Holy Blood, Holy Grail (47 page)

Our hypothetical scenario was both logically consistent and intriguing. As yet, however, it was also preposterous. Attractive though it might be, it was, as yet, much too sketchy and rested on far too flimsy a foundation.

Although it explained many things, it could not yet in itself be supported.

There were still too many holes in it, too many inconsistencies and anomalies, too many loose ends. Before we could seriously entertain or consider it, we would have to determine whether there was any real evidence to sustain it. In an attempt to find such evidence we began to explore the

Gospels, the historical context of the New Testament and the writings

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of the early Church fathers. 12 The Priest-King Who Never Ruled Most people today speak of “Christianity’ as if it were a single specific thing a coherent, homogeneous and unified entity. Needless to say

“Christianity’ is nothing of the sort. As everyone knows, there are numerous forms of “Christianity’: Roman Catholicism, for example, or the Church of

England initiated by Henry VIII. There are the various other denominations of Protestantism from the original Lutheranism and Calvinism of the sixteenth century to such relatively recent developments as Unitarianism.

There are multitudinous ‘fringe’ or “evangelical’ congregations, such as the

Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. And there are assorted contemporary sects and. cults, like the Children of God and the Unification

Church of the Reverend Moon. If one surveys this bewildering spectrum of beliefs from the rigidly dogmatic and conservative to the radical and ecstatic it is difficult to determine what exactly constitutes

“Christianity’.

If there is a single factor that does permit one to speak of Christianity’, a single factor that does link the otherwise diverse and divergent

“Christian’ creeds, it is the New Testament, and more particularly the unique status ascribed by the New Testament to Jesus, his Crucifixion and

Resurrection. Even if one does not subscribe to the literal or historical truth of those events, acceptance of their symbolic significance generally suffices for one to be considered a Christian.

If there is any unity, then, in the diffuse phenomenon called Christianity, it resides in the New Testament and, more specifically, in the accounts of Jesus known as the Four Gospels. These accounts are popularly regarded as the most authoritative on record: and for many Christians they are assumed to be both coherent and unimpugnable. From

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childhood one is led to believe that the “story’ of Jesus, as it is preserved in the Four Gospels, is, if not Godinspired, at least definitive. The four evangelists, supposed authors of the Gospels, are deemed to be unimpeachable witnesses who reinforce and confirm each other’s testimony. Of the people who today call themselves Christians, relatively few are aware of the fact that the Four Gospels not only contradict each other, but, at times, violently disagree.

So far as popular tradition is concerned, the origin and birth of Jesus are well enough known. But in reality the Gospels, on which that tradition is based, are considerably more vague on the matter. Only two of the Gospels -Matthew and Luke say anything at all about Jesus’s origins and birth; and they are flagrantly at odds with each other. According to Matthew, for example, Jesus was an aristocrat, if not a rightful and legitimate king -

descended from David via Solomon.

According to Luke, on the other hand,

Jesus’s family, though descended from the house of David, was of somewhat less exalted stock; and it is on the basis of Mark’s account that the legend of the ‘poor carpenter’ came into being. The two genealogies, in short, are so strikingly discordant that they might well be referring to two quite different individuals.

The discrepancies between the Gospels are not confined to the question of

Jesus’s ancestry and genealogy. According to Luke, Jesus, on his birth, was visited by shepherds. According to Matthew, he was visited by kings.

According to Luke, Jesus’s family lived in Nazareth. From here they are said to have journeyed for a census which history suggests never in fact occurred to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born in the poverty of a manger.

But according to Matthew, Jesus’s family had been fairly well-to-do residents of Bethlehem all along, and Jesus himself was born in a house. In

Matthew’s version Herod’s persecution of the innocents prompts the family to flee into Egypt, and only on their return do they make their home in

Nazareth.

The information in each of these accounts is quite specific and assuming the census did occur perfectly plausible. And yet the information itself simply does not agree. This contradiction cannot be rationalised. There is no possible means whereby the two conflicting

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narratives can both be correct, and there is no means whereby they can be reconciled. Whether one cares to admit it or not, the fact must be recognised that one or both of the Gospels is wrong. In the face of so glaring and inevitable a conclusion, the Gospels cannot be regarded as unimpugnable. How can they be unimpugnable when they impugn each other?

The more one studies the Gospels, the more the contradictions between them become apparent. Indeed they do not even agree on the day of the

Crucifixion. According to John’s Gospel, the Crucifixion occurred on the day before the Passover. According to the Gospels of Mark, Luke and

Matthew, it occurred on the day after. Nor are the Gospels in accord on the personality and character of Jesus. Each depicts a figure who.

is patently at odds with the figure depicted in the others a meek lamblike saviour in

Luke, for example, a powerful and majestic sovereign in Matthew who comes “not to bring peace but a sword’. And there is further disagreement about

Jesus’s last words on the cross. In Matthew and Mark these words are,

“My

God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In Luke they are, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” And in John, they are simply, “It is finished.”

Given these discrepancies, the Gospels can only be accepted as a highly questionable authority, and certainly not as definitive. They do not represent the perfect word of any God; or, if they do, God’s words have been very liberally censored, edited, revised, glossed and rewritten by human hands. The Bible, it must be remembered and this applies to both the Old and New Testaments is only a selection of works, and, in many respects, a somewhat arbitrary one. In fact, it could well include far more books and writings than it actually does. Nor is there any question of the missing books having been “lost’. On the contrary they were deliberately excluded. In A.D. 367 Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria compiled a list of works to be included in the New Testament. This list was ratified by the

Church Council of Hippo in 393 and again by the Council of Carthage four years later. At these councils a selection was agreed upon.

