THE MESSIANIC LEGACY

By Michael

"A sequel to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: who founded Christianity and what did it mean to be a Messiah? And how was this concept employed in recent times by Hitler and Stalin? 

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Having worked on our first book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,for some six years, delving into historical mysteries and enigmas, we were constantly confronted with questions concerning the meaning and the context of the discoveries we were making. But the book we were writing was not the place to explore these since it was already growing too large. We resolved, therefore, to explore these issues in a second volume, The Messianic Legacy.

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There had been a huge, world-wide, often emotional, reaction to the publication of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail; a reaction which we saw resulting, primarily, from a failure of Christian scholarship to communicate its findings to the general public. A major problem was that the Jesus of theology, built up over 1500 years of Church Councils and doctrinal arguments, had become a very different person from the Jesus of history; yet the Church still insisted, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the two were identical. In fact, it went further, it argued that the theological presentation of Jesus was so accurate that the history of 1 century Judaea had to be interpreted in the light of the evidence of the New Testament – which was not set as the canon of Christian literature until as late as  the Councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD). From an historical perspective this is clearly nonsense but it was nevertheless maintained with tenacity and dogmatism. This, of course, made the theological position of Christian teaching extremely vulnerable to historical and archaeological discoveries such that the Church sought not only to control interpretation of such finds but also attempted to control the finds themselves – as we explored in a later book, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception.

We realised that the reaction to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had been a remarkable illustration of the dangers of belief without knowledge. Belief is a dangerous thing; belief systems are a species of cultural virus. So much blood has been spilled in the service of belief that it is hard to see it positively. Our position is that one either knows something; or one does not know something. To believe is an act of faith and may, or may not, be in the direction of knowledge.

We decided, in The Messianic Legacy, to first of all explore the historical context of Jesus: what did it mean that he was called King of the Jews, or the Messiah? Then we explored the concept of the Messiah itself and discovered that this carried on down through history in various forms: Constantine, for example, was hailed as a new Messiah. And not surprisingly it was under Constantine that the historical Jesus was finally destroyed. We also explored the creation of Christianity – since Jesus was, of course, a Messianic Jew. And, in a curious discovery, we found much evidence for the Celtic Church of Ireland having had a direct connection with Middle Eastern events which was independent of Rome. Which fact suggested an additional agenda at play with Rome’s quiet destruction of the Celtic Church.

We secondly explored the Messianic impulse as it burst through the twentieth century movements of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Both these systems were founded upon a philosophy which was tantamount to a religious faith. Both movements spawned liturgies and canonical texts, both used symbolism and ritual in their pageantry and spectacle. We argued that Stalin and Hitler were, in fact, more akin to shamans than politicians. Much of the information on this which we published in The Messianic Legacy is very disturbing and, even today in a new millennium, directly relevant to an understanding of the Fundamentalist movements which are emerging as the true enemy of civilisation.

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Finally, we continued to pursue the elusive secret society we first contacted in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the Prieuré de Sion, since it seemed to understand the power of the symbolic and the mythological and its effect on society, indeed, upon the understanding of history itself. This led us into some very strange byways indeed. But we remained cautious over the claims and counter-claims; and we were cautious over the apparent plan to present a messianic figure to western culture. As we wrote: “We would prefer to see individuals creating a sense of meaning from within themselves, rather than accepting one proffered from without, however ostensibly lofty or laudable."

MB

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