Читать книгу The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History - Michael Baigent - Страница 6

Throughout my career I’ve enjoyed correspondence with other historians and researchers into the truth behind accepted history, but some letters demand more attention than others. This letter certainly did.

“May I advise you that the ‘treasure’ is not one of gold and precious stones, but a document containing incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in the year A.D. 45. The clues left behind by the good curé have never been understood, but it is clear from the script that a substitution was carried out by the extreme zealots on the journey to the place of execution. The document was exchanged for a very large sum and concealed or destroyed.”

Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, and I simply didn’t know what to do with this note. It came from a respected and highly educated Church of England vicar, the Rev. Dr. Douglas William Guest Bartlett. By “the good curé” Bartlett was referring to the Abbé Béranger Saunière, the priest of the small hilltop village of Rennes le Château, nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Abbé Saunière was appointed priest at the village in 1885. His annual income was approximately ten dollars. He gained a notoriety that has lasted to the present day by obtaining, in the early 1890s, from mysterious sources, for equally mysterious reasons, considerable wealth.¹ The key to his wealth was a discovery he made while restoring the church in 1891. But the “treasure” he found, according to Bartlett, was not the glittering deposit we had at first supposed (perhaps the lost treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem), but something far more extraordinary—some documents concerning Jesus and therefore the very basis of Christianity. At the time this seemed too wild for us to even consider and so we left it “on file.”

We had certainly suspected that something odd was going on in the dark corridors of history, but while working on Holy Blood, Holy Grail we were discovering all manner of unexpected and highly controversial data that would take us far away from the concerns of this letter, so we tabled it for future scrutiny. Jesus’s survival was simply not an important issue for us at that time, as our focus had become fixed on the possibility that prior to the crucifixion he had at least one child—or had left his wife pregnant. So whether Jesus’s life ended on the cross or not seemed irrelevant to our developing story of his marriage, the survival of his bloodline down through European history, and its symbolic expression in the stories of the Holy Grail, stories that formed the backbone of our best-selling book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, first published in 1982.

Yet, intrigued by this bland, outrageous, but confident letter, we kept returning to it. “What,” we asked ourselves, “would constitute ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that Jesus survived and was living long afterwards?” “What, in fact,” we thought, racking our brains, “would constitute incontrovertible evidence of anything in history?” Documents, we supposed, but what sort of documents would be beyond doubt?

The most believable documents, we thought, would be the most apparently mundane, those with no agenda to serve, no argument to support—an inventory perhaps, a historical equivalent of a shopping list. Something like a Roman legal document stating in a matter-of-fact manner: “Item: Alexandria, Fourth year of Claudius (A.D. 45), report of Jesus ben Joseph, an immigrant from Galilee, formerly tried and acquitted in Jerusalem by Pontius Pilate, today confirmed as the owner of a plot of land beyond the city walls.”

But it all seemed a bit far-fetched.

After Holy Blood, Holy Grail appeared and the dust had settled, out of personal curiosity more than anything else, we decided to visit the author of the letter and see what we could make of him. We needed to know whether he was believable or not. He lived in Leafield, Oxfordshire, a rural county of England comprising idyllic villages with stone houses centered upon the ancient university town of Oxford. The Rev. Bartlett lived in one of the small villages set in the higher country to the northwest of the county. We talked to him one afternoon in his garden, sitting on a wooden bench. It was the normality of the setting that made the topic of our conversation all the more remarkable.

“In the 1930s, I was living in Oxford,” reported the Rev. Bartlett. “In the same street was a ‘high-powered’ figure in the Church of England, Canon Alfred Lilley. I saw him every day.” Canon Alfred Leslie Lilley (1860-1948) had been, until his retirement in 1936, Canon and Chancellor of Hereford Cathedral. He was an expert in medieval French and for that reason was often consulted on difficult translation work.

During their daily talks, Lilley and Bartlett became closer, and Lilley eventually trusted Bartlett sufficiently to tell him an extraordinary story. In the early 1890s, Lilley reported, he had been asked by a young man, a former student of his, to travel to Paris to the Seminary of Saint Sulpice to advise on the translation of a strange document (or perhaps documents—Bartlett could no longer remember exactly) that had appeared from a source that was never divulged. At Saint Sulpice there was a group of scholars whose task it was to comb through all the documents that came in—a task performed, Lilley suspected, at the request of a Vatican cardinal. The scholars asked for help on the translation because they couldn’t really make out the text. Perhaps it seemed so outrageous to them that they thought they were misunderstanding it in some manner.

