After the shocking revelations of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail the authors, in their quest to determine the discrepancies between early and modern ‘Christian’ thought, found that they were forced to ask such questions as:
The Messianic Legacy offers enthralling new investigations into the shadowy society of the ‘Prieure de Sion’ – ‘The Guardians of the Holy Grail’ – as the authors discover the murky world of politics, finance, Freemasonry and religion that exists beneath the most solid and conservative seeming of European institutions. The ominous global conspiracy of disinformation they uncover ensures that The Messianic Legacy is an up-to-the-minute thriller and a work of biblical detection that is even more significant than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
MICHAEL BAIGENT was born in New Zealand in 1948 and obtained a degree in psychology from Canterbury University, Christchurch. Since 1976 he has lived in England.
RICHARD LEIGH studied at Tufts University, Boston, the University of Chicago and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
HENRY LINCOLN was born in London in 1930. An ardent Francophile, he has long been deeply interested in French language, history and culture. He has been a writer for over forty years, having produced more than 100 television scripts. He has lectured extensively, and is best known for the presentation of his own programmes on BBC television.
Once again, we should like to thank Ann Evans, whose rare dexterity in trivariance accounts in large part for this book’s existence.
We should also like to thank: Juan Atienza, Andrew Baker, Michael Bentine, Ernest Bigland, Colin Bloy, Brie Burkeman, Derek Burton, Liz Calder, Philippe de Chérisey, Jonathan Clowes, Lindy and Ramon del Corral, Ian Craig, Neville Barker Cryer, Robert Eisenman, Geoff Elkin, Patrick J. Freeman, Jim Garrets, Janice Glaholm, Denis Graham, Joy Hancox, Nigel Horne, Douglas Lockhart, Lydia Ludlow, Linda MacFadyen, Jania McGillivray, Rosalind Maiden, Alison Mansbridge, Tom Maschler, Robert Matthews, Roberta Matthews, Robin Mosley, Michael Myfsud, William Phillips, Piedrre Plantard de Saint-Clair, John Prudhoe, Bob Quinn, David Rolfe, Gino Sandri, John Saul, Hugh Schonfield, Rosalie Siegel, Gordon Thomas, Jonathan Tootell, Louis Vazart, Gérard Watelet, Lilianne Ziegel, the staff of the Wiener Library and the British Library Reading Room, and, of course, our ladies.
Permission from Faber & Faber Ltd to quote from Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation (translated by P. A. Bien, 1961) on p.78 and from William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd to quote from Nichel Tournier’s The Erl King (translated by Barbara Bray, 1972) on pp.140-1 is gratefully acknowledged.
The Temple and the Lodge
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception
Secret Germany: Claus von Staffenberg and the Mystical Crusade against Hitler
The Elixir and the Stone
The Inquisition
Also by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
By Michael Baigent
From the Omens of Babylon
Ancient Traces
by Henry Lincoln
The Holy Place
Key to the Scared Pattern
The Templars’ Sacred Island
ABERG, N., The Occident and the Orient in the Art of the Seventh Century, Part I, The British Isles (Stockholm, 1943–7)
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—— Forty-seven Identifications of the British Nation with the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel (London, 1874)
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—— Mein Kampf (London, 1939)
—— Hitler’s Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London, 1953)
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. . . This fell into my hands by chance a little while ago. Until then I’d never had any intimation of what was being done nowadays in the field of biblical research, or of the attacks being launched by competent historians. It was a shock to me — and a revelation! . . . I learnt all sorts of facts that were entirely new to me. That the Gospels, for example, were written between the years 65 and 100. That means the Church was founded, and was able to carry on, without them. Think of it! More than sixty years after Christ’s birth! It’s as if someone today wanted to write down Napoleon’s words and deeds without being able to consult a single written document, only vague memories and anecdotes.1
Apart from the reference to Napoleon, the above quotation, to judge from the letters and verbal declarations we received, might have expressed, almost verbatim, the reaction of a contemporary reader to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when it was published in 1982. In fact the words are from a novel, Jean Barois by Roger Martin du Gard, published in 1912, and in that novel they elicit the response:
. . . Before long all theologians of any intellectual standing will have reached these conclusions. In fact, they’ll be amazed that nineteenth-century Catholics contrived to believe for so long in the literal truth of those poetic legends.2
Yet even before the time of this fictional dialogue, set in the 1870s, Jesus and the origins of Christianity had begun to emerge as a burgeoning industry for researchers, writers and publishers. In the early sixteenth century, Pope Leo X is on record as declaring: ‘It has served us well, this myth of Christ.’ As early as the 1740s, scholars had deployed what we would now recognise as a valid historical methodology for questioning the veracity of scriptural accounts. Thus, between 1744 and 1767, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor at Hamburg, had argued that Jesus was nothing more than a failed Judaic revolutionary whose body was removed from its tomb by his disciples. By the mid-nineteenth century, German biblical scholarship had truly come of age, and a dating of the Gospels had been established which — in its approach and in most of its conclusions — is still deemed valid. Today, no reputable historian or biblical scholar would deny that the earliest of the Gospels was composed at least a generation after the events it describes. The thrust of German research was eventually to culminate in a position summarised by Rudolf Bultmann of the University of Marburg, one of the most important, most famous and most esteemed of twentieth-century biblical commentators:
I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary.3
Yet Bultmann remained a devout Christian. He did so by insisting on a crucial distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. As long as this distinction was acknowledged, faith remained tenable. If the distinction were not acknowledged, faith would inevitably find itself eroded and embarrassed by the ineluctable facts of history.
