It is Easter, but that is not why people are talking about Jesus. The Good Book describing his life has been toppled by Gnostic gospels and airport paperbacks. Last week came the publication of The
Gospel According to Judas, which made out that, in getting Christ crucified, Judas was just following his orders. In America, Michael Baigent, a co-author of the 1980s bestseller
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, is plugging his new work,
The Jesus Papers, which argues that Pilate faked the Crucifixion. And then, also high on the bestseller lists, come the latest spiritual-adventure novels: Kate Mosse’s
Labyrinth, Javier Sierra’s
The Secret Supper and Matilde Asensi’s
The Last Cato.
It is all the fault of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, an arcane conspiracy thriller that has sold 40 million copies and next month appears as a movie starring Tom Hanks. It posits a secret, suppressed Christian history in which Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a daughter whose descendants, in opposition to religious orthodoxy, venerated sex and the female. The “truth” has been guarded through the ages by a secret society, The Priory of Sion. Among its members was Leonardo, whose fresco The Last Supper allegedly depicts Mary Magdalene sitting next to Jesus. Last week The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail authors lost, with notable poor grace, a breach of copyright action against Brown for “stealing” what they considered their theory. It is all very bizarre and getting rather nasty.
The Rev Robin Griffith-Jones, a 49-year-old Anglican cleric, finds himself caught in the middle of it. He is the Master of the Temple, a 12th-century church just south of Fleet Street in London that owes its name to its founders, the Order of the Knights Templar. As anyone who has read The Da Vinci Code will recall, one of its false climaxes occurs in the temple as the hero and heroine seek among its effigies of crusader knights “the orb that ought to be on his tomb”.
“We have had a huge increase in visitors,” says Griffith-Jones. “The tourist trail used to go up the Strand to St Paul’s and miss us out. Now there must be well over a thousand people a week coming through our doors. And they love it.”
If they arrive at 1pm on a Friday, they will chance upon one of London’s great bargains: for £4 they can hear Griffith-Jones deliver a witty, one-hour talk that he has now expanded into a short book, The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of The Temple. The master takes the thriller seriously enough to give it a good debunking. “What I’ve tried to say is that this is a rip-roaring page-turner, a fantastic read. Historically, it’s rubbish, but it’s a novel, and some questions it raises are extremely interesting.”
Next week, partly to promote his book, Griffith-Jones will be in New York. I warn him that such is the extent of Grail Fever over there that fans are likely to throw themselves at the feet of a real live “Reverent and Valiant Master of the Temple”. He laughs and says he must remember to bring his scarlet cassock. The fictional master in the Da Vinci Code reputedly possesses a “foul temper”. The real one is so good-humoured that his sentences — spoken or written — tend to end in exclamation marks. He is a worldly sort of eccentric, the son of the prosecuting counsel in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial in 1960 (the one who asked the jury if they would let their wives or servants read the novel), a former Oxford University maths student who worked for six years at Christie’s auction house before finding his vocation. His hair is blondish white and he favours vividly coloured jumpers rather than dog collars, let alone scarlet robes.
His book systematically plucks every thread from Brown’s tapestry. Although the Knights Templar have been so traduced over the centuries that they probably have no reputation left to lose, he explains carefully that they accumulated their wealth during the Crusades as, in effect, one of the first international banks, not by blackmailing the Pope with heretical proofs.
The good times ended in 1307, when Edward II came to the Temple and removed £50,000 worth of silver, gold, jewellery and precious stones from its money chests. Philip IV of France simultaneously began a widespread suppression of the Knights. The lawyers of the Inner and Middle Temple now look after the church and are obliged by statute to pay the master an annual stipend of £26, one shilling and sixpence a year.
Another chapter deals with Opus Dei, an unsavoury outfit even in Griffith-Jones’s balanced account, but not one that included monks (so Brown’s assassin Silas, with his self-flagellating cilice under his habit, could not exist). Another section analyses The Last Supper: the figure next to Christ does not have breasts; it just looks that way because of how his shirt is gathered. Since The Da Vinci Code does not purport to be anything more than fiction, Griffith-Jones cannot really object to any of this. What he can object to are Brown’s claims at the front of the book printed under the word “Fact”. Brown asserts: “The Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organisation.” It was, says the master, actually founded in the 1950s by a French con artist named Plantard. As for the “parchment known as Les Dossiers Secrets” it was just a batch of typed documents, no more ancient than the typewriter.
But there is one allegation against the Church that he cannot so easily dismiss. “If you say, ‘Has the Church misused women for most of its 2,000 years?’ the answer is yes. So let’s be honest about it. We are, I think, slowly but surely getting through that, but it’s taking an awful long time. The Church does seem to outsiders to be terrified of sex, and particularly to be terrified of women’s sexual allure and the threat they seem to offer to celibate men.”
Again, however, Brown has misinterpreted church history to bolster his case. The Gnostic gospels, including Mary’s and Judas’s, may have become fashionable New Age texts, but they are anything but proto-feminist or pro-sex texts. “The Gnosticism of the ancient world was very deep, thoughtful and profound, but it was world-denying. It was misogynistic. It was exclusivist. It was pretty unattractive, actually. I’m not sure that one should just lightly say, ‘I am the heir of these people’. Are you really? Crikey!”
Griffith-Jones accepts that no one knows for sure, but he does not believe that Jesus married. There was a Jewish tradition of celibacy in the 1st century that Brown, naturally, ignores. But nor does he dismiss the claim as risible fantasy. “After all, who’s making the incredible claims, Dan Brown or the Church? We are! We are saying virgin birth, walk on water, raised from the dead. Come on!” Would it matter to him if Christ had married? “No, it wouldn’t, but I do recognise that for a large number of people it would, and I respect that. I genuinely respect the offence and difficulty that it would cause.”
Yet in his chapters concering Christ’s celibacy, Griffith-Jones himself tries to reposition women at the heart of the New Testament. In a reworking of the last part of his 2001 book The Four Witnesses, he says St John’s Gospel has poetic motifs from the Garden of Eden and Song of Songs. In its final scene on Easter Day, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus outside the empty tomb and mistakes him for the gardener. Then he calls her by her name. Griffith-Jones writes: “Who are these two, this man and this woman, in a springtime garden as the light rises on Day 1? They are Adam and Eve. They are together again in Paradise, the Garden of Eden, and all creation is made new.” This is fine as literary criticism, but it does not get to the truth of what actually happened right after Jesus was executed. In these pages a few years ago William Rees-Mogg called St John’s Gospel “the most vivid portrait of Jesus, by the friend who knew him best”, but modern scholars doubt that the apostle John is the John who wrote the gospel. Even Griffith-Jones seems agnostic on the issue. He claims that John, rather than giving an eye-witness account, was trying to bring the story alive to early Christians as a series of faith-affirming surprises, the last and greatest experienced by Mary in the garden on Easter Day. In that case, I say, aren’t Brown and St John both really novelists? “No! Good heavens, they don’t read like novels! If you read The Golden Ass you see what an ancient novel is like; it’s completely different.”
