Nevertheless, the real spirit of both Judaism and Christianity moved away from the Holy Land. The majority of Palestine’s Jewish population dispersed in a diaspora like that which had occurred some seven hundred years before, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. And Christianity, in a similar fashion, began to migrate across the globe—to Asia Minor, to Greece, to Rome, to Gaul, to Britain, to North Africa. Not surprisingly, conflicting accounts of what had happened in or around A.D. 33 began to arise all over the civilized world. And despite the efforts of Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and their kin, these accounts—officially labeled "heresies"—continued to flourish. Some of them undoubtedly derived from some sort of first-hand knowledge preserved both by devout Jews and by groups like the Ebionites, Jewish converts to one or another form of Christianity. Other accounts were patently based on legend, or rumor, or an amalgamation of current beliefs—such as Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Mithraic mystery traditions. Whatever their specific sources, they caued much disquiet to the "adherents of the message," the coalescing orthodoxy that was endeavoring to consolidate its position.
Information on the early "heresies" is meager. Modern knowledge about them derives largely from the attacks of their opponents, which naturally makes for a distorted picture—like the picture that might emerge of the French Resistance, for instance, from Gestapo documents. On the whole, however, Jesus seems to have been viewed by the early "heretics" in one of two ways. For some he was a full-fledged god, with few, if any, human attributes. For others he was a mortal prophet, not essentially different from, say, the Buddha—or, half a millennium later, Muhammad.
Among the most important of the early heresiarchs was Valentinus, a native of Alexandria who spent the latter part of his life (A.D. 136-65) in Rome. In his time Valentinus was extremely influential, numbering such men as Ptolemy among his following. Claiming to possess a body of "secret teachings" of Jesus, he refused to submit to Roman authority, asserting that personal gnosis took precedence over any external hierarchy. Predictably enough Valentinus and his adherents were among the most belabored targets of Irenaeus’ wrath.
Another such target was Marcion, a wealthy shipping magnate and bishop who arrived in Rome around 140 and was excommunicated four years later. Marcion posited a radical distinction between "law" and "love," which he associated with the Old and New Testaments respectively; certain of these Marcionite ideas surfaced a full thousand years later in such works as the Perlesvaus. Marcion was the first writer to compile a canonical list of biblical books— which in his case excluded the whole of the Old Testament. It was in direct response to Marcion that Irenaeus compiled his canonical list, which provided the basis for the Bible as we know it today.
The third major heresiarch of the period—and in many ways the most intriguing—was Basilides, an Alexandrian scholar writing between A.D. 120 and 130. Basilides was conversant with both Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Gospels. He was also steeped in Egyptian and Hellenistic thought. He is supposed to have written no less than twenty-four commentaries on the Gospels. According to Irenaeus he promulgated a most heinous heresy indeed. Basilides claimed that the Crucifixion was a fraud, that Jesus did not die on the cross, and that a substitute—Simon of Cyrene—took his place instead.19 Such an assertion would seem to be bizarre. And yet it has proved to be extraordinarily persistent and tenacious. As late as the seventh century the Koran maintained precisely the same argument—that a substitute, traditionally Simon of Cyrene, took Jesus’ place on the cross.20 And the same argument was upheld by the priest from whom we received the mysterious letter discussed in Chapter 1—the letter that alluded to "incontrovertible proof" of a substitution.
If there was any one region where the early heresies most entrenched themselves, it was Egypt, and more specifically Alexandria— most learned and cosmopolitan city in the world at the time, the second largest city in the Roman empire and a repository for a bewildering variety of faiths, teachings, and traditions. In the wake of the two revolts in Judaea, Egypt proved the most accessible haven for both Jewish and Christian refugees, vast numbers of whom thronged to Alexandria. It was thus not surprising that Egypt yielded the most convincing evidence to support our hypothesis. This was contained in the so-called Gnostic Gospels, or, more accurately, the Nag Hammadi scrolls.
In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant, digging for soft and fertile soil near the village of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, exhumed a red earthenware jar. It proved to contain thirteen codices— papyrus books or scrolls—bound in leather. Unaware of the magnitude of the discovery, the peasant and his family used some of the codices to stoke their fire. Eventually, however, the remainder attracted the attention of experts; and one of them, smuggled out of Egypt, was offered for sale on the black market. Part of this codex, which was purchased by the C. G. Jung Foundation, proved to contain the now famous Gospel of Thomas.
In the meantime the Egyptian government nationalized the remainder of the Nag Hammadi collection in 1952. Only in 1961, however, was an international team of experts assembled to copy and translate the entire corpus of material. In 1972 the first volume of the photographic edition appeared. And in 1977 the entire collection of scrolls appeared in English translation for the first time.