This was the kind of conclusion to which nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship would eventually lead. At the same time, however, the bastion of traditional scriptural authority was also being challenged from other quarters. The controversial contentions of German research remained confined to a rarefied sphere of specialists: but in 1863 the French writer Ernest Renan caused a major international controversy with his celebrated best-seller The Life of Jesus. This work, which sought to strip Christianity of its supernatural trappings and present Jesus as ‘an incomparable man’, was perhaps the single most talked-about book of its age. Its impact on the public was enormous; and among the figures it most deeply influenced was Albert Schweitzer. Yet even Renan’s treatment was to be regarded as saccharine and uncritically sentimental by the generation of Modernists who had begun to appear in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And the majority of Modernists, it should be noted, were working within the framework of the Church — until, that is, they were officially condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907 and an anti-Modernist oath was introduced in 1910.
By this time, the findings of both German biblical scholarship and of the Roman Catholic Modernists had begun to find their way into the arts. Thus, in 1916, the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore published his own fictionalised account of Jesus in The Brook Kerith. Moore caused considerable scandal by depicting Jesus as surviving the Crucifixion, and being nursed back to health by Joseph of Arimathea. In the years since The Brook Kerith was published, there have been numerous other fictionalised accounts of the Gospel story. In 1946, Robert Graves published his ambitious fictional portrait, King Jesus, in which Jesus again survives the Cross. And in 1954, Nikos Kazantzakis, the Nobel Prize-winning Greek author, caused an international rumpus with The Last Temptation. In contrast to the Jesus figures in Moore and Graves, Kazantzakis’s protagonist does die on the Cross. Before he does so, however, he has a vision of what his life should and would have been had he not voluntarily submitted himself to his final sacrifice. In this vision — a kind of ‘flash-forward’ in fantasy — Jesus sees himself married to the Magdalene (for whom he has lusted all through the book) and fathering a family upon her.
These examples illustrate the extent to which biblical scholarship opened up new territory for the arts. Two hundred years ago, a novel dealing with scriptural material would have been unthinkable. Even poetry would not address such matters except in the more or less orthodox, more or less devotional form of Paradise Lost. By the twentieth century, however, Jesus and his world had become ‘fair game’, not for luridly sensational purposes, but as valid points of enquiry and exploration for serious, internationally acclaimed literary figures. Through their work, the fruits of biblical scholarship were disseminated to an ever-widening audience.
Biblical scholarship itself did not stand still. Jesus and the world of the New Testament continued to be addressed by professional historians and researchers who, with increasing rigour and fresh evidence at their disposal, sought to establish the facts surrounding that enigmatic individual of two thousand years ago. Many of these works were intended primarily for other experts in the field and attracted little popular attention. A few, however, were pitched to the general reading public and engendered considerable controversy. The Passover Plot (1963) by Dr Hugh Schonfield argued that Jesus staged his own mock crucifixion and did not die on the cross; the book became an international best-seller, with more than three million copies now in print. More recently, controversy was provoked by Jesus the Magician, in which Dr Morton Smith depicts his protagonist as a typical wonder-worker of the age, a figure of a kind that thronged the Middle East at the beginning of the Christian era. The Jesus of Morton Smith is not significantly different from, say, Apollonius of Tyana, or the prototype (assuming one existed) of the legendary figure of Simon Magus.
