Michael Baigent, the dean of alternative Jesus historians, known best for suing Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, calls the Crucifixion an elaborate hoax. (From the archive)
View Full Issue Click to View Article Pages 3233 April 3 2006 View Full Issue View Article Pages The greatest story ever Told hardly begins to describe it. Jesus Christ is the most important figure in Western history; given the West’s impact on the rest of the world, possibly in all human history. His story, as detailed in the four Gospels— which depict his transformation from Jesus of Nazareth into Jesus Christ—is sunk deep in the cultural DNA of the West.
It’s clearly not enough for a vast contemporary audience. And so the door is wide open for fiction writers like Dan Brown, whose Da Vinci Code hasn’t dominated bestseller lists for three years on its thriller element alone. Brown’s backstory of a misogynist Church, cruelly suppressing all knowledge of Christ’s marriage to Mary Magdalene and, with it, any trace of the honour primitive Christianity offered “the sacred feminine” principle, has resonated with millions of women .
But Baigent can’t follow Harpur down that road: “The no-Christ position is impossible to maintain, if only because of Tacitus—a highly placed Roman historian with good access to contemporary documents—saying that Pontius Pilate crucified him.” Nor is there anything particularly new with the notion that, while Jesus was crucified, he did not die on the cross. In fact, it’s almost 2,000 years old.
Gnostic Christians, who are credited with a secret, individual and dogma-free enlightenment—and, perhaps crucially, a belief in equality for women—have had good press in modem times. They lost the battle with those Christians who were coalescing around a centralized, required belief system and nascent Church hierarchy. Baigent’s affection for them runs deep. “The Gnostics didn’t stress faith, but individual experience, and I agree it’s better to know than to believe.
And it is the Vatican he hammers. Again, like most others who see a Church-led conspiracy to hide the truth, Baigent hasn’t a word to say about Greek Orthodoxy or even fundamentalist Protestantism. “The Vatican is spin central,” he insists. “It’s the heir to that Roman centralizing group that screwed this religion down 1,600 years ago, that kicked out the feminine element that Jesus fostered, and then turned him into God.
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