God, this conspiracy is getting bigger
As Dan Brown is accused of stealing the plot for the Da Vinci Code, new books are queuing to reveal the truth about the Jesus dynasty and other odd goings on, finds Stuart Wavell
Another day, another conspiracy theory. Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code outraged traditionalists with the idea that Jesus married and had children. The theological applecart is about to be upset again by a new scholarly book that kicks down another central prop of Christianity. It claims Jesus was intent on founding a royal dynasty, not a new religion.
With The Jesus Dynasty, published next month, the biblical archeologist James Tabor is tapping into a market that has made a multi-millionaire out of Brown, who was being sued in the High Court last week by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. They claim that much of Brown’s novel derives from their 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
Brown’s book revolves around the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and founded the Merovingian dynasty of French kings, a secret protected by the Knights Templar and a mysterious group called the Priory of Sion, which included in its membership Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci supposedly left a “clue” in his painting The Last Supper by depicting the apostle John as Magdalene.
Tabor, chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, says such speculation is “highly suspect at best”, although he does not rule out the possibility that Jesus married and had children.
From archeological and textual evidence, Tabor has concluded that far from setting himself up as the Messiah, Jesus was intent on establishing himself and his family as the rightful rulers of Israel.
Jesus and his extended family were “royals” descended from King David, who ruled in the 10th century BC, Tabor says. He was proclaimed “king of the Jews” and executed for this claim.
Yet his paternity remains open to debate. His adoptive father Joseph apparently died childless and his mother Mary remarried Joseph’s brother Clopas, but there is “good reason to doubt” whether either of Mary’s two husbands fathered Jesus, Tabor maintains.
So who was his father? According to an anti-Christian work by the philosopher Celsus in AD178, Mary “was pregnant by a Roman soldier named Panthera and was driven away by her husband as an adulterer”. Such was the gossip in Jewish circles. In Germany Tabor tracked down the grave of a Roman soldier of the same name, possibly Jewish, who was a contemporary of Mary.
“So we have the right name, the right occupation, the right place and the right time,” Tabor concludes. “(But) there is no way to prove a connection with this type of evidence, short of DNA tests of identifiable remains.”
Contrary to assumptions that he came to found a new religion that would supersede Judaism, Jesus preached “a very Jewish apocalyptic message”. He wanted a social revolution, informed by spiritual values, in anticipation of the imminent collapse of the Roman empire, Tabor writes.
In the event, after Jesus’s crucifixion in AD30 his half-brother James became head of the family until he was executed in AD62 and was followed by Jesus’s second brother Simon, who ruled for 45 years before his brutal death. Leadership then passed to a man named Judas, perhaps one of Jesus’s nephews.
“What we clearly have is nothing less than a Jesus dynasty, taking us well into the 2nd century AD,” Tabor claims.
However diligent his research, Tabor’s theory is largely speculative, adding to the canon of colourful books that occupy a lucrative publishing niche. In this netherworld where mysteries intersect, nothing is off limits. Certainly not Diana, Princess of Wales.
When Diana died in a car crash in the Pont d’Alma tunnel in central Paris nine years ago, conspiracy theories abounded. But something much more sinister was evidently afoot.
In pre-Christian times, the Pont d’Alma area had been the site of a pagan temple of the goddess Diana and a direct gateway to heaven. Mindful of this safety net, the place was chosen by the Merovingian kings (AD500-751) to fight their duels, with the loser going directly to paradise.
At least, we have to take this on trust from Rayelan Allan’s book Diana, Queen of Heaven, which relates that as a Spencer, Diana was descended via the Stuarts from the Merovingian dynasty, which in turn was descended from the union of Jesus and Mary.
With such deft logic, the Diana myth hooks up with books such as The Da Vinci Code. But Allan goes one stage further. A secret cabal of powerful men, intent on establishing a new world order, had manipulated Diana to marry Bill Clinton (Hillary would be removed through divorce or even murder), Allan claimed. Diana’s refusal led MI6 to eliminate her. They picked Pont d’Alma to “send a signal” that would lead to Saint Diana and a new world religion.
This fantasy has echoes of an equally implausible explanation for the death of Princess Grace of Monaco in a car crash in 1982. Of course that was no accident either, but linked to her involvement with the Order of the Solar Temple.
Members of this sinister Francophone cult, which claimed to have descended from the Knights Templar, later committed mass suicide at locations in Quebec and Switzerland. Grace, initiated by having sex during a magical ceremony and induced to give the order millions of dollars, became disillusioned and threatened to reclaim her funds, whereupon she was murdered.
But the Solar Temple baddies are minnows compared with the Illuminati, or “enlightened ones”, who feature in many conspiracy theories. They were founded in Bavaria in 1776 by a former Jesuit law professor who dreamt of fomenting revolution and installing a single world government. Although they ceased to exist after 1785, they have been blamed for the French and Russian revolutions, not to mention the creation of the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank and much else.
The truth is definitely out there, and so is David Icke, the former professional goalkeeper turned sports presenter who, while Green party spokesman, announced he was the son of God 15 years ago on Terry Wogan’s chat show.
Icke is now the author of 15 books with such compelling titles as Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race Has Controlled the World for Thousands of Years — and Still Does, and I Am Me, I Am Free. His message is that life is an illusion generated by reptilian Illuminati who manipulate humans with the aim of enslaving us. And yes, he blames them for Diana’s death.
Icke realised that the late Sir Edward Heath was a lizard as long ago as 1989, when he shared a makeup room with the former prime minister at Sky News, he confided to the Daily Express in January. “As his eyes scanned me . . . they went jet black,” he said. “It was like looking into two black holes.”
In the scale of daft conspiracies, it ranks up there with the great Titanic insurance scam, listed in Joel Levy’s The Little Book of Conspiracies. The theory goes that it was not the Titanic that sank, but its sister ship the Olympic.
While the Titanic was being prepared for its launch, the Olympic collided with a British warship off the coast of Southampton and the insurers refused to pay up. The solution was to do a switch, so the battered Olympic was dressed up as her sister and launched with the aim of scuttling the ship, offloading passengers and claiming the insurance money. But the Olympic hit an iceberg and went down with massive loss of life.
Entertaining stuff, but it doesn’t quite measure up to theories challenging articles of faith. A classic of this genre is a disturbing reinterpretation of the Book of Genesis by Christian O’Brien, a geologist involved in the discovery of the Tchoga Zambil ziggurat in Iran.
First published in 1985, The Genius of the Few introduced a group of alien sages known as the “Shining Ones” who, O’Brien claimed, established an agricultural centre remembered as the garden of Eden and founded the Hebrew race.
According to O’Brien, Yahweh was a leader of the Shining Ones who led the Israelites out of Egypt, guiding them from an aerial craft that rode on “a pillar of cloud” by day and a “pillar of fire” by night.
He was a bellicose and intimidating figure who kept his face covered when talking to Moses, even in the privacy of his specially constructed tent. Neither he nor the Ark of the Covenant, which he kept close, could be touched without danger to life. From the tent’s vast dimensions, O’Brien calculated that Yahweh must have measured between 8ft and 13ft.
Tales don’t come any taller than that.