In addition to material devoted specifically to Jesus, there have been innumerable works on the origins of Christianity, the formation of the early Church and its roots in Old Testament Judaism. Here, Dr Schonfield has again played a prominent role with a series of works addressed to the background of the New Testament. And in 1979 Elaine Pagels attracted the world’s attention, and an immense readership, with The Gnostic Gospels — a study of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, discovered in Egypt in 1945, which offered a radical new interpretation of Christian teaching and tradition.
Biblical scholarship has made enormous advances during the last forty years, aided immensely by the discovery of new primary sources, material unavailable to researchers in the past. The most famous of these sources, of course, are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 in the ruins of the ascetic Essene community of Qumran. In addition to such major discoveries, many parts of which have not yet been published, other sources have gradually been coming to light or, after long suppression, are being circulated and studied.
As a result, Jesus is no longer a shadowy figure existing in the simplistic, fairy-tale world of the Gospels. Palestine at the advent of the Christian era is no longer a nebulous place belonging more to myth than to history. On the contrary, we now know a great deal about Jesus’s milieu, and far more than most practising Christians realise about Palestine in the first century — its sociology, its economy, its politics, its cultural and religious character, its historical actuality. Much of Jesus’s world has emerged from the haze of conjecture, speculation and mythic hyperbole, and is clearer and better documented than, say, the world of King Arthur. And although Jesus himself remains to a significant degree elusive, it is as possible to deduce plausible information about him as it is to deduce such information about Arthur, or Robin Hood.
The Failure of Biblical Scholarship
Despite all this, the hopeful prophecy which we quoted at the beginning of this book has not been fulfilled. Theologians of intellectual standing have not — at least, not publicly — come to share those conclusions, nor to be amazed at the credulity of their nineteenth-century predecessors. In certain quarters, dogma is, if anything, more entrenched than ever. Despite the current problem of over-population, the Vatican can still impose its strictures on birth control and abortion — not on social or moral grounds, but on theological. A fire, caused by a bolt of lightning at York Minster, can still be regarded as evidence of divine wrath at the appointment of a contentious bishop. This bishop’s ambiguous statements on aspects of Jesus’s biography can still provoke outrage among people who refuse to believe anything but that their saviour was conceived by the Holy Spirit of a virgin. And in American communities, major works of literature can be banned from schools and libraries — or even, occasionally, burnt — for challenging traditional scriptural accounts, while a new current of fundamentalism can actually influence American politics through the support of millions eager to be raptured away to a heaven more or less interchangeable with Disneyland.
However unorthodox its presentation of Jesus, Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation is a passionately religious, passionately devotional, passionately Christian work. Nevertheless, the novel was banned in many countries, including the author’s native Greece, and Kazantzakis himself was excommunicated. Among non-fiction works, Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, despite immense sales, provoked much bitter hostility.
In 1983, David Rolfe, working for London Weekend Television and Channel 4, began work on a three-part television documentary entitled Jesus: the Evidence. The series took no position of its own, endorsed no particular point of view. It simply endeavoured to survey the field of New Testament studies and to assess the value of various theories proposed. Yet even before the project got under way, British pressure groups were lobbying to have the enterprise suppressed. When it was finished, in 1984, it had to be screened, in a private showing, to a number of Members of Parliament before it could be cleared for transmission. And although subsequent reviews found it thoroughly sane and quite uncontroversial, clerics of the Church of England publicly announced that they would be on standby alert to deal with any members of their congregation upset by the programmes.
Jesus: the Evidence had sought to bring some of the advances in New Testament scholarship to the attention of the lay public. Apart from The Passover Plot, virtually none of this scholarship has found its way into popular consciousness. A few works, such as Jesus the Magician and The Gnostic Gospels, have been widely reviewed, discussed and distributed, but their readership has been largely confined to people with a particular interest in their subject matter. Most of the work done in recent years has impinged only on specialists. Much of it is also written specifically for specialists, being virtually impenetrable to the uninitiated reader.
So far as the general public is concerned, as well as the churches which minister to that public, the works cited above might never have been produced. George Moore’s depiction of Jesus as having survived the Crucifixion followed on from a contention maintained not only by some of the oldest heresies, but also by the Koran, and thus widely accepted throughout Islam and the Islamic world. And yet the same claim, when promulgated by Robert Graves, then by Dr Schonfield in The Passover Plot, attracted as much scandal and incredulity as if it had never been broached before. In the field of New Testament studies, it is as if each new discovery, each new assertion, is swallowed up as quickly as it can be made. Each must constantly be presented anew, only to disappear again. Many people reacted to certain assertions in our own book as if The Passover Plot, or Graves’s King Jesus, or Moore’s The Brook Kerith — or, for that matter, the Koran itself — had never been written.
