CHAPTER FOUR
THE REAL MESSIANIC MESSAGE
Deo duce, ferro comitante.
In addition to their dubious suggestions in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that Jesus had not really died on the cross, that a substitute had died in his place, or that in some other curious way the historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts of his death and resurrection were to be called into question, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln produced a sequel called The Messianic Legacy.
By invoking an argument as tortuous as any Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four “doublethink”, The Messianic Legacy attempts to discredit any arguments based on subjective feelings and inner experiences. The reader is asked to imagine, for the sake of creating a parallel situation, that a modem Mexican Indian with a claim to ancient Aztec blood, might assert that he believed in the divinity of Hernán Cortés. The authors ask us to suppose that our imaginary believer might also assert that he could “feel” Cortés alive inside him, that he spoke to Cortés and that Cortés appeared to him in visions.
They admit that what an individual experiences in the private, inward secrecy of the mind must be his, or her, experience alone, and cannot be violated from outside. They go on to protest, however, that when the feelings and beliefs that belong to this inner sanctum begin to “distort, alter or transform historical fact” or when they “derange dramatically the laws of probability” the believer cannot expect other people to “condone the process”.1
This line of thought seems to presuppose that something called a “simple historical fact” can ever be ascertained with the certainty which Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln ascribe to it. The simplicity is knocked out of most so-called simple historical — or any other kind of — facts by the theory of relativity and its comments on the position of the observer. Let's have a hypothetical situation to match our imaginary Mexican Indian who believes in the divinity of Hemán Cortés. Imagine a straightforward, down-to-earth materialist who believes that what his senses tell him is fact. We will now confront this character with a glass-sided train. Inside one transparent carriage two small boys are alleviating their boredom by throwing a tennis ball backwards and forwards to each other.
We have an athletic tramp hitching a ride by hanging underneath the train and looking up through the glass floor at the two boys who are throwing the tennis ball. There is also an observer on the platform watching the train with interest as it passes through this particular station at 100 kilometres an hour.
From the point of view of the observer hanging under the floor, the tennis ball is moving from a point just beyond his forehead to a point near his hips, and then back again, at a speed of about ten kilometres an hour. From his point of view it moves in a flat trajectory in a series of straight lines. Seen by the boys playing the game, however, it moves in a series of arcs: its path curves in the vertical plane. Seen by the man on the platform it moves past him at 110 kilometres an hour while being thrown towards the front of the train, and at only ninety kilometres an hour when thrown towards the rear of the train. All three observers are reporting accurately what they see: each is in a different frame of reference. If we add other observers in space craft outside the earth's gravitational field, the ball will also be following the earth's rapid axial rotation and its journey around the sun, as well as the whole solar system's trip through space. There is no single, simple, factual description of the ball's flight.
Although light travels faster than anything else we've yet discovered, its enormous velocity is nevertheless finite: the old definition of approximately 186,000 miles (just under 300,000 kilometres) a second is close enough for our present purposes. If an observer is stationed at a distance of 18,000,000 kilometres (one light minute) away from the train, his observations will differ from those of the boys, the tramp and the man on the platform. His “now” will be one minute behind their “now”. An observer with an unimaginably powerful telescope on a planet 5,000 light years from earth would at this moment be watching the pyramids being built. His description of human civilisation would encompass what he could see of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt. An infinite number of observers placed at different distances from the scene of an activity would describe “now” in an infinite number of ways.
Imagine two space ships in an infinite empty void. There are no reference points from which they can get any information about their speed or position. They can see only each other, and each ship is a perfect sphere: there is no “front” or “back” on either. One ship “passes” the other. Is it overtaking, or are they moving in opposite directions? With no reference points other than themselves it is a question which cannot be resolved. It is just not possible to say that A overtook B, or that A and B were going in opposite directions and met, as a simple historical fact. There can be no absolute external certainty in this situation: what does each astronaut believe?
