Jesus bloodline

The Jesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of descendants of the historical Jesus has persisted to the present time. The claims frequently depict Jesus as married, often to Mary Magdalene, and as having descendants living in Europe, especially France but also the UK. Differing and contradictory Jesus bloodline scenarios, as well as more limited claims that Jesus married and had children, have been proposed in numerous modern books. Some such claims have suggested that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to another location such as France, India or Japan.

Though absent from the Gospels or historical records, the concept of Jesus having blood descendants has gained a presence in the public imagination, as seen with Dan Brown's best-selling novel and movie ''The Da Vinci Code'' that used the premise for its plot, it is generally dismissed by the scholarly community. These claimed Jesus' bloodlines are distinct from the biblical genealogy of Jesus and from the documented 'brothers' and other kin of Jesus, known as the ''Desposyni''.

Jesus as husband and father

Historical precursors

Ideas that Jesus Christ might have been married have a long history in Christian theology, though the historical record says nothing on the subject. Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, commented that, although there are some historical scholars who claim that it is likely that Jesus was married, the vast majority of New Testament and early Christianity scholars find such a claim to be historically unreliable.

Much of the bloodline literature has a more specific focus, on a claimed marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are indications in Gnosticism of the belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene shared an amorous, and not just a religious relationship. The Gnostic ''Gospel of Philip'' tells that Jesus "kissed her often" and refers to Mary as his "companion". Several sources from the 13th-century claim that an aspect of Catharist theology was the belief that the earthly Jesus had a familial relationship with Mary Magdalene. ''An Exposure of the Albigensian and Waldensian Heresies'', dated to before 1213 and usually attributed to Ermengaud of Béziers, a former Waldensian seeking reconciliation with the mainstream Catholic Church, would describe Cathar heretical beliefs including the claim that they taught "in the secret meetings that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Christ". A second work, untitled and anonymous, repeats Ermengaud's claim. The anti-heretic polemic ''Historia Albigensis'', written between 1212 and 1218 by Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay, gives the most lurid description, attributing to Cathars the belief that Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus. These sources must be viewed with caution: the two known authors were not themselves Cathars and were writing of a heresy being actively and violently suppressed. There is no evidence that these beliefs derived from the much earlier Gnostic traditions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but the Cathar traditions did find their way into many of the 20th-century popular writings claiming the existence of a Jesus bloodline.

Modern works

The late 19th-century saw the first of several expansions on this theme of marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, providing the couple with a named child. The French socialist politician, Louis Martin (pseudonym of Léon Aubry, died 1900), in his 1886 book ''Les Evangiles sans Dieu'' (''The Gospels without God''), republished the next year in his ''Essai sur la vie de Jésus'' (''Essay on the life of Jesus''), described the historical Jesus as a socialist and atheist. He related that after his crucifixion, Mary Magdalene, along with the family of Lazarus of Bethany, brought the body of Jesus to Provence, and there Mary had a child, Maximin, the fruit of her love for Jesus. The scenario was dismissed as 'certainly strange' by a contemporary reviewer.

The late 20th century saw the flourishing of a genre of popular books claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a family. Donovan Joyce's 1972 best-seller, '' The Jesus Scroll'', presented an alternative timeline for Jesus that arose from a mysterious document. He claimed that, after being denied access to the Masada archaeological site, he was met at the Tel Aviv airport by an American University professor using the pseudonym "Max Grosset", who held a large scroll he claimed to have smuggled from the site. Relating its contents to Joyce, Grosset offered to pay him to smuggle it out of the country, but then became spooked when his flight was delayed and snuck away; he was never identified and the scroll was not seen again. According to Joyce, the 'Jesus Scroll' was a personal letter by 80-year-old ''Yeshua ben Ya’akob ben Gennesareth'', heir of the Hasmonean dynasty and hence rightful King of Israel, written on the eve of the fall of the city to the Romans after a suicide pact ended Masada's resistance. It was said to have described the man as married, and that he had a son whose crucifixion the letter's author had witnessed. Joyce identified the writer with Jesus of Nazareth, who, he claimed, had survived his own crucifixion to marry and settle at Masada, and suggested a conspiracy to hide the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to suppress this counter-narrative to Christian orthodoxy.

Barbara Thiering, in her 1992 book '' Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story'', republished as ''Jesus the Man'', and made into a documentary, ''The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls'', by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, also developed a Jesus and Mary Magdalene familial scenario. Thiering based her historical conclusions on her application of the so-called Pesher technique to the New Testament. In this work of pseudo-scholarship, Thiering would go so far as to precisely place the betrothal of Jesus and Mary Magdalene on 30 June, AD 30, at 10:00 p.m. She relocated the events in the life of Jesus from Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem to Qumran, and related that Jesus was revived after an incomplete crucifixion and married Mary Magdalene, who was already pregnant by him, that they had a daughter Tamar and a son Jesus Justus born in AD 41, and Jesus then divorced Mary to wed a Jewess named Lydia, going to Rome where he died. The account was dismissed as fanciful by scholar Michael J. McClymond.

