Holy Blood, Holy Grail (58 page)

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

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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 papyrous 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. z’

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

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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,

-escaping his death on the cross by dint of an ingenious substitution.

In the following extract, Jesus speaks in the first person:

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 .22

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. 123 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

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all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”Z4 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 i’s, 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. 1213 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. 127

According to one scholar, the word “companion’ is to be translated as ‘spouse. 128 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 ?129

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.”3 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

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man is he who is created through the Son of man. 14 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 socalled “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, mufti-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 hypothesi sed 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.

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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

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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

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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