The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar (23 page)

Tradition and these texts say that Joseph of Arimathea took the family of Jesus to Marseilles in France and then traveled alone to England. It is said that Joseph came to Glastonbury and founded the first Christian church in England. Calling Joseph a “secret disciple,” even a renowned historian such as Barbara Tuchman, in asking about the connection between the abbey at Glastonbury in England and Joseph of Arimathea, says, “Perhaps the answer is that he actually did make his way from Palestine to Britain.”
³⁷
Historians who scoff at finding any truth in literary tradition often find themselves being proved wrong. Heinrich Schliemann, the “amateur” German archaeologist who found Troy, disproved the claims of establishment historians that Troy was just a story. In his lifetime he was criticized for his belief, and he is still criticized today for his methods. Historians of the establishment do not like to be proved wrong.

Today we accept that Troy and the Trojan War were real, but we still deny the accounts of those who returned home from that long conflict. If Homer’s first tale, the
Iliad,
is now accepted, why is his second tale, the
Odyssey,
considered fiction? Medieval stories of wandering refugees from the leveled cities of Trojan shores are regarded as total fabrications. Trojans reputedly settled in Italy, France, and other parts of Europe. In France, it is claimed that the city named Troyes was founded by Trojans, and a certain Priam is reported to have taken twelve thousand settlers there. We accept that Phoenician trade reached northern Europe and Britain. Why is it unthinkable that people from the Mediterranean traveled to western Europe? And why should it be difficult to believe that Joseph, a merchant, could have sailed there?

Eusebius, one of the earliest writers on the history of the Christian Church, tells of the official persecution of the direct descendants of the family of Jesus and others in the Davidic bloodline before such history
was censored.
³⁸
Rome had reason to take seriously the threat of a king emerging from the bloodline of David—the hostilities were real. James himself was executed by the Sanhedrin in the year
A.D.
62. After his death, Clopas, brother of Jesus’ earthly father Joseph, may have taken over the leadership of the group. Certainly the son of Clopas, Simeon, who was a cousin of Jesus, became the first bishop of Jerusalem. Other surviving members and family would surely have sought safe refuge from the Roman suppression that is unrecorded by the Gospels but documented in both Church and non-Church histories.

In
A.D.
65 Simeon led his followers, who called themselves Nazoreans, away from Jerusalem. They may have founded the town of Nazareth. In the year
A.D.
66, we know they were forced into hiding. In another town called Nazara, and in Cochaba, the family of Jesus, known as the “Heirs,” lived and survived persecution. The Nazarean Church became completely separate from the Pauline Christian Church. Later, the emperor Vespasian sought to ferret out the descendants of Jesus and his followers, although the threat against them appeared to diminish as Jewish Christianity slowly died out. Eusebius was scornful of this group of Jewish followers of Jesus because they had never accepted Jesus as a god, only as a man inspired by God, a prophet. Even after Vespasian there were further references to the descendants of the family of Jesus. Jude, another brother, had two grandsons who were brought before the emperor Domitian. They were leaders in the Church and had borne witness to the life of Jesus, but Domitian dismissed them as not being a threat to Rome.

Despite the writings of Eusebius and other early texts, which included the Gnostic Gospels, the Church ignored the descendants and treated much of the writings at best as unimportant and at worst as hoaxes. When the Christian Church decided two hundred years later at the Council of Nicaea just which texts would be admitted into what became the New Testament, they allowed much that had been adopted from Essene teachings to remain. Activities such as the communal feast, baptism, the celebration of the Pentacost, and the exorcism of devils remained from the early days of the Church. The term “New Covenant,” proclaimed by the Essene teachings, came to be applied to the teachings
of Jesus. Another Essene doctrine, that the poor would inherit the Earth, also was adopted, but the Church was by that time attracting a better class of followers. A doctrine applying just to the poor was no longer acceptable. The church that Jesus founded had appealed to the underclasses. Now the Roman-sanctioned Church had to take on a new character to accommodate the ruling class as well.

Nazoreans and Ebionites, known as “Poor Christians” were by then just small sects hiding in southern Lebanon and near the Euphrates River. The Church itself no longer recognized the Essene community, nor did that community recognize the Church. The lives of the people who had played a part in the life of Jesus were recorded by Eusebius. Herod was deprived of his throne and exiled to France, where he made his home in Vienne. Jewish merchants and traders gave passage to both Jews and Christians, and both were found in France in the early days of the Church. (Eusebius refers to “the servants of Christ at Vienne and Lyons in Gaul.”) The family of Jesus survived in Roman Gaul, and they would have been forced to maintain a low profile, since they had been the hunted heirs to the Davidic kingship. They were the “sprouts” of the vine of David, the “scions” in his priestly line.

