Jesus bloodline

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A Jesus bloodline is a hypothetical two-millenia-old sequence of direct descendants of the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene or some other woman usually portrayed as his alleged wife or a religious prostitute. There is no historical, biblical, apocryphal, archaeological, genealogical or genetic evidence which conclusively supports or refutes this modern hypothesis. Different versions of the Jesus bloodline hypothesis have been promoted by numerous books, websites and films of non-fiction and fiction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which have almost all been dismissed as works of pseudohistory and conspiracy theory by professional historians and scholars from related fields.^[1] The hypothetical Jesus bloodline should not be confused with the biblical genealogy of Jesus or the historical relatives of Jesus and their descendants known as the Desposyni.

Contents 1 History of the hypothesis 2 Claimants 3 Religious adherence 4 Criticism 5 Notes

History of the hypothesis

The Jesus bloodline hypothesis, which held that the historical Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and fathered a child with her, was first postulated by Donovan Joyce in his 1973 book The Jesus Scroll.^[2] In his 1977 book Jesus died in Kashmir: Jesus, Moses and the ten lost tribes of Israel, Andreas Faber-Kaiser explored the legend that Jesus met, married and had several children with a Kashmiri woman. The author also interviewed the late Basharat Saleem who claimed to be a descendant of Jesus.^[3] Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln developed and popularized the hypothesis that a bloodline from Jesus and Mary Magdalene eventually became the Merovingian dynasty in their 1982 controversial non-fiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,^[4] in which they asserted:

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience - exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity? We do not think so. In fact, we do not not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels, and of established Christianity, is ultimately incomplete - a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our research enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.^[4]

In her 1992 book Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story, Barbara Thiering also developed a Jesus and Mary Magdalene bloodline hypothesis, basing her historical conclusions on her application of the so-called Pesher technique to the New Testament.^[5] In her 1993 book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, Margaret Starbird developed the hypothesis that Saint Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and that this was the source of the legend associated with the cult at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. She also claimed that the name "Sarah" meant "Princess" in Hebrew, thus making her the forgotten child of the "sang raal", the blood royal of the King of the Jews.^[6]

The 1996 book Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner is unique in that it presents dubious pedigree charts of Jesus as the convenient ancestor of all the European royal families of the Common Era. The 2000 book Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the Dynasty of Jesus by Marylin Hopkins, Graham Simmans and Tim Wallace-Murphy developed the hypothesis that a Jesus bloodline was part of a shadow dynasty descended from twenty-four high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem known as "Rex Deus" - the "Kings of God".^[7]

The 2003 conspiracy fiction novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown accepted some or all of the above hypotheses as being valid. Elements of the Jesus bloodline hypothesis were propounded by the 2007 documentary film The Lost Tomb of Jesus by Simcha Jacobovici focusing on the Talpiot Tomb discovery,^[8] which was also published as a book entitled The Jesus Family Tomb.^[9]

Claimants

The following is a list of notable persons who have publicly claimed to be from a Jesus bloodline:

• Basharat Saleem, the late Kashmiri caretaker of the Martyr's Tomb of Yuz Asaf in Srinagar.^[10][11]
• Michel Lafosse, a Belgian false pretender to the throne of the former Kingdom of Scotland.^[12][13]
• Kathleen McGowan, an American author, lyricist, screenwriter.^[14][15]

Religious adherence

In reaction to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code, and other controversial books on the same theme, a significant number of individuals^[who?] in the New Age movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have adopted a religious devotion to a hypothetical Jesus bloodline.^[16] They expect this "holy bloodline" will eventually breed a direct descendant of Jesus who will become a messiah - a sacred king who rules a world government - during an event which they will interpret as the second coming of the Gnostic Christ and the dawn of the Age of Aquarius^{[citation needed]}.^[17]

The views of many of these "adherents of the bloodline" are influenced by the writings of academics^[who?] and laymen who seek to challenge predominant Judeo-Christian beliefs and institutions through a systematic defense of the "sacred feminine".^{[18][19][20][21][22][23]} These iconoclasts often portray Mary Magdalene as being the apostle of a Christian feminism, and even the personification of the mother goddess, usually associating her with the Black Madonna.^[24] Some, such as Margaret Starbird, wish the ceremony that celebrated the beginning of the alleged marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene to be viewed as a "holy wedding"; and Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their alleged daughter, Sarah, to be viewed as a "holy family".^[25]