The comforting old world concept of “simple historical facts” received another devastating body blow from the work of Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac, over sixty years ago. Most widely known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the heart of what they postulated was that if you want to forecast where a particle is going, you need to know where it is now and its current velocity. The snag is that to do that you have to shine a light on it. For scientific purposes, where highly accurate measurements are desirable, you need to use light of the shortest possible wavelength, because your accuracy of measurement is governed by the distances between the wave crests of the light you're using to observe the particle: the shorter the wavelength, the more accurate the measurements. Twenty years before Heisenberg and his contemporaries worked out the Uncertainty Principle and its ramifications, Max Planck had put forward the Quantum Theory, which had dire consequences for the physics of particle observation. Planck said that light, X-rays and similar waves were emitted in minute “packets” which he called quanta. It was not possible to deliver less than one quantum: one “packet” was absolute minimum. Each finite quantum contained a certain amount of energy. The higher the frequency of the wavelength, the more energy each quantum had. Hitting a particle with a photon (a quantum of light) at very high frequency would obviously disturb the particle and change its velocity in a totally unpredictable way, so in the act of observing a particle the observer influenced its future behaviour. Heisenberg was able to demonstrate that the more accurately the observer seeks to measure the location of a particle, the less accurately can he measure its velocity; and, conversely, the more accurately he tries to measure the velocity, the less certain can he be of the particle's location! Heisenberg went on to demonstrate this mathematically: the uncertainty of the position multiplied by the uncertainty of the velocity multiplied by the mass of the particle being studied is always greater than a certain constant, which mathematicians and physicists call h, or Planck's Constant. Its actual value is 6.626 x 1034(joule second). It makes no difference how you measure the position, or how you measure the velocity; it doesn't even matter what type of particle you're observing: Planck's constant is always constant! Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is ubiquitous and inevitable: it's just part of the way God made our world. Its implications are massive and highly controversial. In effect, they spell the end of the kind of philosophical determinism associated with Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, the great Napoleonic astronomer and mathematician, whose pioneering genius has probably been equalled only by Albert Einstein and Professor Stephen Hawking.
Laplace, whose solutions to the intricate and convoluted problems concerning the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter put him well on the way to his rightful niche in the Hall of Fame, dreamt of creating a thoroughly deterministic model of the universe in which everything could be predicted accurately — as accurately as the orbits of the planets. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the later developments of quantum mechanics make it abundantly clear that if we're not able to measure the here and now accurately (which we're not!) we haven't any chance at all of predicting the then and the there. All we can hope to do is to calculate the various probabilities. An event may be defined as the interaction of matter and energy in space and time. Some events are massively more probable than others but no event is so improbable that it is absolutely impossible.2
Further interesting highlights on the mysterious nature of the universe appear among the case histories of incredible “coincidences” which Alan Vaughan has recorded in his books on synchronicity.3 One of the episodes he records concerns an unpleasant nineteenth century character whose casual seduction of a girl led to her pregnancy and subsequent suicide. Her brother shot the man responsible, assumed he was dead and then shot himself. The seducer, however, got up. The bullet which had struck him without doing any serious damage had ricocheted into a tree and lodged there. Many years afterwards — now a prosperous businessman — he bought the field in which the tree stood and dynamited it as part of his land clearance scheme. The bullet flew out and killed him. Vaughan goes on from his case histories to expound a theory of synchronicity based on the thoughts of Carl Jung, the pioneer psychologist. Jung's theory was that synchronicity was an acausal connecting principle which revealed itself as what he termed meaningful coincidences in his famous archetypal situations. Vaughan's theory of synchronicity is even bolder than Jung's. Vaughan suggests that there is a sense in which consciousness is capable of creating — not merely observing — space, time and matter. It is a controversial hypothesis, but a well-reasoned one, which is well worth reading. It, too, casts doubt on the apparent simplicity of “simple historical facts”.
Another nail in the coffin of “simple historical facts” is what John Michell and Robert Rickard describe as phenomenalism: the idea that there are three spheres of observation — the “hard” phenomena which can be weighed and measured (within the limits set by Heisenberg); the phenomenal, which are a kind of half-way house between “hard” phenomena and purely mental ones; and what the authors describe as psychological phenomena, the world of mental experiences. They believe that there is an overlap between these zones. Their theory is controversial, but well argued and worth serious consideration.4
If we have succeeded in presenting a reasonable case for the historicity of the New Testament miracles — and especially the supreme miracle of Christ's resurrection — we may proceed first to examine and then to counter the arguments put forward in The Messianic Legacy suggesting that Jesus was merely a mortal Messiah, a political aspirant for the throne of Judah in the tradition of David, Solomon or any other Hebrew monarch.
The writers of The Messianic Legacy blithely assert that although they can accept that the oldest and purest versions of Buddhism and Islam may be close to the teachings of their original founders, the same cannot be said of Christianity.
It is true that long intervening centuries and the natural weakness of fallible human conductors of divine truth have created differences among groups of the faithful. It is also true that when all those minor denominational disagreements are thrown away as the trivia they are, and when certain prominent liberal humanists are extracted from their bishops' camouflage, there still remains a massive common core of solid, bedrock Christianity that can be traced directly to Jesus Christ as surely as Islam can be traced to the Prophet Mohammed.
Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln have insinuated that there was some absolutely fundamental difference between the teachings of St. Paul — whose missionary work was so deservedly successful — and the Jerusalem Church leaders like St. James, the brother of Jesus, and St. Peter. Yet Paul himself says clearly in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (written early in A.D. 56) that the Gospel which he had preached to them was the one that he himself had received. It was neither a misunderstanding nor a creation on his part: it was the basic and fundamental truth at the heart of the Christian faith. Of course, there were differences of style, doctrinal emphasis and personality between the first century apostles — just as there are among Church leaders today — but there is no evidence at all of the sort of sinister and unbridgeable gulf between a supposed group of politically motivated messianic insurgents in Jerusalem and the spiritually motivated fathers of the Church elsewhere.
The Messianic Legacy seeks to persuade the reader that Jesus was neither more nor less than one of a substantial series of messianic priest-king aspirants to the Davidic throne, and that his attempt failed. We are also asked to believe that a small inner clique of his family, friends and close supporters were “in the know” as far as this political intrigue was concerned, that the. rest of his disciples and adherents were not, and that there was a subsequent misunderstanding of his person and work which led to its becoming spiritualised and mysticised into early Christianity.
For the sake of illustration, let us make a parallel hypothesis of equal, or greater, probability than the Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln ideas about Jesus. Imagine that Sir Isaac Newton was a political agitator who had planned to begin a popular revolution by providing free apples all round on a prototype of the National Health Service. He then intended to set himself up as a scientific philosopher-king of the kind envisaged in Plato's Republic. His scheme failed when the government got wind of it, and sent a brigade of hussars to arrest him in the orchard. He was subsequently assassinated by government agents, but it was made to look like death from natural causes. We are also required to believe that he had been secretly married to his orchard keeper's second cousin (who had had a certain reputation in the village!) The evidence for such a marriage being that he had once provided free cider at a village wedding. This clandestine marriage had produced offspring who had escaped to the Isle of Wight after Sir Isaac's death and subsequently married into the ruling family. It is also darkly rumoured that their descendants may still be around and plotting to take over the United States of Europe. Any carvings or paintings depicting apples or orchards are really sinister, secret emblems of the underground movement dedicated to putting the Newtonians into power.
Now we add the complication that one of his more naive followers (who hadn't understood the great man's real political motives in the first place) wrongly assumed — when he observed Newton hurling an apple down in frustration and disgust one day — that that gesture was really making a statement about an invisible force called gravity. This well-meaning ignoramus of a disciple was abnormally energetic and persuasive: over the course of centuries several people came to believe in his non-existent force of gravity. All properly educated people, of course, know it to be an entirely subjective experience, despite the sensation of imaginary pain that they think they feel when falling from a height on to a hard surface!
The Messianic Legacy. and its predecessor. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, both assert that the canon of scripture was deliberately edited, redacted and modified to remove references to the supposed political ambitions of Jesus and his inner clique.
Biblical scholars of the highest reputation certainly claim to see evidence of deliberate arrangement and reorganisation in scripture — but it is neither more nor less than the kind of planning any authors undertake when putting a serious, factual work together.
Unless you are engaged on a “stream of consciousness” novel, or some form of diary, or journal, whose contents are dictated strictly by the chronological order of events, you naturally tend to group and categorise your memories of the man of whom you are writing.
If I were writing a biography of my late father, my most vivid memories of him from over fifty years ago would be of the toy car and wheelbarrow he made for me on the carpenter's bench in his old greenhouse-cum-work-shop. That was a completely separate dimension from his work as a Special Constable during World War II; as was his Provincial Grand Rank in East Anglian Freemasonry in the 1920s. When I wrote of him as landlord of “The Crown” in Church Street, Dereham; as a soldier in World War I; as a scrap-metal dealer, and later as a small town high street shopkeeper, those memories, although clear and accurate, would be automatically organised and categorised into the various areas and aspects of his life. A literary critic with time to spare and access to the Norwich archives might correct me in one or two odd places by discovering that my father had re-married in 1933 and not, as I had thought, in 1932. But no emendation or reorganisation of my categories would materially alter the central facts about my father's life and character. There is no way that he could have been a Rosicrucian, a Hermeticist, or a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion without my strongly suspecting that something of that nature was going on. I may not have known every fact about his business ventures, but I did know enough to say quite categorically that he was not a fishmonger, a bookseller, nor an antique dealer.
So it is with the accounts we have of the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels. The best scholarly evidence suggests that Mark's Gospel is directly based on the memories of Peter, who knew Jesus very well indeed, and that Mark himself, the son of Mary of Jerusalem, was very probably the young man in the linen garment who escaped from the garden on the night Jesus was arrested.