The Nag Hammadi scrolls are a collection of biblical texts, essentially Gnostic in character, which date, it would appear, from the late fourth or early fifth century—from about A.D. 400. The scrolls are copies, and the originals from which they were transcribed date from much earlier. Certain of them—the Gospel of Thomas, for example, the Gospel of Truth, and the Gospel of the Egyptians—are mentioned by the very earliest of Church Fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Origen. Modern scholars have established that some if not most of the texts in the scrolls date from no later than A.D. 150. And at least one of them may include material that is even older than the four standard Gospels of the New Testament.21
Taken as a whole, the Nag Hammadi collection constitutes an invaluable repository of early Christian documents—some of which can claim an authority equal to that of the Gospels. What is more, certain of these documents enjoy a claim to a unique veracity of their own. In the first place, they escaped the censorship and revision of later Roman orthodoxy. In the second place, they were originally composed for an Egyptian, not a Roman, audience, and are not therefore distorted or slanted to a Romanized ear. Finally, they may well rest on first-hand and/or eyewitness sources—oral accounts by Jews fleeing the Holy Land, for instance, perhaps even personal acquaintances or associates of Jesus, who could tell their story with a historical fidelity the Gospels could not afford to retain.
Not surprisingly the Nag Hammadi scrolls contain a good many passages that are inimical to orthodoxy and the "adherents of the message." In one undated codex, for example, the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Jesus is depicted precisely as he is in the heresy of Basilides—escaping his death on the cross by dint of an ingenious substitution. In the following extract Jesus speaks in the first person:
I did not succumb to them as they had planned ... And I did not die in reality but in appearance, lest I be put to shame by them ... For my death which they think happened [happened] to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death ... It was another, their father, who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. They struck me with the reed; it was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns ... And I was laughing at their ignorance.22
With convincing consistency certain other works in the Nag Hammadi collection bear witness to a bitter and ongoing feud between Peter and the Magdalen—a feud that would seem to reflect a schism between the "adherents of the message" and the adherents to the bloodline. Thus, in the Gospel of Mary, Peter addresses the Magdalen as follows, "Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember—which you know but we do not."23 Later Peter demands indignantly of
the other disciples, "Did he really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?"24 And later still, one of the disciples replies to Peter, "Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us."25
In the Gospel of Philip the reasons for this feud would appear to be obvious enough. There is, for example, a recurring emphasis on the image of the bridal chamber. According to the Gospel of Philip, "the Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber."26 Granted, the bridal chamber, at first glance, might well seem to be symbolic or allegorical. But the Gospel of Philip is more explicit, "There were three who always walked with the Lord; Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalen, the one who was called his companion." 27 According to one scholar the word "companion" is to be translated as "spouse."28 There are certainly grounds for doing so, for the Gospel of Philip becomes more explicit still:
And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalen. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her?"29
The Gospel of Philip elaborates on the matter. "Fear not the flesh nor love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you. If you love it, it will swallow and paralyze you."30 At another point this elaboration is translated into concrete terms. "Great is the mystery of marriage! For without it the world would not have existed. Now the existence of the world depends on man, and the existence of man on marriage."31 And toward the end of the Gospel of Philip there is the following statement. "There is the Son of man and there is the son of the Son of man. The Lord is the Son of man, and the son of the Son of man is he who is created through the Son of man."32
14
The Grail Dynasty
On the basis of the Nag Hammadi scrolls alone the possibility of a bloodline descended directly from Jesus gained considerable plausibility for us. Certain of the so-called Gnostic Gospels enjoyed as great a claim to veracity as the books of the New Testament. As a result the things to which they explicitly or implicitly bore witness—a substitute on the cross, a continuing dispute between Peter and the Magdalen, a marriage between the Magdalen and Jesus, the birth of a "son of the Son of man"—could not be dismissed out of hand, however controversial they might be. We were dealing with history, not theology. And history in Jesus’ time was no less complex, multifaceted, and oriented toward practicalities than it is today.
The feud, in the Nag Hammadi scrolls, between Peter and the Magdalen apparently testified to precisely the conflict we had hypothesized—the conflict between the "adherents of the message" and the adherents of the bloodline. But it was the former who eventually emerged triumphant to shape the course of Western civi- lization. Given their increasing monopoly of learning, communication, and documentation, there remained little evidence to suggest that Jesus’ family ever existed. And there was still less to establish a link between that family and the Merovingian dynasty.
