Monday, May 15, 2006
The Jesus Papers -- Just another conspiracy story

(After waiting more than a month, my library has finally provided me with a copy of Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers. This is part one of some posts that I intend to write reviewing parts of the book as the mood strikes me.)

Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers seeks to pick up where the book he co-authored Holy Blood, Holy Grail left off in 1982. The introduction reads, in pertinent part:

Since the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I have had twenty-two more years to reflect on these very questions, to do more research and to reassess the history and implications of those events. In other words, two decades of research over and above what is explored in The Da Vinci Code.

In other words, Mr. Baigent realizes that The Da Vinci Code made a lot of money capitalizing on his leaps from speculations to conclusions that he "researched" 22 years prior (can anyone say "Priory of Sion"?) and he wants to be able to throw out more logical leaps to capitalize on the popularity of Dan Brown's book. As an unintended consequence, Mr. Baigent's book doesn't disappoint -- it appears to be equally as flawed as both his prior book and The Da Vinci Code.

The first chapter of his book has a story about a meeting between himself and some other unidentified people in an unidentified bank where he is shown, for no discernable reason, a chest full of documents from ancient times that he is asked to photograph so that some secret potential buyers can review the photos before purchasing the contents of the chest. Of course, in a typical conspiracy-theory scene, the bank officials have to make it a point that as far as they are concerned the contents of the chest don't exist. What is the secret of these documents? Baigent doesn't know because he cannot read the ancient languages. But he is called on to take photos, and he does so. When he tries to sneak one of the rolls of film into his pocket so that he can prove that these documents exist, the agent of the owner of these documents who is in the room at the time catches Baigent by noting that Baigent is one film short. Baigent reluctantly turns over the roll he had slipped into his pocket with a sort-of 'whatdoyouknow, here it is -- I wonder how it ended up in my pocket?' type of attitude.

Now, one would think that if the people who had called him in to photograph these super-secret texts caught him trying to slip a roll of film that he had taken into his pocket, they might not trust Baigent. In fact, it seems to me that these people could even kill him to assure his silence. What happens, is -- to put it mildly -- incredible. Baigent records that his friend who invited him to this super-secret meeting to photograph these super-secret documents, recognizing that Baigent was trying pilfer a roll of film which records what these super-secret documents said, decides to help him. He asks the owner's agent to tell him where he planned to get the film developed. "At a photographic shop," the agent responded. At a photographic shop!?! We have documents hidden in bank vault where their very existence is not even acknowledged by the bank, where the agent is so careful he counts the number of rolls of film snapped by Baigent to make certain that they are all accounted for, and the agent responsible for the safekeeping of this secret plans to drop the photos off for processing at the local 24-hour photo shop?

Now it goes from incredible to even more incredible: Baigent's friend convinces the agent that such a photographic shop is not secure, and further convinces him to have Baigent develop the rolls of film! Yes, the agent somehow decides to trust Baigent to develop this film of these super-secret ancient documents even though he had caught Baigent just a few moments earlier trying to secretly take one roll for his own purposes. Maybe I'm alone, but I cannot imagine that any competent agent who is concerned with the secrecy of the existence and contents of some documents would be so incredibly stupid.

But wait -- it gets even better. Baigent goes home and develops the film, developing a second set for himself. Of course, this means that we are going to have photographic evidence of these documents and what they say, right? Well . . . .

From here, Baigent takes the photographs to the Western Asiatic Department of the British Museum to speak to an expert he had interviewed for a prior book in order to have him give him his opinion of the writings and content of the documents. The expert he wanted to meet was not there, but he met with a new expert he had never met before to whom he turned over the photographs. (Baigent is an incredibly trusting guy, right?) Now, get this -- Baigent turned over the only other set of prints he had made. That's right -- when he has possession of the negatives, he only prints up one extra set and that is the set he turns over to a man he has never before met at the British Museum. Now, I begin to wonder whether Baigent is any more intelligent than the agent for the owner.

So, what happens next? As any conspiracy theory reader knows, the plot must thicken. After several weeks, Baigent goes back to the museum and -- surprise, surprise -- not only does no one know anything about the photographs, but the guy to whom he gave the photographs had also disappeared to somewhere ("I think to Paris"). So, Baigent is left without the photos and with no clue as to where the expert to whom he had given them had disappeared.

But all is not lost -- he had a couple of "reject prints" still at the house that he was able to pass along to another expert who said that they were records of commercial transactions. Interestingly, while the book has three seperate sets of pages set aside for photographs, he does not include any of these "reject prints" to verify anything of what he says.