“They didn’t know that it was so close to the bone,” Bartlett recalled Lilley explaining. “Lilley said that they 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. He didn’t know what happened to them [the documents], but he thought that they had changed hands for a large sum of money and had ended up in Rome.” In fact, Lilley thought that the Church would ultimately destroy these documents.

Lilley was quite certain that these documents were authentic. They were extraordinary and upset many of our ideas about the Church. Contact with the material, he said, led to an unorthodoxy. Lilley did not know for certain where the documents had come from but believed that they had once been in the possession of the heretical Cathars in the south of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even though they were much older. He was also sure that following the demise of the Cathars the documents had been held in Switzerland until the wars of the fourteenth century, when they were taken to France.

“By the end of his life,” Bartlett explained, “Lilley had come to the conclusion that there was nothing in the Gospels that one could be certain about. He had lost all conviction of truth.”

Henry and I were stunned. Bartlett was no fool. Not only was he a church minister with a master’s degree from one of the Oxford colleges, but he also held a science degree in physics and chemistry from the University of Wales, as well as a medical degree, also from Oxford. He was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians. To call him highly educated was something of an understatement. He clearly admired Canon Lilley and greatly respected his learning and had no doubt whatsoever that Lilley had been accurately describing the document, or documents, he had seen during that trip to Paris. We needed to study Lilley and see if we could glean any further information about the material concerning Jesus and determine who at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice and the Vatican might have had an interest in it.

The key to understanding Canon Lilley was that he considered himself a “Modernist”; he was the author of a book on the movement that was extremely influential at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Modernists wished to revise the dogmatic assertions of church teachings in the light of the discoveries made by science, archaeology, and critical scholarship. Many theologians were realizing that their confidence in the historical validity of New Testament stories was misplaced. For example, William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was once asked to write on the life of Jesus. He declined, saying that there was not nearly enough solid evidence to write anything at all about him.

During the nineteenth century the Vatican was becoming increasingly anachronistic. The Papal States stretching from Rome across to Ancona and up to Bologna and Ferrara still existed, and the pope ruled like a medieval potentate. Torture was regularly practiced by the anonymous minions of the Inquisition in their secret jails. Those convicted in papal courts were sent as oarsmen to the galleys or were exiled, imprisoned, or executed. A well-used gallows stood in the town square of every community. Spies lurked everywhere, and repression was the rule; modernity was being kept at arm’s length—even railways were banned by the pope for fear that travel and communication between people would harm religion. And all this was occurring against a backdrop of a Europe where pressure for social change in the form of liberation movements opposing despotic power and encouraging parliamentary rule had become the norm.

Despite willful ignorance, the outside world was spilling over the crumbling borders of the papal domains. Change was beginning to seem inevitable. Democratic political philosophy, a growing social awareness, and the mounting criticism of biblical texts and their inconsistencies were causing religious certainties to buckle under the strain. And to the horror of Catholic conservatives, papal political power too was under direct threat. This was a real problem: in 1859, following a war between Austria and France that saw the defeat of the Catholic Hapsburg forces, the great majority of the papal lands joined the newly created kingdom of Italy. The pope, Pius IX, summarily demoted by events, now ruled over only Rome and a fragment of the surrounding countryside. And it grew worse: on 21 September 1870, even this small patrimony was taken away by Italian troops. The pope found himself left with just the walled enclave of Vatican City, where his successors continue to rule today.

Just before the loss of Rome, the pope, in what seems to have been considerable desperation, had called a General Council of Bishops to shore up his power. Yet by calling this council, the pope was implicitly recognizing the limitations of that power. The question of who held the reins had long been a festering sore at the Vatican. The uncomfortable truth was that the pope derived his legitimacy, not from the apostle Saint Peter, two thousand years earlier as he claimed, but from a much more mundane and worldly source: a Council of Bishops that had met at Constance in the early fifteenth century. At that time there had been three popes—a trinity of pontiffs united only in mutual loathing—all claiming, simultaneously, to have supreme authority over the Church. This ludicrous situation had been resolved by the bishops, who claimed—and were recognized in this claim—to hold legitimate authority. From that point on, the popes held their authority by virtue of the bishops. Accordingly, every pope was bound, when wishing to make a major change, to seek their approval.

