The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (9 page)

Robert de Boron’s
Joseph of Arimathea
represents a wholesale Christianization of the grail, supplying the famous back story of the grail as the Last Supper chalice and of Joseph as its guardian, and so forth. In it everything is explicit that we have not even been able to trace implicitly in these other versions. The explicitly Eucharistic coloring of any of the remaining versions seems to represent borrowing from Robert de Boron. For instance,
Perlesvaus
makes use of Chrétien and his second continuator, the
Prose Lancelot
, and perhaps Robert de Boron, whence he derived the notion of the grail as the container of the blood of Jesus from the crucifixion. Here is a narrative full of overt, even clumsy, allegorical teaching, but none of the kind posited by
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
or
The Da Vinci Code
. It is all a mass of forced and wearisome parallels between this knight and that virtue, the evil king and the devil, Perceval’s liberation of the devil’s castle and the Harrowing of Hell. Nothing about a royal bloodline or a messianic marriage.

THE VULGATE CYCLE

We find a more thoroughly Christian version of the grail in the three works combined in the Vulgate cycle, the
Lancelot
, the
Queste del Saint Graal
, and the
Estoire del Saint Graal
. These are also the chief sources for Thomas Malory’s
La Morte d’Arthur
. In the
Lancelot
, we find Gawain at the Grail Castle, where he witnesses a holy maiden carrying aloft the “holy vessel” as she passes before those seated in the banqueting hall. It was made “in the semblance of a chalice,” and as she passes, each knight, except Gawain, kneels, whereupon the tables become laden with the most sumptuous fare.

Later, in the
Queste del Saint Graal
, we have the famous Pentecost epiphany of the grail at Camelot, the revelation that prompts Galahad’s search for the grail. And yet, despite the Christian symbolism, the grail retains the consistent magical feature of feeding all present with whatever food they wish. And indeed when one looks closely at the odd features of any and all versions of the saga, one begins to notice a great many features that appear to have no Christian relevance at all, often making little sense even as features of a coherent plot. It is as if we are viewing a building put together crudely from fragments of older, demolished structures. All manner of oddities protrude to no purpose that nonetheless made sense in the original structure. Where do these features of the grail stories originate?

CELTIC CROCKERY

What would it mean for the Teabing hypothesis if the grail cycle could be shown to be an arbitrary patchwork of mismatched pieces from pre-Christian folklore? It would render utterly superfluous the whole theory of the grail being designed as a cipher for the legacy of Jesus and the Magdalene. Scholars, including Alfred Nutt and Roger Sherman Loomis, have long ago demonstrated that the grail romances are based on materials derived from Celtic myths and legends and that virtually every major and minor puzzle may be solved in this way. To begin with the strange notion of the grail as a miraculous horn of plenty, Loomis shows that the prototype for it was the mythic horn or cauldron of Bran the Blessed, a Celtic god. From it all blessings, all gifts and foods, emerged. The Celtic connection is all the more sure in light of the fact that, in some versions of the grail legend, the maimed Fisher King is named Bron (
Didot Perceval
) or Brons (Robert de Boron). Not only that, but the Celtic divinity Bran is himself the victim of a hobbling wound in the “foot” (another biblical euphemism for penis) or in the thigh.
⁴
He is the classic case of the nature god, the corn king, whose vitality is identical to that of his realm. Bran is the son of the sea god Lyr, which would seem to account for the doubling of the (implicitly divine) maimed king. The bleeding lance has been taken over from the flaming lance of Lug, the Irish sun god. Both are said to hover upright above a silver bowl.
⁵

The fair maiden who carries the grail through the dining hall turns out to be another avatar of the hideous hag who shows up at Camelot to scold Perceval. And this means she was originally a mythic character called the Sovranty of Ireland, a living embodiment, first, of the amazing beauty of Ireland, then of the seasonal rigors of its climate.
⁶
The crucial questions about the grail and the king who drinks from it (ill-suited to the cup of the Last Supper!) parallel the mystery of the tale of the Irish hero Conn. Like Perceval, he finds himself in a castle, that of Lug the sun god, welcomed to join the king at table, served by a crowned maiden bearing a golden vessel.
She
asks
him
, “To whom shall this cup be given?” In the end, the castle and its occupants vanish, and he is left with the cup of prophecy by which he predicts his successors to the throne.

How did Bran’s horn of plenty become the vessel bearing a communion wafer (in Chrétien’s version)? As Loomis shows, the transformation must have come about via misunderstanding. The bards and tale-tellers brought their repertoire with them from Britain. French audiences were not familiar with sacred drinking horns common in Britain. The Old French words for “horn” and “body” (as in the sacramental “body of Christ”) were identical:
li cors
. When the French heard of a
horn
, or as they thought, a
body
, that brought miraculous bounty, they thought of current ecclesiastical stories of saints and hermits whose sole physical nourishment was the wafer of the mass.
⁷
And thus the confusion—and Christianization—of the original grail mythos.