In the television documentary, ''The Lost Tomb of Jesus'', and book '' The Jesus Family Tomb'', both from 2007, fringe investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino proposed that ossuaries in the Talpiot Tomb, discovered in Jerusalem in 1980, belonged to Jesus and his family. Jacobovici and Pellegrino argue that Aramaic inscriptions reading "Judah, son of Jesus", "Jesus, son of Joseph", and "Mariamne", a name they associate with Mary Magdalene, together preserve the record of a family group consisting of Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalene and son Judah. Such theory has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars, archaeologists and theologians, including the archaeologist Amos Kloner, who led the archeological exavation of the tomb itself.

The same year saw a book following the similar theme that Jesus and Mary Magdalene produced a family written by psychic medium and best-selling author Sylvia Browne, ''The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus''.

The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus from a liberal Christian perspective, were unable to determine whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a matrimonial relationship due to the dearth of historical evidence. They concluded that the historical Mary Magdalene was not a repentant prostitute but a prominent disciple of Jesus and a leader in the early Christian movement.''The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus'' (1998), Harper SanFrancisco, The claims that Jesus and Mary Magdalene fled to France parallel other legends about the flight of disciples to distant lands, such as the one depicting Joseph of Arimathea traveling to England after the death of Jesus, taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as " pious fraud" produced during the Middle Ages.

Joseph and Aseneth

In 2014, Simcha Jacobovici and fringe religious studies historian Barrie Wilson suggested in ''The Lost Gospel'' that the eponymous characters in a 6th-century tale called "Joseph and Aseneth" were in actuality representations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The story was reported in an anthology compiled by Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, along with covering letters describing the discovery of the original Greek manuscript and its translation into Syriac. In one of these, translator Moses of Ingila explained the story "as an allegory of Christ's marriage to the soul". Jacobovici and Wilson instead interpret it as an allegorical reference to actual marriage of Jesus, produced by a community holding that he was married and had children.

Israeli Biblical scholar, Rivka Nir called their work "serious-minded, thought-provoking and interesting", but described the thesis as objectionable, and the book has been dismissed by mainstream Biblical scholarship, for example by Anglican theologian, Richard Bauckham. The Church of England compared ''The Lost Gospel'' to a Monty Python sketch, the director of communications for the Archbishop's Council citing the book as an example of religious illiteracy and that ever since the publication of ''The Da Vinci Code'' in 2003, "an industry had been constructed in which 'conspiracy theorists, satellite channel documentaries and opportunistic publishers had identified a lucrative income stream'." ''The Lost Gospel'' was described as historical nonsense by Markus Bockmuehl.

Early Mormon theology

Early Mormon theology posited not only that Jesus married, but that he did so multiple times. Early leaders Jedediah M. Grant, Orson Hyde, Joseph F. Smith and Orson Pratt stated it was part of their religious belief that Jesus Christ was polygamous, quoting this in their respective sermons. A number of the early church leaders claimed to be the lineal descendants of Jesus by such a marriage. The Mormons also used an apocryphal passage attributed to the 2nd-century Greek philosopher Celsus: "The grand reason why the gentiles and philosophers of his school persecuted Jesus Christ was because he had so many wives. There were Elizabeth and Mary and a host of others that followed him". This appears to have been a summary of a garbled or second-hand reference to a quote from Celsus the Platonist preserved in the apologetics work Contra Celsum ("''Against Celsus''") by the Church Father Origen: "such was the charm of Jesus' words, that not only were men willing to follow Him to the wilderness, but women also, forgetting the weakness of their sex and a regard for outward propriety in thus following their Teacher into desert places."