Was Mary Magdalen the same woman as Mary of Bethany, and was either (or were both) the same person as the woman with the precious alabaster box of ointment of spikenard? Did Jesus actually work in Joseph's carpentry shop in Nazareth in the years before his public ministry began? Did he provide and care for Mary and his younger step-brothers and sisters after Joseph, her husband, had presumably died? Was Joseph of Arimathea his uncle, and did they once visit England together on a tin trading voyage, as Blake seems to hint at in Jerusalem?
These are interesting questions: but they are totally peripheral. Even the remote possibility that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen, and that they had children is totally peripheral. Christ's unique work as the Son of God and Saviour of the World is not affected one iota by whether he married or not, nor by the precise order of events in his earthly life, nor by the exact locations in which those events occurred. The great central truth of the Gospel remains absolutely unimpaired by minor disagreements about times, places and precise sequences. Christ was born to the Virgin Mary by the miraculous intervention of the Holy Spirit. He taught us the truth about God his Father, and what was necessary for our salvation. He went nobly and willingly to a death for all our sakes which he could so easily have avoided.
By the power of God he rose from the dead; not as a beautiful thought; nor as some sort of fragrant, sacred memory; nor as a pale, ethereal ghost; but in his new, immortal, post-resurrection body with powers vastly exceeding those of any terrestrial being: a body with everything gained and nothing lost. On that first Easter Morning Christ was — and is — eternally, abundantly, objectively alive. Of course it is true that he lives in the hearts and minds of his people, but it is even more true that he lives his own supra-personal life in its own external and objective right as well. Because a few drops of the great Pacific Ocean sustain the life of a tiny fish by passing through its gills, it does not mean that the ocean has no existence outside the gills of the fish!
We live in a world which is, tragically, becoming daily more obsessed by detail and bureaucratic proliferation. Some social historians spend more time working out the precise number of unemployed charcoal burners in the New Forest in 1812 than on considering who won the Battle of Waterloo and why. Some pharmacists have to spend more time filling in government claim forms neatly and correctly than in dispensing drugs to relieve pain and cure illness. Some social workers are busier writing reports, compiling statistics and attending case conferences than getting on with the vital job of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. Some teachers have to spend more time filling in mark-books and evaluation sheets than in actually teaching their pupils to read, write and count. Whatever the trade or profession, it is becoming increasingly handicapped by this modem obsession with minutiae, analysis, records, statistics and bureaucratic regulations. We are in grave danger of losing sight of our true aims and objectives because we are preoccupied with the details of how to get there.
The obvious purpose of a road and a car is to convey human beings to and from desirable destinations quickly, comfortably, safely and conveniently: but we have to negotiate a score of hurdles of our own preposterous making before we can fulfil the fundamental aims and objectives of simply using the car. We encumber ourselves with driving lessons, tests and licences, insurances, road fund tax discs, MOT tests, log books, speed limits, tachometers, drivers' hours, one way systems, contra-flows, parking restrictions, compulsory seat belts, old uncle Tom Cobleigh and the kitchen sink! Did that same dashing warrior, Jehu (who dealt so effectively with the evil and arrogant Queen Jezebel) worry about traffic regulations when he drove his chariot so that you could tell he was coming from miles away, simply by his style with the reins? (2 Kings 9:20: “His driving is like the driving of Jehu, for he driveth furiously”.)
The obvious purpose of Holy Scripture is to lead us to God, to Christ and to everlasting life, but we have encumbered that spiritual road as effectively as we have cluttered our tarmac. There are now more textual theories per verse than a diligent Bible scholar can hope to read in a year! We know the roots of every Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic, Greek and Latin word in the most minute detail. We know their derivations and parallel usages. What we have lost somewhere along the way is what they actually mean for us today. We are like pools winners holding a cheque for £1,000,000 in our hands and minutely studying the details of the printer's art on the cheque form — instead of getting down to the bank to pay it in and start enjoying our good fortune. The thing to do with Holy Scripture is not to spend hours quibbling over its tiny details, but to get down to its main message, the real messianic message.
