by the Moors in 711, the Jews eagerly welcomed the invaders.
Under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a thriving existence. The Moors were gracious to them, often placing them in administrative charge of captured cities like Cordoba, Granada and Toledo. Jewish commerce and trade were encouraged and attained a new prosperity. Judaic thought coexisted, side by side, with that of Islam, and the two cross-fertilised each other. And many towns—including Cordoba, the Moorish capital of Spain—were predominantly Jewish in population.
At the beginning of the eighth century the Moors crossed the Pyrenees into Septimania; and from 720 until 759—while Dagobert’s grandson and great-grandson continued their clandestine existence in the Razes—Septimania was in Islamic hands. Septimania became an autonomous Moorish principality, with its own capital at Narbonne and owing only nominal allegiance to the emir of Cordoba. And from Narbonne the Moors of Septimania began to strike northwards, capturing cities as deep into Frankish territory as Lyons.
The Moorish advance was checked by Charles Martel, Mayor of the Palace and grandfather of Charlemagne. By 738 Charles had driven the Moors from Narbonne, to which he then laid siege. Narbonne, however—defended by both Moors and Jews—proved impregnable, and Charles vented his frustration by devastating the surrounding countryside.
By 752 Charles’s son, Pepin, had formed alliances with local aristocrats, thereby bringing Septimania fully under his control. Narbonne, however, continued to resist, withstanding a seven-year-long siege by Pepin’s forces. The city was a painful thorn in Pepin’s side, at a time when it was most urgent for him to consolidate his position. He and his successors were acutely sensitive to charges of having usurped the Merovingian throne. To establish a claim to legitimacy, he forged dynastic alliances with surviving families of the Merovingian royal blood. To further validate his status he arranged for his coronation to be distinguished by the Biblical rite of anointing—whereby the Church assumed the prerogative of creating kings. But there was another aspect to the ritual of anointing as well. According to scholars, anointing was a deliberate attempt to suggest that the Frankish monarchy was a replica, if not actually a continuation, of the Judaic monarchy in the Old Testament. This, in itself, is extremely interesting. For why would Pepin the usurper want to legitimise himself by means of a Biblical prototype? Unless the dynasty he deposed—the Merovingian dynasty—had legitimised itself by precisely the same means.
In any case Pepin was confronted by two problems—the tenacious resistance of Narbonne, and the matter of establishing his own legitimate claim to the throne by referring to Biblical precedent. As Professor Arthur Zuckerman of Columbia University has demonstrated, he resolved both problems by a pact in 759 with Narbonne’s Jewish population. According to this pact, Pepin would receive Jewish endorsement for his claim to a Biblical succession. He would also receive Jewish aid against the Moors. In return he would grant the Jews of Septimania a principality, and a king, of their own.
In 759 the Jewish population of Narbonne turned suddenly upon the city’s Muslim defenders, slaughtered them and opened the gates of the fortress to the besieging Franks. Shortly thereafter, the Jews acknowledged Pepin as their nominal overlord and validated his claim to a legitimate Biblical succession. Pepin, in the meantime, kept his part of the bargain. In 768 a principality was created in Septimania—a Jewish principality which paid nominal allegiance to Pepin but was essentially independent. A ruler was officially installed as king of the Jews. In the romances he is called Aymery. According to existing records, however, he seems, on being received into the ranks of Frankish nobility, to have taken the name Theodoric or Thierry. Theodoric, or Thierry, was the father of Guillem de Gellone. And he was recognised by both Pepin and the caliph of Baghdad, as “the seed of the royal house of David.”
As we had already discovered, modern scholars were uncertain about Theodoric’s origins and background. According to most researchers he was of Merovingian descent. According to Arthur Zuckerman he is said to have been a native of Baghdad—an “exilarch”, descended from Jews who had lived in Babylon since the Babylonian Captivity. It is also possible, however, that the “exilarch” from Baghdad was not Theodoric. It is possible that the “exilarch” came from Baghdad to consecrate Theodoric, and subsequent records confused the two. Professor Zuckerman mentions a curious assertion that the “Western exilarchs” were of “purer blood” than those in the East. Who were the “Western exilarchs”, if not the Merovingians? Why would an individual of Merovingian descent be acknowledged as king of the Jews, ruler of a Jewish principality and “seed of the royal house of David”, unless the Merovingians were indeed partly Judaic? Following the Church’s collusion in Dagobert’s assassination and its betrayal of the pact ratified with Clovis, the surviving Merovingians may well have repudiated all allegiance to Rome and returned to what was their former faith. Their ties to that faith would, in any case, have been strengthened by Dagobert’s marriage to the daughter of an ostensibly “Visigoth” prince with the patently Semitic name of Bera.
Theodoric, or Thierry, further consolidated his position, and Pepin’s as well, by an expeditious marriage to the latter’s sister Alda, the aunt of Charlemagne. In the years that followed the Jewish kingdom of Septimania enjoyed a prosperous existence. It was richly endowed with estates held in freehold from the Carolingian monarchs. It was even granted sizeable tracts of Church land despite the vigorous protests of Pope Stephen III and his successors.