This is an extraordinary situation, perhaps unique in the entire spectrum of modern historical research. In every other sphere of historical enquiry, new material is acknowledged. It may be disputed. Attempts may be made to suppress it. Alternatively, it may be digested and assimilated. But at least people know what has already been discovered, what has already been said twenty or fifty or seventy years ago. There is some species of genuine advance, whereby old discoveries and contentions provide a basis for new discoveries and contentions, and a corpus of knowledge comes into being. Revolutionary theories may be accepted or discarded, but least cognisance is at taken of them and of what preceded them. A context exists. Cumulative contributions by successive generations of researchers create an increased and increasing understanding. Thus do we acquire our knowledge of history in general, as well as of specific epochs and events. Thus do we acquire a coherent image of such figures as King Arthur, Robin Hood or Jeanne d’Arc. These images are constantly growing, constantly mutating, constantly being augmented by new material as it becomes available.
So far as the general public is concerned, New Testament history offers a striking contrast. It remains static, unaffected by new developments, new discoveries, new findings. Each controversial assertion is treated as if it were being made for the first time. Thus the Bishop of Durham’s theological pronouncements produce as much of a shock-horror reaction as if the Bishop’s own acknowledged precursor, Archbishop Temple, had never lived, never presided over the Anglican Church between the wars and never made essentially similar pronouncements.
Each contribution in the field of biblical research is like a footprint in sand. Each is covered almost immediately and, so far as the general public is concerned, left virtually without trace. Each must constantly be made anew, only to be covered again.
Why should this be? Why should biblical scholarship, which is pertinent to so many lives, be thus immune to evolution and development? Why should the great mass of believing Christians in fact know less about the figure they worship than about historical figures of far less relevance? In the past, when such knowledge was inaccessible or dangerous to promulgate, there might have been some justification. The knowledge today is both accessible and safely promulgated. Yet the practising Christian remains as ignorant as his predecessors of centuries ago; and he subscribes essentially to the same simplistic accounts he heard when he himself was a child.
A fundamentalist might well assert that the situation bears witness to the resilience and tenacity of Christian faith. We do not find such an explanation satisfactory. The Christian faith may indeed be resilient and tenacious. History has proved it to be so. But we are not talking about faith — which must necessarily be an intensely private, intensely subjective affair. We are talking about documented historical facts.
In the wake of the television series mentioned above, a panel discussion on the subject was transmitted. A number of distinguished commentators, most of them ecclesiastics, were assembled to evaluate the programmes and their implications. During the course of this panel discussion, several of the contributors agreed on one telling point. In the last year, the same point has been echoed not only by the Bishop of Durham, but also by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was also a focus of debate at a subsequent synod of the Church of England.
According to several participants, the prevailing ignorance of New Testament scholarship is in large part the fault of the churches themselves and of the ecclesiastical establishment. Anyone in the ministry, anyone training for the ministry, is, as a matter of course, confronted with the latest developments in biblical research. Any seminarian today will learn at least something of the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls, of the history and evolution of New Testament studies, of the more controversial statements made by both theologians and historians. Yet this knowledge has not been passed on to the laity. In consequence, a gulf has opened between ecclesiastics and their congregations. Among themselves, ecclesiastics have become eminently sophisticated and erudite. They react to the latest discoveries with blasé aplomb, remaining unruffled by theological controversy. They may find contentions such as those we have made questionable, but not surprising or scandalous. Yet nothing of this sophistication has been transmitted to their flock. The flock receives virtually no historical background from its shepherd — who is believed to be the definitive authority on such matters. When, in consequence, such background is presented by writers like ourselves, rather than by the official shepherd, it can often produce a reaction amounting to trauma, or a personal crisis of faith. Either we become regarded as gratuitously destructive iconoclasts, or the shepherd himself becomes suspect for having withheld information. The overall effect is precisely the same as if there were an organised conspiracy of silence among churchmen.