It was Pope Pius IX, though, who wanted to make the most major of changes: he was determined to be declared infallible, thus receiving unprecedented power over all the faithful. But he knew that he would have to use guile to achieve this goal. Hence, the First Vatican Council was convened in late 1869. Its real aims were kept secret by a small group of powerful men that included three cardinals, all of whom were members of the Inquisition. No mention was made of papal infallibility in any of the documents circulated about the objectives and direction of the council. Meanwhile, the bishops gathered and found themselves subjected to strong-arm tactics. There were no secret votes, and the cost of criticism was immediately apparent: the loss of Vatican stipends was the least that a dissenting bishop could expect.

After two months the issue of papal infallibility was introduced to the council. Most of the bishops present were surprised, shocked, even outraged. Certain church leaders who stood and spoke against the move were “dealt with” by house arrest, while others fled. One leader was physically assaulted by the pope himself. Despite the intimidation, only 49 percent of the bishops cast their vote for papal infallibility. And yet, a majority vote in favor of the move was declared, and on 18 July 1870, the pope was pronounced infallible. Just over two months later Italian troops entered Rome and consigned the freshly “infallible” pope to the limits of Vatican City—a divine response, perhaps, to his lack of humility.

The desire of the pope and his supporters, of course, was that the doctrine of infallibility would buttress the Vatican against the challenges it was facing—in particular from biblical criticism and the discoveries of archaeology.

The aim of the Modernists, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. They sought to revise church dogma in light of their scholarly findings. The historical evidence their research produced was helping to unravel the myths the Church had created and perpetuated, especially the myth about Jesus Christ. The Modernists were also greatly opposed to the centralization of the Vatican. The Modernist movement at this time was especially strong in Paris, where the director of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, from 1852 to 1884, was a liberal Irish theologian named John Hogan. Hogan welcomed and openly encouraged Modernist studies at the seminary. Indeed, Canon Lilley saw him as the “greatest single influence” on what became Modernism.² Many of Hogan’s students also attended lectures by the Assyriologist and Hebrew expert, Father Alfred Loisy, who was director of the Institute Catholique in Paris and another prominent Modernist.

At first the Vatican seemed not to mind. The new pope, Leo XIII (who was elected in 1878 and served until 1903), was sufficiently confident in the strength of Rome’s position to allow scholars access to the Vatican archives. But he had not realized what scholarship would subsequently discover and the church doctrines these findings would call into question. It soon became apparent to him that this scholarship posed a serious threat to the very foundations of the Church. Just before his death in 1903, Pope Leo XIII moved to repair the damage. In 1902 he created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to oversee the work of all theological scholars and to ensure that they did not stray from the teachings of the Church. The Commission had close connections with the Inquisition, having been ruled by the same cardinal.

The danger, apparent to all, was expressed succinctly by Father Loisy: “Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom, but what came was the Church.”³ Loisy, among other Modernists, believed that the historical scholarship conducted during that time had made many church dogmas impossible to maintain, dogmas such as the founding of the Church by Jesus, his virgin birth, and his divine sonship—in essence, Jesus’s very divinity.⁴

The leading British Modernist George Tyrell opposed the unrelentingly autocratic authority of the Vatican. “The Church, he thought, had no business being an official Institute of Truth.”⁵ Of course, the Church considered that to be exactly its role.

The Modernists asked an uncomfortable and impertinent question: what should be done when history or science point to a conclusion that contradicts the Church’s tenets? The response of the Church in the face of these direct challenges was to withdraw further behind its walls of dogma: it resolved all uncertainty by ruling that the Church was always right, under all circumstances, about everything.

In 1892 Hogan’s successor at Saint Sulpice ordered students to stop attending lectures by the Modernist Alfred Loisy. The next year Loisy was dismissed from his teaching post at the Institute Catholique, and he was eventually excommunicated. In fact, the Vatican suspended or excommunicated many Modernists and placed their books on the “Index.” In 1907 Pope Pius X issued a formal ban against the entire movement, and on 1 September 1910, all priests and Catholic teachers were required to swear an oath against Modernism. Just to be sure that the ever-changing world outside would not intrude upon their delicate theological sensibilities, students at seminaries and theological colleges were forbidden to read newspapers.

But before the veil came down in 1892, the atmosphere at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice had been very heady. The center was a place of learning, stimulated by curiosity and discovery. Adding continuously to a great sense of excitement was a steady stream of new translations and archaeological discoveries. It was in this milieu that Canon Lilley was called to Paris to look at the document or documents that provided incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45. Upon witnessing this level of analytical study, Lilley must have wondered how much longer the Vatican could maintain its rigidly dogmatic position. He must have guessed that it would soon react against these discoveries and shut the door on free scholarship. As he relayed to Bartlett, he believed that the documents he was working on ended up in the Vatican, either locked away forever or destroyed.