Not that the "adherents of the message" had things entirely their own way. If the first two centuries of Christian history were plagued by irrepressible heresies, the centuries that followed were even more so. While orthodoxy consolidated itself—theologically under Irenaeus, politically under Constantine—the heresies continued to proliferate on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
However much they differed in theological details, most of the major heresies shared certain crucial factors. Most of them were essentially Gnostic or Gnostic-influenced, repudiating the hierarchical structure of Rome and extolling the supremacy of personal illumination over blind faith. Most of them were also, in one sense or another, dualist, regarding good and evil less as mundane ethical problems than as issues of ultimately cosmic import. Finally, most of them concurred in regarding Jesus as mortal, born by a natural process of conception—a prophet, divinely inspired perhaps but not intrinsically divine, who died definitively on the cross or who never died on the cross at all. In their emphasis on Jesus’ humanity many of the heresies referred back to the august authority of Saint Paul, who had spoken of "Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh." (Romans 1:3)
Perhaps the most famous and profoundly radical of the heresies was Manichaeanism—essentially a fusion of Gnostic Christianity with skeins of earlier Zoroastrian and Mithraic traditions. It was founded by an individual named Mani, who was born near Baghdad in A. D. 214 to a family related to the Persian royal house. As a youth Mani was introduced by his father into an unspecified mystical sect—probably Gnostic—that emphasized asceticism and celibacy, practiced baptism, and wore white robes. Around A.D. 240 Mani began to propagate his own teachings and, like Jesus, was renowned for his spiritual healing and exorcisms. His followers proclaimed him "the new Jesus" and even credited him with a virgin birth—a prerequisite for deities at the time. He was also known as "Savior," "Apostle," "Illuminator," "Lord," "Raiser of the Dead," "Pilot," and "Helmsman." The last two designations are especially suggestive, for they are interchangeable with "Nautonnier," the official title assumed by the grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.
According to later Arab historians Mani produced many books in which he claimed to reveal secrets Jesus had mentioned only obscurely and obliquely. He regarded Zarathustra, Buddha, and Jesus as his forerunners and declared that he, like them, had received essentially the same enlightenment from the same source. His teachings consisted of a Gnostic dualism wedded to an imposing and elaborate cosmological edifice. Pervading everything was the universal conflict of light and darkness; and the most important battlefield for these two opposed principles was the human soul. Like the later Cathars, Mani espoused the doctrine of reincarnation. Like the Cathars, too, he insisted on an initiate class, an "illuminated elect." He referred to Jesus as the "Son of the Widow"—a phrase subsequently appropriated by Freemasonry. At the same time he declared Jesus to be mortal—or, if divine at all, divine only in a symbolic or metaphorical sense, by virtue of enlightenment. And Mani, like Basilides, maintained that Jesus did not die on the cross but was replaced by a substitute.1
In A.D. 276, by order of the king, Mani was imprisoned, flayed to death, and decapitated; and perhaps to preclude a resurrection, his mutilated body was put on public display. His teachings, however, only gained impetus from his martyrdom, and among his later adherents, at least for a time, was Saint Augustine. With extraordinary rapidity Manichaeanism spread throughout the Christian world. Despite ferocious endeavors to suppress it, it managed to survive, to influence later thinkers, and to persist up to the present day. In Spain and in the south of France Manichaean schools were particularly active. By the time of the Crusades these schools had forged links with other Manichaean sects from Italy and Bulgaria. It now appears unlikely that the Cathars were an offshoot of the Bulgarian Bogomils. On the contrary, the most recent research suggests that the Cathars arose from Manichaean schools long established in France. In any case the Albigensian Crusade was essentially a crusade against Manichaeanism; and despite the most assiduous efforts of Rome, the word "Manichaean" has survived to become an accepted part of our language and vocabulary.
In addition to Manichaeanism, of course, there were numerous other heresies. Of them all, it was the heresy of Arius that posed the most dangerous threat to orthodox Christian doctrine during the first thousand years of its history. Arius was a presbyter in Alexandria around 318 and died in 355. His dispute with orthodoxy was quite simple and rested on a single premise—that Jesus was wholly mortal, was in no sense divine, and in no sense anything other than an inspired teacher. By positing a single omnipotent and supreme God—a God who did not incarnate in the flesh and did not suffer humiliation and death at the hands of his creation—Arius effectively embedded Christianity in an essentially Judaic framework. And he may wel
l, as a resident of Alexandria, have been influenced by Judaic teachings there—the teachings of the Ebionites, for example. At the same time the supreme god of Arianism enjoyed immense appeal in the West. As Christianity came to acquire increasing secular power, such a god became increasingly attractive. Kings and potentates could identify with such a god more readily than they could with a meek, passive deity who submitted without resistance to martyrdom and eschewed contact with the world.
Although Arianism was condemned at the Council of Nicea in 325, Constantinc had always been sympathetic toward it and became more so at the end of his life. On his death his son and successor, Constantius, became unabashedly Arian, and under his auspices councils were convened that drove orthodox Church leaders into exile. By 360 Arianism had all but displaced Roman Christianity. And though it was officially condemned again in 381, it continued to thrive and gain adherents. When the Merovingians rose to power during the fifth century, virtually every bishopric in Christendom was either Arian or vacant.
Among the most fervent devotees of Arianism were the Goths, who had been converted to it from paganism during the fourth century. The Suevi, the Lombards, the Alans, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths were all Arian. So were the Visigoths, who, when they sacked Rome in 480, spared Christian churches. If the early Merovingians, prior to Clovis, were at all receptive to Christianity, it would have been the Arian Christianity of their immediate neighbors, the Visigoths and Burgundians.
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