This, then, is the situation at present. On the one hand, there is the ecclesiastical hierarchy, steeped in what has been written in the past, versed in all the latest aspects of biblical scholarship. On the other hand, there is the lay congregation, to whom biblical scholarship is totally unknown territory. The modern, more or less well-read cleric is acutely aware, for example, of the distinction between what is in the New Testament itself and what is an accretion of later tradition. He is aware of precisely how much — or, to be more accurate, how little — the scriptures actually say. He is aware of how much latitude, indeed, of how much necessity, there is for interpretation. For such a cleric, the contradictions between fact and faith, between history and theology, were personally confronted and resolved long ago. Such a cleric has long recognised that his personal belief is not the same thing as historical evidence, and he has effected some kind of personal reconciliation between the two — a reconciliation which, to a greater or lesser degree, manages to accommodate both. Such a cleric has generally ‘heard it all before’. He is unlikely to be startled by the kind of evidence or hypothesis presented by us and by other writers. It will already have been familiar to him, and he will have formed his own conclusions long ago.
In contrast to the learned shepherd, the flock has not had occasion either to familiarise itself with the evidence in question or to confront the inconsistencies between scriptural accounts and the actual historical backdrop. For the devout Christian, there has been no need to reconcile fact and faith, history and theology, simply because he has never had any reason to believe that a distinction between them might exist. He may not even have thought consciously of Palestine two thousand years ago as a very real place, precisely situated in space and time, subject to a confused welter of social, psychological, political, economic and religious factors — the same factors that operate in any ‘real’ locality, past or present. On the contrary, the story in the Gospels is often utterly divorced from all historical context — a narrative of stark, timeless, mythic simplicity enacted in a sort of limbo, a never-never-land of long ago and far away. Jesus, for example, appears now in Galilee, now in Judaea; now in Jerusalem, or on the banks of Jordan. For the modern Christian, however, there is often no awareness of the geographical and political relation between these places, how far they might be from each other, how long a journey from one to the other might take. The titles of various official functionaries are often meaningless. Romans and Jews mill confusingly in the background, like extras on a film set, and if one has any concrete image of them at all, it generally derives from one or another Hollywood spectacular — Pilate complete with Brooklynese accent.
For the lay congregation, scriptural accounts are regarded as literal history, a self-contained story no less true for being divorced from an historical context. Never having been taught otherwise by his spiritual mentors, many a devout believer has had no need to question the problems posed by such a context. When these problems are suddenly posed by a book such as ours, they will quite understandably assume the form of revelation, or of sacrilege. And we ourselves will instinctively be perceived as ‘anti-Christian’, as writers engaged in a fully fledged crusade which pits us, as militant adversaries, against the ecclesiastical establishment — as if we were personally bent on toppling the edifice of Christendom (and so naïve as to think such a feat possible).
Our Conclusion in Perspective
Needless to say, we harbour no such intention. We are not engaged in any sort of crusade. We have no particular desire to make ‘converts’. We certainly are not deliberately trying to shake people’s faith. In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, our motivation was really quite simple. We had a story to tell, and the story seemed eminently worth the telling. We had been involved in an historical adventure as gripping as any detective tale or spy thriller. At the same time, the adventure had also proved immensely informative, uncovering vast tracts of our civilisation’s past — and not just biblical — which we and our readers might not otherwise have had occasion to explore. It is a truism that a good story requires telling; it seems to have a life and momentum of its own, which demand expression. We wished to share our story, in much the same way that one might tug a friend’s arm and call his or her attention to a striking landscape, or a spectacular sunset.
Our conclusions about Jesus were an integral part of our adventure. Indeed, the adventure itself led us to them. We simply invited our readers to witness the process whereby it had done so. ‘These are the conclusions we reached,’ we said in effect. ‘They are our conclusions, based on our own research, our own predispositions, our own framework, our own lack of preconceptions. We are not trying to foist them upon you. If they make sense to you, well and good. If not, feel free to discard them and draw your own. In the meantime, we hope you found your sojourn with us interesting, entertaining and informative.’ And yet it was inevitable, given our subject matter, that we should find ourselves caught in the inherent conflict between fact and faith. A simple example should serve to illustrate the complexities and the paradoxes of this conflict.
In 1520, Hernán Cortés, advancing on the ancient Mexican capital of Tenochtitlán, was regarded as a god by the Aztecs. Never having seen firearms or horses before, the Aztecs regarded these things not only as supernatural, but as confirmation of Cortés’s divine status — of his identity as an avatar of their supreme god, Quetzalcoatl. Today, of course, it is understandable how such a misconception can have occured. Even to a Western European at the time, it would have been comprehensible. It is quite clear that there was nothing in any way divine about Cortés. And yet it is equally clear that in the minds of those who believed in his divinity, he was indeed a god.