No mainstream Christian denomination (excluding some Restorationist movements) has adhered to a Jesus bloodline hypothesis as a doctrine or an object of uncritical devotion, since they maintain that Jesus, being God the Son, was perpetually celibate, continent and chaste, and metaphysically married to the Church; he died, was resurrected, ascended to heaven, and will eventually return bodily and visibly to earth, thereby making all Jesus bloodline hypotheses and related messianic expectations impossible.^[16]

Many fundamentalist Christians believe the Antichrist, prophesied in the Book of Revelation, plans to present himself as descended from the Davidic line to bolster his false claim that he is the Jewish Messiah. The intention of such propaganda would be to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of Jews and philo-Semites to achieve his Satanic objectives.^[26]

Criticism

The Jesus bloodline hypothesis parallels other legends about the flight of disciples to distant lands, such as the one depicting Joseph of Arimathea traveling to England after the death of Jesus, taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as "pious fraud" produced during the Middle Ages.^[27][28][29]

The Jesus bloodline hypothesis from the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is not contained in any of the "Priory of Sion documents" and was dismissed as fiction by Pierre Plantard in 1982 on a French radio interview, as well as by Philippe de Cherisey in a magazine article.^[30][31] Plantard only claimed that the Merovingians were descended from the Tribe of Benjamin,^[32] which contradicts the hypothesis of a Jesus bloodline as the missing link between the Merovingian line and the Davidic line from the Tribe of Judah. The Desposyni (the relatives of Jesus and their descendants) are claimed to have existed in various anti-gnostic Christian texts that have only survived by way of quotations.^[33] However, the notion of a direct bloodline from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and its supposed relationship to the Merovingians (as well as their alleged modern descendants: House of Habsburg, Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg, Clan Sinclair, House of Stuart, House of Cavendish, and other noble families), is strongly dismissed as pseudohistorical by an overwhelming majority of Christian and secular historians such as Darrell Bock and Bart Ehrman,^[34][35] as have journalists and investigators such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has an extensive archive on this subject matter.

In 2005, UK TV presenter and amateur archaeologist Tony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, "The Real Da Vinci Code", shown on Channel 4.^[36] The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists, and cast severe doubt on the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France, among other related myths, by interviewing on film the inhabitants of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the centre of the cult of Saint Sarah.

The speculation surrounding a Rex Deus bloodline is based upon dubious historical evidence that has been supposedly lost, therefore conveniently cannot be independently verified. The authors' informant who related this pseudohistory (which is based on the work of Barbara Thiering) is named "Michael", who claimed that the evidence was contained in his late father's bureau, which was sold his brother blissfully unaware of its contents.^[7]

Robert Lockwood, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s director for communications, sees the myth of a Church conspiring to cover-up the historical Jesus and his hypothetical bloodline as a deliberate piece of anti-Catholic propaganda. He sees it as part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic sentiment, with deep roots in the American Protestant imagination but going back to the very start of the Reformation of 1517.^[37]

The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus from a liberal Christian perspective, concluded that the notion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or some other woman (regardless of whether this union produced any children) is possible, and should not be viewed as "heretical", "blasphemous" or "anti-Christian". They argue that there is no historical evidence which conclusively supports or refutes such a notion.^[38]

Ultimately, the notion that a person living millennia ago has a small number of descendants living today is statistically improbable.^[39] Steve Olson, author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, published an article in Nature demonstrating that, as a matter of statistical probability, "[i]f anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet."^[40] Historian Ken Mondschein ridiculed the notion that the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene could have been preserved: "Infant mortality in pre-modern times was ridiculously high, and you'd only need one childhood accident or disease in 2,000 years to wipe out the bloodline … keep the children of Christ marrying each other, on the other hand, and eventually they'd be so inbred that the sons of God would have flippers for feet."^[41]

Notes