The Hebrew name
Levi
literally means “scions” and, in its agricultural context (levy) “sprouts.” It became a code word surviving among the Templars and later among high-ranking Freemasons. It would be very important to those who believed in a Davidic line of kingship, specifically in a secret society—the Prieuré de Sion—that lay behind the Templars and Masons. The stated reason for their existence was to preserve and advance the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
³⁹

Holy Blood, Holy Grail
was written using documents that this secret group (the Prieuré de Sion) provided for much of the source material. Some of these documents were unable to be verified; others were obviously historically incorrect. But other researchers have corroborated that the society exists and that it may have taken different forms at different times. Robert Anton Wilson believes that the group had been active from the nineteenth century but that their early history is not what they have suggested it to be.
⁴⁰
There is compelling evidence that an “underground stream” of knowledge has indeed been preserved by a group
taking one name or another over the past thousand years. Some of this knowledge was to be held secret for only a chosen elite. The secrets of the Prieuré de Sion and their treasure was to be protected by those who inherited the task of keeping the sacred knowledge intact and the secret society alive. The Sinclairs in Scotland became its guardians.

Chapter 8

T
HE
F
RENCH
C
ONNECTION

A
t about the time that the authors of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
started their research, a series of bodies, murders, and attempted murders surfaced in France. One publication, called
Secret D
o
ssiers,
that provided information for the book was written by Leo Schidlof. It is possible that Schidlof was connected with espionage or some other clandestine activity because he was refused entry into the United States.
¹
What does twentieth-century espionage have to do with documents over two hundred years old?
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
does not answer this question, but soon after Schidlof's death his briefcase, reputedly containing documents relating to the Rennes-le-Chateau area of France, was in turn taken by Fakhar ul Islam, who was trying to reach East Germany but instead was hurled from a train outside Paris and killed. Three weeks later a privately published work entitled the
The Red Serpent
turned up at the National Library of Paris. It, too, contained information on the Rennes-le-Chateau area. The three authors of the work were all found
hanged, at different times, between March 6 and March 7, 1967, two weeks after the death of Fakhar ul Islam. Obviously, someone wasn’t happy about researchers digging into the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau.

The publication of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
ignited a storm of controversy in 1982 at a time when the Catholic Church was already under siege. The backlash from the Church was expected, in light of the fact that the book suggested several controversial scenarios—Jesus as husband and Mary Magdalene as mother of his child, for example. Worse still to many, the book made the case that Jesus may have survived his execution. The concept that Jesus both plotted his own execution and survived the Crucifixion had already been reviewed in print, although the popularity, especially in Europe, of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
brought the topic a great deal more attention.
²
Could Jesus have orchestrated his own execution? Could the family of Jesus have escaped Jerusalem?

The activities of Jesus the man were at the least able to incite a carefully planned stage in a revolt if not a complete revolt. He threw the bankers and money changers out of the temple not too long after two zealots had been executed for removing the Roman eagle. He challenged the Jewish puppets of the Roman state, the Sadducees, at every turn. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, fulfilling the prophecy in the Bible that declared that the scion of David would enter the city in this manner. He denied being a king, but the cheering crowds left no doubt that they wanted him to be their king.
³
These actions resulted in his death, an execution that history records and few challenge. Of the four accepted Gospels, the Gnostic Gospels, and one secular history,
The Jewish War,
by Josephus, all written in the first century, none hint that Christ survived his execution.

The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles do record that the followers of Jesus fled Jerusalem. If Mary Magdalene had been married to Jesus and pregnant with his child, she would have had a very strong reason to escape Roman Jerusalem. History does not document the fate of others surrounding Jesus—the following scenario, corroborated only by legend, is possible. Under the leadership of Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, her companions, and possibly her unborn child might
have fled by sea to France.
⁴
The entrance of Jesus’ family into France could have been at or near the port city of Marseilles.

Marseilles is recognized as the oldest city in the country of the Celtic Gauls.
⁵
Its ports were visited by Greek and Phoenician sailors at least six hundred years before Christ was born. The Phoenicians had founded nearby Monaco three hundred years before Marseilles, but the port city grew faster in prominence. For twenty-six hundred years, Marseilles has been considered France’s most important seaport. The first recorded journey to Iceland, mentioned in the second chapter, was made by the writer and explorer Pytheas, who sailed from Marseilles in 330
B.C.
The south of France soon became a crossroads for maritime and overland trade and, as a result, figured prominently in political and religious history.

In
A.D.
117 Rome built a highway called the Via Aurelia from Rome to Marseilles along trade routes already established from Celtic times.
⁶
The highway attested to the position of Marseilles as a trade center. It was not a remote outpost by any means, but a very populated city and the gateway to a populated region. The Roman historian Strabo, writing on Palestine’s growing status as a world trader during the Hellenistic period, before it was conquered by Rome, states that there was not a city in the world where the Jews were not to be found. They were accomplished merchants and traders from Solomon’s day onward, as is recorded in the Bible. If Solomon’s fleets traded with Tarshish, which we now identify as Spain, Marseilles was on the route.
⁷

As a result of the Marseilles sea trade, the overland route grew as well, and along the trade routes from Rome to Marseilles to Spain sprang up many cities, including several that hold legends of the Jesus family and their landing, traveling through, or residing in these towns. Near Marseilles is the smaller city of Aix, now called Aix-en-Provence.
⁸
Then, as now, it was considered a center of healing—its hot springs attracted people from Rome and even farther east. Such centers were found along the trade route in France and in the Spanish Pyrennees. These springs were regarded as representations of Earth’s fertility and were often considered sacred.