Let us suppose that a modern Mexican Indian, perhaps with vestiges of an Aztec heritage, asserts that he believes in Cortés’s divinity. It might seem to us somewhat peculiar, but we could not presume to challenge his belief — especially if his background, his education, his upbringing, his culture had all conduced to foster it. Moreover, his ‘faith’ might entail something much more profound than a mere conviction of Cortés’s divinity. He might assert that he experienced Cortés within him, that he communed personally with Cortés, that Cortés appeared to him in visions, that through Cortés he approached oneness with God or with the sacred. How could we possibly challenge such assertions? What a man experiences in the privacy of his psyche must of necessity remain inviolate and inviolable. And there are a great many people, quite sane, quite balanced, quite worthy of respect, who, in the privacy of their psyches, believe in things far stranger than the divinity of Hernán Cortés.
But the times in which Cortés lived, like the times in which Jesus lived, are documented. We know quite a bit about the historical context, the world in which both figures existed. This knowledge is not a matter of personal belief, but of a simple historical fact. And if a man permits his personal belief to distort, alter or transform historical fact, he cannot expect others, whether or not they share his belief, to condone the process. The same principle obtains if a man permits his personal belief to derange dramatically the laws of probability and what we know of human nature. We could not, as we said, challenge a man who believed in Cortés’s divinity, or who, in some manner or form ‘experienced’ Cortés within him. We could, however, challenge a man who asserted that, as a matter of historical fact, Cortés (like Quetzalcoatl) was born of an eagle and a serpent, or that Cortés was ordained to save the world, or that Cortés never died and now bides his time in some underground crypt awaiting a propitious moment to return and proclaim his sovereignty over Mexico. We could challenge a man who asserted that Cortés, even without his armour, was immune to spears and arrows, that he rode a horse through sea or sky, or that he used weapons which in reality were not invented until two centuries later.
It is not that established records of Cortés explicitly deny these things. They do not — for the simple reason that no such things were ever asserted about Cortés during his lifetime. But such things fly so flagrantly in the face of known history, so flagrantly in the face of human experience, so flagrantly in the face of simple probability, that they impose an inordinate strain upon credulity. As personal belief, they may be unimpugnable. But presented as historical fact, they rest on too improbable and too tenuous a basis.
Jesus poses a problem essentially analogous. We have no desire to challenge anyone’s personal faith, anyone’s personal belief. We are not dealing with the Christ or Christos of theology, the figure who enjoys a very real and very puissant existence in the psyches and consciences of the faithful. We are dealing with a different figure, someone who actually walked the sands of Palestine two thousand years ago, just as Cortés trod the stones of the Mexican desert in 1519. We are dealing, in short, with the Jesus of history — and history, however vague and uncertain it may sometimes be, will still often brazenly defy our wishes, our myths, our mental images, our preconceptions.
In order to do justice to the Jesus of history, one must effectively divest oneself of preconceptions — and especially of the preconceptions fostered by subsequent tradition. One must be prepared to contemplate biblical material as dispassionately as one might contemplate chronicles pertaining to Caesar, or Alexander — or Cortés. And one must refrain from a priori acts of belief.
Indeed, it can be argued that the wisdom of believing or dis-believing is itself questionable. ‘Belief’ may well be a dangerous word, implying, as it does, an act of faith which may often be unwarranted. People are prepared to kill all too readily in the name of belief. At the same time, to disbelieve is as much an act of faith, as much an unsubstantiated assumption, as belief. Disbelief — as exemplified by the militant atheist or rationalist, for instance — is in itself another form of belief. To say that one does not believe in telepathy, or in ghosts, or in God is as much an act of faith as believing in them.
It is preferable to think in terms of knowledge. Ultimately, the issue is quite simple. Either one knows something, immediately, directly and at first hand, or one does not. A man who touches a hot stove does not need to believe in pain. He knows pain; he experiences pain; pain is a reality that cannot be doubted. A man who receives an electric shock does not ask himself whether he believes in the form of energy known as electricity. He experiences something whose reality cannot be denied, whatever the term one attaches to it. But if one is dealing with anything other than empirical knowledge of this kind — if, in short, one does not personally know in the sense just explained — the only honest thing one can say is that one does not know. So far as the theological attributes accorded Jesus by Christian tradition are concerned, we simply do not know.