What's the point? Did these documents have anything to do with Jesus? Not that we can tell. In fact, assuming the meeting and subsequent events really took place as Baigent describes, as far as we can know the box had nothing but commercial records. In fairness, Baigent doesn't claim that the box had anything more in it, and concludes the chapter by saying that the account of the document-filled chest at the bank is included to demonstrate that the world of ancient times is a world where "potentially crucial keys to the mysteries of our past are simultaneously available and elusive." So, he is not saying that there was necessarily anything important in the chest.

However, in typical Baigent fashion, he does allude that there was more:

"I was horrified to note, there were hundreds of pieces of papyrus text roughly fixed to the cardboard by small strips of clear adhesive tape. The texts were written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Accompanying them were Egyptian mummy wrappings inscribed in demotic -- the written form of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I knew that it was common for such wrappings to bear sacred texts, and so the owners of this hoard must have unwrapped at least a mummy or two. The Aramaic or Hebrew texts looked, at first sight, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I had seen before, although they were mostly written on parchment.

I have not finished the book, but I have already seen several places where Baigent draws conclusions of fact from suggestions. But then, isn't that what most conspiracy theories do?

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Tuesday, May 16, 2006
The Jesus Papers -- The incredible non-clues of Chapter 2

(After waiting more than a month, my library has finally provided me with a copy of Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers. This is part two of some posts that I intend to write reviewing parts of the book as the mood strikes me. Part I is located here.)

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Chapter 2 of Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers finally begins the actual discussion of the Jesus Papers by repeating a tale that is apparently part of both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code -- the tale of the sudden wealth of Abbe Beranger Sauniere. According to the story, Abbe Sauniere, while doing some renovation work at his church in the village of Rennes de Chateau around 1890, came across some documents that contained "incontrovertible evidence" that Jesus was still alive in 45 A.D.

Taking a step back, the rumors about Abbe Sauniere were not that he had found such a document, but rather he had found a "treasure." This"treasure" he took to Paris from where he returned to Rennes de Chateau very wealthy -- wealthy enough to improve the roads to the church and the church itself. The tie to the "treasure" being documents comes from a note by Dr. Douglas William Guest Bartlett of the Church of England. Baigent, being a good and diligent investigator, interviews Dr. Bartlett and learns that Dr. Bartlett has no personal knowledge of what Abbe Sauniere found more than 100 years ago, but he knows someone who did -- Canon Alfred Lilley (1860-1848). According to Dr. Bartlett, Canon Lilley was asked by a former student in the 1890s to travel to Paris to help interpret a document. What is interesting is that Baigent's conversation with Bartlett reveals one very interesting omission: he never says what Lilley reportedly said he read.

Think about this for a moment: the purpose of this chapter is to provide support for the idea that Abbe Sauniere had discovered a document that showed that Jesus survived the crucifixion. The documents themselves are no longer available (because the big, bad Vatican had either secreted or destroyed them after obtaining possession of them from Abbe Sauniere and discovering what they really were), and the only eyewitness account of what the documents said (even though it is hearsay because the eyewitness died 58 years ago) is the statements made to Bartlett by Lilley which were themselves made around 40 years after the alleged translation. So, wouldn't one think that it would be important to be clear on what Lilley said he read? Alas, Baigent either never heard clearly what Lilley saw or decided not to bore us with the details. Instead, he says things like,"Lilley said that they [meaning the priests who were working on the translation with him] wouldn't have a long and happy life if certain people knew about it. It was a very delicate matter. Lilley laughed over what was going to happen when the French priests told anyone about it." (Nice attitude for a man of the cloth to have.) He also says that the documents "were extraordinary and upset many of our ideas about the Church. Contact with the material, he said, led to an unorthodoxy. " Finally, Baigent records Bartlett saying, "By the end of his life, Lilley had come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the Gospels that one could certain about. He had lost all conviction of truth."

Now, once again being fair to Baigent, he may be assuming that the note itself makes it clear that the documents reported that "a substitution was carried out by extreme zealots on the journey to the place of execution." But one would think that Baigent would have used the interview to provide more details then contained in the note by either clarifying what the documents were or what they said. Unfortunately, the interview apparently succeeded in none of those tasks because Baigent admits that Bartlett couldn't even clarify the number of documents allegedly found (whether that was Bartlett's or Lilley's lack of memory is unclear) let alone the type of documents. Thus, the eyewitness testimony of Lilley seems to be, at minimum, extremely vague and unclear. Oh, and I should mention that Bartlett said that Lilly didn't know where these document(s) had originated, and so there is no necessary connection between Lilley's document(s) and the "treasure" allegedly found by Abbe Sauniere.

I have to admit to being totally unconvinced, thus far.