Jesus as ancestor of a bloodline

Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln developed and popularized the idea of a bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene in their 1982 book ''The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail'' (published as ''Holy Blood, Holy Grail'' in the United States), in which they asserted: ". . . we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children." Specifically, they claimed that the ''sangraal'' of medieval lore did not represent the ''San Graal'' (Holy Grail), the cup drunk from at the Last Supper, but both the vessel of Mary Magdalene's womb and the ''Sang Real'', the royal blood of Jesus represented in a lineage descended from them. In their reconstruction, Mary Magdalene goes to France after the crucifixion, carrying a child by Jesus who would give rise to a lineage that centuries later would unite with the Merovingian rulers of the early Frankish kingdom, from whom they trace the descent into medieval dynasties that were almost exterminated by the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars, leaving a small remnant protected by a secret society, the Priory of Sion. The role of the Priory was inspired by earlier writings primarily by Pierre Plantard, who in the 1960s and 1970s had publicized documents from the secretive Priory that demonstrated its long history and his own descent from the lineage they had protected that traced to the Merovingian kings, and earlier, the biblical Tribe of Benjamin. Plantard would dismiss ''Holy Blood'' as fiction in a 1982 radio interview, as did his collaborator Philippe de Cherisey in a magazine article, but a decade later Plantard admitted that, before he incorporated a group of that name in the 1950s, the very existence of the Priory had been an elaborate hoax, and that the documents on which Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln had relied for inspiration had been forgeries planted in French institutions to be later "rediscovered"."Affaire Pelat: Le Rapport du Juge", ''Le Point'', no. 1112 (8–14 January 1994), p. 11. The actual lineage claimed for the portion of the Plantard and ''Holy Blood'' bloodline that passes through the medieval era received highly-negative reviews in the genealogical literature, being viewed as consisting of numerous inaccurate linkages that were unsupported, or even directly contradicted, by the authentic historical record.

''The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail'', a 1993 book by Margaret Starbird, built on Cathar beliefs and Provencal traditions of Saint Sarah, the black servant of Mary Magdalene, to develop the hypothesis that Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In her reconstruction, a pregnant Mary Magdalene fled first to Egypt and then France after the crucifixion. She sees this as the source of the legend associated with the cult at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. She also noted that the name "Sarah" means "Princess" in Hebrew, thus making her the forgotten child of the "''sang réal''", the blood royal of the King of the Jews. Starbird also viewed Mary Magdalene as identical with Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus. Though working with the same claimed relationship between Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Saint Sarah that would occupy a central role in many of the published bloodline scenarios, Starbird considered any question of descent from Sarah to be irrelevant to her thesis, though she accepted that it existed. Her view of Mary Magdalene/Mary of Bethany as wife of Jesus is also linked with the concept of the sacred feminine in feminist theology. Mary Ann Beavis would point out that unlike others in the genre, Starbird actively courted scholarly engagement over her ideas, and that " though her methods, arguments and conclusions do not always stand up to scholarly scrutiny, some of her exegetical insights merit attention . . .," while suggesting she is more mythographer than historian.

In his 1996 book ''Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed'', Laurence Gardner presented pedigree charts of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as the ancestors of all the European royal families of the Common Era. His 2000 sequel ''Genesis of the Grail Kings: The Explosive Story of Genetic Cloning and the Ancient Bloodline of Jesus'' is unique in claiming that not only can the Jesus bloodline truly be traced back to Adam and Eve but that the first man and woman were primate-alien hybrids created by the Anunnaki of his ancient astronaut theory. Gardner followed this book with several additional works in the bloodline genre.

In ''Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the Dynasty of Jesus'', published in 2000, Marylin Hopkins, Graham Simmans and Tim Wallace-Murphy developed a similar scenario based on 1994 testimony by the pseudonymous "Michael Monkton", that a Jesus and Mary Magdalene bloodline was part of a shadow dynasty descended from twenty-four high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem known as '' Rex Deus'' – the "Kings of God". The evidence on which the informant based his claim to be a ''Rex Deus'' scion, descended from Hugues de Payens, was said to be lost and therefore cannot be independently verified, because 'Michael' claimed that it was kept in his late father's bureau, which was sold by his brother unaware of its contents. Some critics point out the informant's account of his family history seems to be based on the controversial work of Barbara Thiering.

''The Da Vinci Code''

The best-known work depicting a bloodline of Jesus is the 2003 best-selling novel and global phenomenon, ''The Da Vinci Code'', joined by its 2006 major cinematic release of the same name. In these, Dan Brown incorporated many of the earlier bloodline themes as the background underlying his work of conspiracy fiction. The author attested both in the text and public interviews to the veracity of the bloodline details that served as the novel's historical context. The work so captured the public imagination that the Catholic Church felt compelled to warn its congregates against accepting its pseudo-historical background as fact, which did not stop it from becoming the highest-selling novel in American history, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide. Brown mixes facts easily verified by the reader and additional seemingly-authentic details that are not actually factual, with a further layer of outright conjecture that together blurs the relationship between fiction and history. An indication of the degree to which the work captured the public imagination is seen in the cottage industry of works that it inspired, replicating his style and theses or attempting to refute it.

In Brown's novel, the protagonist discovers that the grail actually referred to Mary Magdalene, and that knowledge of this, as well as of the bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary, has been kept hidden to the present time by a secret conspiracy. This is very similar to the thesis put forward by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln in ''Holy Blood and the Holy Grail'' though not associating the hidden knowledge with the Cathars, and Brown also incorporated material from Joyce, Thiering and Starbird, as well as the 1965 ''The Passover Plot

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