Holy Blood, Holy Grail - Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

"Any responsible researcher must, like a detective, pursue whatever clues come to hand, however seemingly improbable."

As you may have noticed I have a tendency to include in each blog brief quotes from the books I write about to help give an idea of the effect that each book has had upon me. It is rare that I include this quote with disdain or irony but, sadly, this entry, which may appear more like a review, does just that.

The work of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln is the very same that, just a few years ago, inspired Dan Brown to write The DaVinci Code. The basic hypothesis is that Jesus in fact did NOT die on the Cross in Biblical times but lived to sire a family through Mary Magdalen and that this issue was transplanted across the Mediterranean to France where it eventually integrated into a French royal line known as the Merovingians who, when deposed by the Carolingians, went into hiding and have been so for the last millennium and a half protected by an offshoot of the Knights Templar know as the Prieure du Sion. Wow, that's a mouthful.

Now I will admit that I was intrigued by this particular book since one of its basic arguments is one that I myself had deduced in my experience with medieval romances; that the term Holy Grail, sometimes 'Sangraal' was a mutated form of 'Sang Real' or Blood Royal. This was as far as I had gotten in my own researches, which were only limited at the time having no real indication for what kind of Royal Blood the romances I had read could possibly be referring to. But the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have developed one such conclusion, albeit tragically far fetched, so I picked it up from Amazon this past Christmas and have just gotten around to giving it a read.

Now I could spend pages nitpicking the many minor claims and questionable connections that these fellows have made but I would run the risk of treading trodden ground (the book is nearly as old as I am). Instead I'd like to simply meditate on these authors tragic misallocation of time and energy in the composing of this particular book.

For nearly twenty years historians, theologians, and literary critics have been avidly discrediting the claims made in this text. In fact even one of the authors governing  premises has been found to be a complete fraud (the existence of the Prieure du Sion was found to have been falsified). But in truth, it does not take a professional to notice the cracks in this edifice of pop-history; one has simply to notice aspects of the authors style.

It is probably worth mentioning that the author who received second-billing, Richard Leigh, was not a historian but a novelist. Accordingly, the book reads much like a novel; it is typically presented in first person as if the reader were looking over the researchers' shoulders as they discovered more and more intriguing "evidence" that eventually leads to an earth-shattering hypothesis in chapter 11. The result makes for an entertaining read but at the cost of grossly misrepresenting not only standard research procedures, but those of the authors as well. Now I may sound like a stolid college professor, but any freshman learns (ideally) that the hypothesis comes first and the writer must spend the larger portion of the composition supporting that hypothesis. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail present their research as if each new piece of "evidence" were a trail of breadcrumbs that lead incontrovertibly to their hypothesis. The problem is; there are so many rhetorical leaps, so many instances of the least likely solution being favored, that one cannot help but think that, like me, they had begun with a simply grammatical transmutation and built their story around it.

I should mention that I can't say for certain that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are entirely mislead. In fact there are a great many questions raised in their book that warrant further investigation. But the problem here is method. As you see in the quote included above the authors of this book are more than ready to justify any number of violations of established scholarship and therefore it is not surprising that established scholarship has spent the last two decades beating this book's theories into the ground; if not for the sake of Christian tradition then at least for the defense of their own professions whose faces are often spit in by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.