The son of Theodoric, king of the Jews of Septimania, was Guillem de Gellone, whose titles included count of Barcelona, of Toulouse, of Auvergne and of Razes. Like his father Guillem was not only Merovingian, but also a Jew of royal blood. Royal blood acknowledged by the Carolingians, by the caliph and, albeit grudgingly, by the pope to be that of the House of David.
Despite subsequent attempts to conceal it, modern scholarship and research have proved Guillem’s Judaism beyond dispute. Even in the romances where he figures as Guillaume, Prince of Orange, he is fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic. The device on his shield is the same as that of the Eastern “exilarchs”—the Lion of Judah, the tribe to which the house of David, and subsequently Jesus, belonged. He is nicknamed “Hook-Nose”. And even amidst his campaigns, he takes pains to observe the Sabbath and the Judaic Feast of the Tabernacles. As Arthur Zuckerman remarks:
The chronicler who wrote the original report of the siege and fall of Barcelona recorded events according to the Jewish calendar… [The] commander of the expedition, Duke William of Narbonne and Toulouse conducted the action with strict observance of Jewish Sabbaths and holy Days. In all of this, he enjoyed the full understanding and co-operation of King Louis.
Guillem de Gellone became one of the so-called “Peers of Charlemagne”—an authentic historical hero who, in the popular mind and tradition, ranked with such legendary figures as Roland and Olivier. When Charlemagne’s son, Louis, was invested as emperor, it was Guillem who placed the crown on his head. Louis is reported to have said, “Lord William… it is your lineage that has raised up mine.” It is an extraordinary statement, given that it is addressed to a man whose lineage—so far as later historians are concerned—would seem to be utterly obscure.
At the same time Guillem was more than a warrior. Shortly before 792 he established an academy at Gellone, importing scholars and creating a renowned library; and Gellone soon became an esteemed centre of Judaic studies. It is from just such an academy that the “heathen” Flegetanis might have issued—the Hebrew scholar descended from Solomon, who, according to Wolfram, confided the secret of the Holy Grail to Kyot of Provence.
In 806 Guillem withdrew from active life, secluding himself in his academy. Here, around 812, he died, and the academy was later converted into a monastery, the now famous Saint-Guilhelm-le-Desert. Even before Guillem’s death, however, Gellone had become one of the first known seats in Europe for the cult of the Magdalene—which, significantly enough, flourished there concurrently with the Judaic academy.
Jesus was of the Tribe of Judah and the royal house of David. The Magdalene is said to have carried the Grail—the Sangraal or “royal blood”—into France. And in the eighth century there was, in the south of France, a potentate of the Tribe of Judah and the royal house of David, who was acknowledged as king of the Jews. He was not only a practising Jew, however. He was also a Merovingian. And through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem, he and his family are associated with the Holy Grail.
The Seed of David
In later centuries assiduous attempts seem to have been made to expunge from the records all trace of the Jewish Kingdom of Septimania. The frequent confusion of “Goths” and “Jews” seems indicative of this censorship. But the censorship could not hope to be entirely successful. As late as 1143 Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in an address to Louis VII of France, condemned the Jews of Narbonne, who claimed to have a king residing among them. In Cambridge, a monk, one Theobald, speaks of ’the chief Princes and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain [and] assemble together at Narbonne where the royal seed resides.’ And in 1165-6 Benjamin of Tudela, a famous traveller and chronicler, reports that in Narbonne there are “sages, magnates and princes at the head of whom is… a descendant of the House of David as stated in his family tree.”
But any seed of David residing in Narbonne by the twelfth century was of less consequence than certain other seed living elsewhere. Family trees bifurcate, spread, subdivide and produce veritable forests. If certain descendants of Theodoric and Guillem de Gellone remained in attained more august domains. By the twelfth century these domains included the most illustrious in Christendom—Lorraine and the Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem.
In the ninth century the bloodline of Guillem de Gellone had culminated in the first dukes of Aquitaine. It also became aligned with the ducal house of Brittany. And in the tenth century a certain Hugues de Plantard—nicknamed “Long Nose” and a lineal descendant of both Dagobert and Guillem de Gellone—became the father of Eustache, first Count of Boulogne. Eustache’s grandson was Godfroi de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine and conqueror of Jerusalem. And from Godfroi there issued a dynasty and a ‘royal tradition’ which, by virtue of being founded on “the rock of Sion”, was equal to those presiding over France, England and Germany. If the Merovingians were indeed descended from Jesus, then Godfroi—scion of the Merovingian blood royal—had, in his conquest of Jerusalem, regained his rightful heritage.
Godfroi and the subsequent house of Lorraine were, of course, nominally Catholic. To survive in a now Christianised world, they would have had to be. But their origins seem to have been known about in certain quarters at least. As late as the sixteenth century it is reported that Henri de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, on entering the town of Joinville in Champagne, was received by exuberant crowds. Among them, certain individuals are recorded to have chanted “Hosannah filio David” (“Hosannah to the Son of David”). It is not perhaps insignificant that this incident is recounted in a modern history of Lorraine, printed in 1966. The work contains a special introduction by Otto von Habsburg who today is titular Duke of Lorraine and King of Jerusalem.
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