Certain works were assembled to form the New Testament as we know it today, and others were cavalierly ignored. How can such a process of selection possibly be regarded as definitive? How could a conclave of

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clerics infallibly decide that certain books “belonged’ in the Bible while others did not? Especially when some of the excluded books have a perfectly valid claim to historical veracity?

As it exists today, moreover, the Bible is not only a product of a more or less arbitrary selective process. It has also been subjected to some fairly drastic editing, censorship and revision. In 1958, for example, Professor

Morton Smith of Columbia University discovered, in a monastery near Jerusalem, a letter which contained a missing fragment of the Gospel of

Mark. The missing fragment had not been lost. On the contrary, it had apparently been deliberately suppressed at the instigation, if not the express behest, of Bishop Clement of Alexandria, one of the most venerated of the early Church fathers.

Clement, it seems had received a letter from one Theodore, who complained of a Gnostic sect, the Carpocratians. The Carpocratians appear to have been interpreting certain passages of the Gospel of Mark in accordance with their own principles principles that did not concur with the position of

Clement and Theodore. In consequence, Theodore apparently attacked them and reported his action to Clement. In the letter found by Professor Smith,

Clement replies to his disciple as follows:

You did well in silencing the unspeakable teachings of the Carpocratians.

For these are the “wandering stars’ referred to in the prophecy, who wander from the narrow road of the commandments into a boundless abyss of the carnal and bodily sins.

For, priding themselves in knowledge, as they say, “of the deep [things] of Satan’, they do not know that they are casting themselves away into “the nether world of the darkness’ of falsity, and, boasting that they are free, they have become slaves of servile desires.

Such [men} are to be opposed in all ways and altogether. For, even if they should say something true, one who loves the truth should not, even so, agree with them. For not all true [things] are the truth, nor should that truth which [merely] seems true according to human opinions

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be preferred to the true truth, that according to the faitlri It is an extraordinary statement for a Church father. In effect Clement is saying nothing less than,

“If your opponent happens to tell the truth, you must deny it and lie in order to refute him.”

But that is not all. In the following passage, Clement’s letter goes on to discuss Mark’s Gospel and its “misuse’, in his eyes, by the Carpocratians:

lAs for] Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome he wrote lan account of] the Lord’s doings; not, however, declaring all [of them], nor yet hinting at the secret [ones], but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing both his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress towards knowledge [gnosis]. [Thus] he composed a more spiritual Gospel for the use of those who were being perfected.

Nevertheless, he yet did not divulge the things not to be uttered, nor did he write down the hierophantic teaching of the Lord, but to the stories already written he added yet others and, moreover, brought in certain sayings of which he knew the interpretation would, as a mystagogue, lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth hidden by seven

[veils]. Thus, in sum, he prearranged matters, neither grudgingly nor incautiously, in my opinion, and, dying, he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it even yet is most carefully guarded, being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries.

But since the foul demons are always devising destruction for the race of men, Carpocrates, instructed by them and using deceitful arts, so enslaved a certain presbyter of the church in Alexandria that he got from him a copy of the secret Gospel, which he both interpreted according to his blasphemous and carnal doctrine and, moreover, polluted, mixing with the spotless and holy words utterly shameless lies.2

Clement thus freely acknowledges that there is an authentic secret Gospel of

Mark. He then instructs Theodore to deny it:

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To them [the Carpocratians], therefore, as I said above, one must never give way, nor, when they put forward their falsifications, should one concede that the secret Gospel is by Mark, but should even deny it on oath.

For “not all true [things] are to be said to all men’.3

What was this “secret Gospel’ that Clement ordered his disciple to repudiate and that the Carpocratians were ‘misinterpreting’? Clement answers the question by including a word-for-word transcription of the text in his letter:

To you, therefore, I shall not hesitate to answer the [questions] you have asked, refuting the falsifications by the very words of the Gospel. For example after “And they were in the road going up to Jerusalem,” and what follows, until “After three days he shall arise’, [the secret Gospel] brings the following [material] word for word:

“And they come into Bethany, and a certain woman, whose brother had died, was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, “Son of David, have mercy on me”. But the disciples rebuked her. And

Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near,

Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And

straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus told him what to do and in the eveining the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over [his] naked

[body]. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan. 14

This episode appears in no existing version of the Gospel of Mark. In its general outlines, however, it is familiar enough. It is, of course, the raising of Lazarus, described in the Fourth Gospel, ascribed to John. In the version quoted, however, there are some

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significant variations. In the first place there is a “great cry’

from the tomb before

Jesus rolls the rock aside or instructs the occupant to come forth. This strongly suggests that the occupant was not dead and thereby, at a single stroke, contravenes any element of the miraculous. In the second place there would clearly seem to be something more involved than accepted accounts of the Lazarus episode lead one to believe. Certainly the passage quoted attests to some special relation between the man in the tomb and the man who “resurrects’ him. A modern reader might perhaps be tempted to see a hint of homosexuality. It is possible that the Carpocratians - a sect who aspired to transcendence of the senses by means of satiation of the senses discerned precisely such a hint. But, as Professor Smith argues, it is in fact much more likely that the whole episode refers to a typical mystery school initiation a ritualised and symbolic death and rebirth of the sort so prevalent in the Middle East at the time.