To add to my skepticism, the entire story of Abbe Sauniere finding the documents also appears to be vague and uncertain. As Baigent notes later in the chapter, "The story -- which has proved implacably resistant to verification -- relates Sauniere's discovery of documents during renovation of the church." (Emphasis added.) In fact, not only is it "resistant to verification" , it is an outright fraud. According to "Priory of Sion Parchments and Steven Mizrach",

During the mid-1950s -- after the death of Marie Denarnaud in 1953 -- Noel Corbu, the inheritor of Sauniere's Estate in 1946, decided to open a restaurant in the Villa Bethanie called the 'Hotel de La Tour'. Corbu soon afterwards began spreading a story that Berenger Sauniere had discovered parchments in the hollow Visigothic pillar of his Church when he began renovating it in 1891, leading to a treasure discovery enabling the priest to fully renovate and refurbish the church and to build an ornate Estate. According to Corbu's story, the parchments contained the Seal of Blanche of Castille.

Noel Corbu's allegations contain many problems: Sauniere's renovation of the Church began in 1886, not in 1891; the 'Visigothic' pillar that allegedly contained the parchments was not hollow, nor did it in fact originate from Sauniere's church -- the pillar dates from 1891 when Sauniere installed his Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes at Rennes-le-Chateau (the pillar was moved into the 'Sauniere Museum' in 1993 and was replaced by a replica provided by the Association Terre de Rhedae, and that version itself was to be later replaced by another replica, done by sculptor Alain Feral in 2000).

There is no historical evidence to suggest that Berenger Sauniere discovered any parchments (or treasure) -- the priest's life is very well documented. French books have been published demonstrating the true story about the priest with accompanying primary sources showing that Corbu's story was indeed just a legend. The details in Corbu's story only dated from the time when he started making the allegations during the mid-1950s -- and it has been rightly observed by many sober-minded researchers that it was a mere publicity gimmick, devised to attract custom[ers] to his restaurant.

There is also a more mundane explanation for Sauniere's sudden wealth than the find of secret documents that would split the church -- Abbe Sauniere was engaging in trafficking in masses. Now, while I am not an expert on Roman Catholicism, it is my understanding that this offense arises from priests essentially selling the sacraments. Selling the holy rites to your congregation would seem to be a way to make some extra money.

But wait, there is apparently evidence that Abbe Sauniere had this secret knowledge of Jesus surviving the crucifixion built into the stained glass windows of his church. According to Baigent (who does provide photos this time), the church has stained-glass windows representing the stations of the cross. While the stained-glass windows are made from a standard plaster-cast, the stained-glass windows at Abbe Sauniere's church, Rennes de Chateau, have been modified to communicate this secret knowledge. (As an aside, why is it that all of these people who know the truth behind conspiracies always hiding their knowledge instead of writing it down on paper to be read plainly after their death? Just wondering . . . .) According to Baigent,

. . . the most curious of all is station 14. This is traditionally the last of the series illustrating Jesus being placed in the tomb prior to the resurrection. At Rennes de Chateau the image shows the tomb and immediately in front of it, three figures carrying the body of Christ. But the painted background reveals the time as night. In the sky beyond the figures, the full moon has risen.

If the full moon has risen, it would mean that the Passover has begun. This is significant because no Jew would have handled a dead body after the beginning of the Passover, as this would have rendered him ritually unclean. This variation in the fourteenth station suggests two important points: that the body the figures are carrying is still alive, and that Jesus -- or his substitute on the cross -- has survived the crucifixion. Moreover, it suggests that the body is not being placed in the tomb, but rather, that it is being carried out, secretly, under the cover of night.

Wow! What a revelation! But I do think a couple of observations are in order. First, there is no question that Jesus was taken off the cross and to the tomb late in the day (his death having come around 3:00 in the afternoon). Now, I don't know about other people, but I have often seen the moon come out before the sun has set. Full moons can also be seen before the sun sets, but they generally only come out very late in the day and very low in the sky. The picture of the moon in the church window is also low in the sky. So, I don't think that Baigent is accurate in his claim that the scene depicts that the body is being carried at night -- it could simply be a depiction of twilight as Joseph of Arimathea seeks to have Jesus taken to his tomb before it became fully night.

But why the moon at all? Well, Passover always occurs on the 14th and 15th days after a new moon (Leviticus 23:5-6), and since the moon's cycle is 28 days, it follows that Passover always occurs on a full moon. So, is it unreasonable to conclude that the moon is positioned in the sky just above the horizon to emphasize that this is the eve of Passover? I don't think so.

So, what we have in Chapter 2 is a vague and incomplete recollection of the words of a dead man (who held heretical views according to the book) about some documents that he didn't even know where they came from; a legend that appears to have been invented in the 1950s about events in the 1890s to attract customers to a restaurant, and a stained-glass window that seems to be equally able to be seen as (®) (Information from Roger)