Jesus: The coverup

"Holy Blood, Holy Grail," the source for "The Da Vinci Code," is a masterwork of paranoid pseudohistory. Now its author is back, arguing that Jesus faked his own death and ran off with Mary Magdelene. Verily, there's a sucker born every minute.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Religion, Books, Laura Miller, Christianity, Reviews, Jesus Christ, Book reviews

Woodcut by Gustave Dore, done for The Dori Bible (New York: Dover Publications, 1974)

April 7, 2006 | There is a revelation lurking in Michael Baigent's "The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History," but it's not the one the author and publisher promise. Baigent, one of the co-authors of the 1982 bestseller "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a putative work of nonfiction on which Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" is based, hints in this new book that he'll provide further evidence supporting the elaborate theories in "Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code." Those theories involve Jesus surviving the crucifixion and fleeing with his wife, Mary Magdalene, to the South of France where they allegedly founded the Merovingian Dynasty of Frankish kings. Proof of all this, Baigent claims, exists somewhere in the form of certain documents -- some protected by secret societies, others suppressed by an all-powerful and malevolent Vatican.

Of course, by now, with over 40 million copies of "The Da Vinci Code" in print and a big-budget movie version of the novel due to premiere in May, it's probably safe to say that the "coverup" -- if there ever was one -- has failed. Baigent himself can't rustle up any sufficiently sensational new allegations to fling before the public eye, and in "The Jesus Papers" has to resort to reheating leftovers from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." In a way, the copyright infringement lawsuit Baigent and fellow "Grail" co-author Michael Leigh recently filed against Brown in a British court shows more creativity than anything printed on the pages of the new book. The publicity surrounding the trial has not only driven up sales of the 20-year-old book Baigent accuses Brown of ripping off, it seems to have given "The Jesus Papers" a healthy boost as well. Last week, Baigent's new book climbed to the sixth slot on Amazon's bestseller list.

Nevertheless, the most intriguing discovery to be found in "The Jesus Papers" will probably only interest those of us who pursue the odd and somewhat pitiful hobby of crank-watching; it's finally clear from reading this book that it was Baigent -- rather than co-authors Leigh and Henry Lincoln -- who actually wrote "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." The voice, which grows more and more authoritative in tone as the foundations of its arguments dissolve into piffle, is unmistakable. Baigent's co-authors may have supplied the research and quite possibly the underlying structure of "Grail"; this book offers little fresh information and is badly muddled. But the style of "The Jesus Papers," a masterly counterpoint of bluster, false humility and self-righteousness, matches that of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" like a fingerprint.

And what a style it is; Baigent helped make "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" one of the masterworks of paranoid pseudohistory, along with, say, "Chariots of the Gods." In ambition and organization, "The Jesus Papers" can't hold a candle to "Grail," but because it's a less seamlessly constructed edifice of bunkum, it gives you a clearer picture of how Baigent et al. managed to hoodwink millions of readers. Since writing "Grail," Baigent has borrowed a few crowd-pleasing, thriller-style tricks from Brown, but he's not as gifted a panderer, and he never seems as comfortable when he's trying to entertain you as when he's doing what he does best: pretending -- magnificently -- that he actually knows what he's talking about.

You do get the impression that Baigent isn't as excited about the Magdalene-Grail-bloodline theory as he once was. The parts of "The Jesus Papers" that deal with the theory are relatively perfunctory and cover ground already dealt with in "Grail." In "The Jesus Papers," Baigent seems most enthused during a long, tedious and intellectually muddled section that extols the "secret knowledge" of a grab bag of mystical cults claiming roots in ancient Egypt. He seems to believe sincerely in such practices, implies that he has firsthand experience of them, and attempts to rope Jesus into the cults with the pretty sketchy argument that the messiah spent his youth beside the Nile studying similar rites.

However, the customers will be shelling out to read more on how Jesus faked his own death, not to be lectured on murky Hermetic mysticism, and Baigent knows that he better deliver. Much of the Grail bloodline theory centers around a small town in Southern France where the local priest is rumored to have discovered some incriminating documents and parlayed them into a financial windfall in the late 1800s. In reality, as even Baigent admits (in a footnote), the priest was engaging in the ecclesiastical crime of simony -- charging people to say masses in their names -- but his "unexplained wealth" still led to rumors that he'd discovered some sort of treasure.

Clues to the nature of this treasure are reputed to be hidden in the garish decorations inside the church built by the priest with his ill-gotten gains. One example of such a "clue" provides an excellent illustration of Baigent's ingeniously slippery rhetorical technique.

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