When we first heard this story about Jesus being alive in A.D. 45, we were reminded of a curious statement in the work of the Roman historian Suetonius. In his history of the Roman emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), he reports that, “because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from the city.”⁶

The events he writes about took place around A.D. 45. This “Chrestus” was evidently an individual present in Rome at the time. We wondered: could this individual have been “Christ”? We should remember that “Christos” was the Greek translation, and “Messiah” the Greek transliteration, of the Aramaic meshiha, which itself derives from the Hebrew ha-mashiah, “the anointed (king).” The Greek “Messiah” thus comes from the Aramaic word, which was the commonly spoken language at the time, rather than from the Hebrew.

Was there a messianic individual active in Rome? And if so, why would the Jews have been rioting? Would they have been attacking the Romans under this agitator’s encouragement, or would they have been attacking the agitator? Or, even more strangely, could this agitator have set one man against another in the Jewish community to provoke rioting among them? Suetonius does not give us any information on the aims of the rioters or who they might have opposed. But we wondered nevertheless, could Jesus, like Paul, have ended up in Rome?

Suetonius wrote his histories in the early second century A.D. and for some years was chief secretary to the Roman emperor Hadrian (117-38). He was official keeper of the Roman archives and controller of the libraries. He would obviously have had full access to all imperial documentation, and so his report can be considered accurate. Who truly was “Chrestus”? No one knows.

There was another visitor to Saint Sulpice in those provocative days of the early 1890s: the Abbé Saunière, the priest of Rennes le Château. The story—which has proved implacably resistant to verification—relates Saunière’s discovery of documents during the renovations of his church. After showing these documents to his bishop, he was ordered to travel to Paris, where a meeting with experts at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice was arranged. This occurred in or around 1891. Reportedly, Saunière stayed in Paris for three weeks. When he returned, he had access to considerable wealth, sufficient to construct a new road up the hill to the village, to renovate and repaint the church, and to build a comfortable and fashionable villa, an ornate garden, and a tower that served as his study.

Could Saunière’s documents have been those seen and translated by Canon Lilley? Could Saunière’s sudden wealth be due to his finding them? The Rev. Bartlett certainly thought so. And if this were true, then it would certainly explain a very curious image still on the wall of the church at Rennes le Château—an image that reveals something very heretical indeed about the beliefs of the Abbé Saunière.

Although the church at Rennes le Château is small, it is decorated inside like a Gothic fantasy, something more at home in a Bavarian castle for King Ludwig II than a Pyrenean hilltop village. It is bulging with images and color. Investigators have spent years trying to decipher the many clues Saunière embedded in the symbolism. But there is one image that is very clear—one image that does not take any great occult or symbolic knowledge to understand.

Like all Catholic churches, this one has, around its walls, plaster reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. They are a set sequence of images depicting the stages of Jesus’s walk along the road to Golgotha after his trial. They are used for contemplation and prayer, serving as a kind of map to the resurrection for the faithful. Those about the walls of the church at Rennes le Château are from a standard pattern of casts supplied by a company in Toulouse that can be found in a number of other churches. At least, the plaster-cast images are identical. They differ in one important respect, however: those at Rennes le Château are painted, and in a very curious manner indeed. One image, for example, shows a woman with a child standing beside Jesus; the child is wearing a Scottish tartan robe. Others are equally curious. But 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 le Château 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 of 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.

It is important to note that the Stations of the Cross at Rennes le Château were painted under the direct supervision of Abbé Saunière. He appears to be telling us that he knows—or at least believes—that Jesus survived the crucifixion. Could he have learned this on his visit to Saint Sulpice, we wondered? Did he meet there the same group of scholars who called Canon Lilley to Paris? If we accept the story as it has been relayed to us, then on the face of things the answer to both of these questions seems likely to be yes.

Whatever the answers—and we are hardly in a position to come to any definite conclusions just yet—Station 14 as it is depicted on the wall of this church serves as an eloquent testimony to a secret heretical knowledge that once lay in the hands of a priest in deepest rural France.

It seemed unreasonable for us to suppose that Saunière was alone in his belief. We thought surely there must be other clues in other churches, in documents, and in the writings of those who held the same convictions. Would finding them prove any validity to this story? We needed to know how the crucifixion could have been managed such that Jesus, or his substitute, might have survived. And we needed to know what this might mean. We thought it was time to look at the biblical accounts of the event from this fresh perspective.