That message is plain, simple, clear and straightforward. Jesus never saw himself at any time during his incarnation as any sort of earthly king: Saint Paul, the Apostles and the Church Fathers didn't misunderstand Christ, didn't wrongly spiritualise some political message about his being an earthly successor to the throne of David. They hadn't always understood at the beginning. There were several occasions when Jesus had to make it plain to the disciples that he was not the sort of messiah who was going to overthrow the Romans and the forces of Herod and the priests by force of arms. His mission was not the mission of the Maccabees: the dreaded Hammerers. His mission was to show both by words and deeds, especially by the Ultimate Deed — his death and resurrection — that God had intervened, had broken into history, for the benefit of all mankind. The real messianic message was that God the Son, incarnate in Jesus Christ, had come to save every individual human soul who would accept and believe in him, and to redeem human society and his creation as a totality. The real messianic message still is: repentance, forgiveness and abundant, eternal life in Christ. It is as far removed from the concept of an earthly, Davidic, political kingdom as the east is from the west. It is greater folly to mistake Jesus for a revolutionary politician who failed, than to mistake the first gleam of sunrise for the dying flicker of a guttering candle.
To return to the question of the hypothetical divisions and organisational arrangements of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation: such divisions and taxonomised sub sections of textual material as may be discerned are definitely not the product of some cunning, anti-political editor — some literary member of the “spiritual” faction — trying to bowdlerise the original text and expurgate all possible references to a “political” Jesus, a Jewish warrior-prince seeking the throne of his ancestors.
One of the best and most original of the recent, reputable, scholarly works in this field is David G. Palmer's Sliced Bread, published by Ceridwen Press of 17 Chargot Road, Victoria Park, Cardiff, in 1988. It is very well worth reading. David Palmer, who enjoyed a career as a successful professional architect before being ordained as a Methodist Minister in 1983, has brought his original talents to bear alongside his very considerable theological skills in analysing the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation in a completely new way. His theory is based on the idea of chiasmus, a Greek term meaning “placing crosswise”. As a technical term in literature it signifies a balanced structure, like a reflection, or a step-ladder with two sets of rungs meeting at a small platform at the apex. If passages with similar themes or underlying ideas are designated by various letters of the alphabet, a chiasmus might look like a,b,c,d,c,b,a, with the letter d representing its centre, or reflective surface. Strangely enough, there is an original form of sonnet, the authors' own Fanthorpean Sonnet (devised many years before we had the pleasure of reading David's book) which has the rhyme scheme a,a,b,b,c,c,d,d,c,c,b,b,a,a. The central rhyming couplet (d,d) “reflects” or “symmetrically projects” the other rhyme schemes in both directions. Part of this sonnet form's effect depends upon linking the ideas in the first (a,a) rhyming couplet with those in lines 13 and 14, the final couplet, which must also be (a,a). The poet using this chiasmic sonnet form also endeavours to encapsulate his major thought, or theme, inside the (d,d) central couplet. With these points in mind, let us consider this verse:
| Saunière was Curé of Rennes-le-Château | (a) | |
| And laboured there a century ago. | (a) | |
| What did he find in Visigothic stone? | (b) | |
| What secret shared with Dénamaud alone? | (b) | |
| Strange, cryptic clues from Hautpoul's tomb erased: | (c) | |
| Bigou's inscription, curiously phrased. | (c) | |
| And what of Boudet, up at Rennes-les-Bains? | (d) | |
| A scholarly and enigmatic man. | (d) | |
| His Celtic language riddles questions raised— | (c) | |
| Which Monsieur Bren both analysed and praised. | (c) | |
| Gélis struck down: slain by a hand unknown. | (b) | |
| Dark rumours round that savagery have grown. | (b) | |
| The timeless quest goes on until we know | (a) | |
| The hidden secrets of Rennes-le-Château. | (a) |
The great value of chiasmic arrangements in a society where books in the form of codices and scrolls were rare and expensive was that chiasms were easy to memorise, and they had an added liturgical beauty and rhythm when read aloud to groups. Truth is in no way impaired by being arranged in a form that makes it easier to listen to and easier to recall.
In Sliced Bread, David Palmer puts forward a scrupulously researched, logical and convincing argument for the Gospels, Acts and Book of Revelation having been assembled in this way. It is vastly more probable that the evidence of editing and redacting which biblical scholars claim to have found is the result of chiasmic design for entirely honest and laudable purposes than that it indicates the surreptitious suppression of “embarrassing” political messianic references. The New Testament does not read like a book that has been censored: it reads like a book that has been organised to enhance the clarity and memorability of the truth it contains.
1Baigent, M., Leigh, R., and Lincoln, H. The Messianic Legacy, Corgi Books; 1989 reprint, p. 27.
2For those readers who want to delve more deeply into this area, there is no better book than professor Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, published by Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers Ltd., London in 1988.
3Vaughan, Alan: Incredible Coincidence, Corgi Books, London, 1981.
4Michel, John and Rickard, R.J.M., Phenomena: a book of Wonders, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1977.