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Monday, April 25, 2004 Volume VII Number 16
by Ken Kemp
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hen Stone Phillips devoted the full hour of his weekly newsmagazine Dateline NBC on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, you can conclude it is because he found some intriguing information he was eager to share. Intriguing indeed.
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The complex plot that keeps over six million copies of the book off the shelf and in the hands of eager readers is full of twists and turns. That’s part of the fun. It’s not just that it reads like a feature film (which it soon will be), starring Tom Hanks as Dr. Robert Langdon, a Harvard “symbologist,” and directed by Ron Howard. (Brown got a reported $6 million for the movie rights.) The frontal attack on the history of the Roman Catholic Church is undisguised. The book operates under the assumption that the church is rich and powerful and the Cardinals and Popes have a long history of abuse. Abuse of power. Abuse of wealth. Abuse of the truth, for that matter. Propaganda has been a way of life for the Vatican for centuries, if you believe the book.
But it’s the secret, the mysterious Holy Grail that keeps you guessing - all the way to the end. The secret purports to be so explosive, so shocking, so devastating that if the secret were revealed, it would implode the global structure of the Roman Catholic Church, crushing it into a smoking ruin. It is asserted that this volatile piece of information will erase two thousand years of zeal, just like that. It is, the book says, incontrovertible proof that the Church has based its very reason for being on an ancient fabrication – which once generally known will reverse two millennia of belief.
So it’s not only Catholics who have shunned Brown’s book. Yes, the Cardinals have gone on record that good Catholics should avoid contributing to the success of the author and publisher. Don’t buy. Don’t read it. But evangelical Christians have written volumes debunking the book’s premise as well; particularly the assertion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers who finally married and produced a child.
Stone Phillips and NBC’s Dateline have no such religious agenda. They have no belief to defend and no reason to be concerned about deception, except for Dan Brown’s claim to have based the book on “fact.” When fiction gets mixed with history, the line is always blurred. Dateline’s producers came to the conclusion that the line is not only blurred, it was crossed.
After a lengthy set-up, explaining the book’s basic story line, the producers call in a collection of scholars to speak to the question: is there any evidence that Jesus was married? None, they assert.
So, where did Brown get this story about Opus Dei and the Priori Sion and the succession of grand masters in a secret society which included the likes of Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Bottecelli, and Victor Hugo? There were documents, secret documents, uncovered at France’s National Library (Bibliotheque Nationale), right? Well, yes. Documents, it turns out, planted there by an eccentric Frenchman named Pierre Plantard.
Over one hundred years ago in a tiny village called Rennes le Chateau in the south of France, a local priest named Saunieri came across a substantial amount of money. No one in the town understood how. He rebuilt the old church, restoring it to something of its former glory. It was Pierre Plantard who painstakingly planted the evidence that explained how the priest gained his riches. He explained it to the authors of a 1982 book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which Brown used in his research), by co-authors Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. He was a member of a secret society called the Priori Sion. The priest, Suanieri (whose name is used in Brown’s book), happened across secret parchments hidden in a vault beneath the ancient church. He stumbled across the list of grand masters, and the terrible secret of Jesus’ offspring. Terrified, he went to the Vatican with his evidence. The church paid him handsomely for his silence. Such was Pierre Plantard’s account.
Leigh and Lincoln checked out the story at the library. In doing so, they learned something more. Said Liegh, “We checked all of these… But that wasn’t all. The same files contained papers filled with elaborate family trees, genealogies and codes that seemed to directly tie a line of French kings and queens to the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.”
Brown picks up the whole line of thinking as the most powerful and shattering secret ever kept.
Leigh and Lincoln went back to Plantard with their questions. Plantard not only believed himself to be a member of the ancient secret society, he believed himself to be the direct descendent of Mary Magdalene and her daughter Sarah, and thus Jesus of Nazareth. His documents showed that the French monarchy, all the way back to 496 AD, followed the same bloodline. According to Plantard, not only were the French Kings descendents of Jesus, so was he. In his heart, he believed himself to be royalty; perhaps even deity. Wow.
Archeologist Bill Putnam summed it up this way – “The whole thing is made up… It’s the greatest hoax in my experience.”
And Stone Phillips underscores it, “Putnam is one of several scholars, historians, and journalists who have called The Priory of Sion nothing more than a modern-day con.”
He said all this in Prime Time.
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On this Monday morning, you are a leader. You like intrigue. You are curious about the trappings of money and power. You know about abuse. You are committed to integrity.
You are working your way through the maze.
There are some basic, fundamental truths that hold your life together, but you are honest, too. You will admit that evidence can and often does change your perspective on things. You aren’t living in a cocoon. You are a realist. You’ve made up your mind, but you haven’t closed your mind.
So new ideas stir it up. Make you think. Cause you to do your own research.
All this is good.
But remember this. Legends are legends. Myths are myths. But truth is truth. It’s immutable. Truth is not the defense of an institution or a system of thought or philosophy of life. Truth is the bedrock to which we attach our moral anchor; from there, we build a life full of hopes and dreams. But here’s the best part.
The truth will set you free.
Posted in Placentia, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2005
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