A PRETTY EMPTY CUP

What is the relevance of these observations for the Teabing hypothesis? First, the grail legends are Celtic in origin and can therefore have nothing to do with any Merovingian claims to the throne of France. The French loved and retold the grail stories, in their reinterpreted Christian guise, but they came from Britain, where Merovingian claims were moot. This does not mean that the Christian form of the grail legend was innocent of polemics, however. As some have suggested, the (secondary) connection of Joseph of Arimathea with the grail represents a foundation legend for an autonomous Celtic Christianity, resisting the growing domination of Roman Catholicism by claiming an independent apostolic foundation by Joseph of Arimathea.

Second, the late, secondary Christian coloring of the grail cycle eliminates the possibility that the legends served as the ancient vehicle through which the messianic pedigree of the Merovingians was passed down. In fact, one might say that the Christian appropriation of the pagan Celtic grail material was a co-optation of the earlier tradition in the same spirit of opportunism with which Pierre Plantard and his colleagues in the spurious Priory of Sion have sought to hijack the grail tradition for their own purposes.

Third, the fact that the grail story, in any of its versions, is a late mosaic of legend fragments, originally unrelated to one another, means that the grail legend was never designed to function as a cipher for the dynastic claims of Jesus’s heirs or for anything else. It came together almost like single-celled archaeozoa linked fortuitously by cell membranes as they floated haphazardly through the sea of primal ooze. No, what Dan Brown and his mentors see in the grail legend, they brought to it.

NOTES

1
Joachim Jeremias,
The Eucharistic Words of Jesus
, trans. Arnold Ehrhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955), pp. 108-109, 128-29.

2
Anna Katharina Emmerich,
The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
(London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1942).

3
Roger Sherman Loomis,
The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 13.

4
Ibid., pp. 55-59.

5
Ibid., p. 78.

6
Ibid., pp. 51-53.

7
Ibid., pp. 60-61.

Chapter 3

BEYOND THE CROSS

Did Jesus Survive Crucifixion?

T
hough
The Da Vinci Code
seems to assume that Jesus died hough The Da Vinci Code seems to assume that Jesus died on the cross, in accord with conventional beliefs, many of the writers with whom Dan Brown is allied do not think it happened that way. Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh; Paul S. Blezard; Laurence Gardner; and others picture Jesus somehow surviving the cross and shaking the dust off his sandals as he left the Holy Land to seek a friendlier clime elsewhere, usually pictured as southern France. Barbara Thiering, though not to be associated with the excesses of the Teabing school, is sometimes cited in the interest of the belief in Jesus cheating death on the cross, as she does argue for it in her books, including
Jesus the Man
(a.k.a.
Jesus and the Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls
). In so doing, she is reviving the “Essene hypothesis” of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rationalists. Dr. Thiering arrives at her conclusions about Jesus and his postcrucifixion missionary journeys by an esoteric, Qumranstyle interpretation of the New Testament. The older Rationalists (Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, Karl Heinrich Venturini, even Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher), by contrast, were motivated by the dictates of their theology, which now seems quite arbitrary. In short, they juggled two ill-fitting beliefs. First, they believed in the inerrancy of the gospel texts, which meant that if it said Jesus was up on that cross Friday and was seen alive on Sunday, then both must somehow be true. Second, God does not violate the laws of nature; hence there were never any supernatural “miracles.” The conclusion they were forced to adopt was that Jesus had indeed been crucified but had somehow survived it. Thus, in both cases, Dr. Thiering’s and that of the Rationalists, the belief that Jesus survived crucifixion is a by-product of other considerations. No one will defend the latter today, and to defend the former is beside our point here. What I want to ask is whether there may be anything to be said for the Swoon Theory on the basis of more conventional historical-critical analysis.

Might Jesus have survived crucifixion? Is this not too far-fetched a hypothesis for us to take seriously? Not at all. In fact, it was not unheard of for victims of crucifixion to survive it. After all, the mode of execution was designed to kill the poor wretches slowly, over a period of days. One might be taken down. Josephus the historian, writing at the end of the first century, tells us that the friends or relatives of a crucified man might be able to have him taken down alive.

When I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealius and a thousand horsemen to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintances. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physicians’ hands, while the third recovered.
¹

It is surprising that the theory of Jesus surviving crucifixion is not more widely championed. Hugh J. Schonfield is often mentioned as an advocate of the theory, and he very nearly was. In his book
The Passover Plot
(1965), he speculated that Jesus did try to engineer surviving the cross by being fed a drug and taken down early, but the scheme failed when he was stabbed in the side, something he hadn’t planned on. Along with Barbara Thiering, the theory’s most eloquent and persuasive defender is J. Duncan M. Derrett (
The Anastasis: The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical Event
, 1982). Most who address it at all hold it up to mockery, and for them it is enough to quote the arch-skeptic David Friedrich Strauss against it: “It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead out of the sepulcher, who crept about weak and ill, wanting [i.e., lacking] medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening, and indulgence, and who still at last yielded to his sufferings, could have given the disciples the impression that he was a conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life: an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could . . . by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.”
²