Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Another recent attempt to present Jesus as a traveler is the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Acknowledging the usage of Joyce’s presentation, this work also holds that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (who is identified as Mary of Bethany). The children from this marriage were heirs of Jesus’ kingly bloodline.67 Jesus was said to have been crucified for crimes perpetrated against Rome, not against the Jews. However, he did not die on the cross, but was drugged to make him appear dead. Pilate was bribed in order to allow Jesus to be removed from the cross alive. The Essenes then took his body, which was laid in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a relative of Jesus. After nursing Jesus back to health, Joseph, Mary Magdalene and Lazarus (Jesus’ brother-in-law) went to France to live. However, no one knows where Jesus went after his recuperation. The authors suggest India, Egypt, Masada or somewhere else in Israel.68 The vast bulk of the book is devoted to the remains of Jesus’ bloodline, through Mary Magdalene, as they settled and spread in France. This supposed bloodline is traced through royal families, secret organizations and age-old mysteries. But, as even the authors recognize, the major question is whether this French lineage did, in fact, come from Jesus.69
Problems with International Travel Theory
These attempts to have Jesus avoid death and then travel afterward are laden with more difficulties than any other approach that we have studied. This is largely due to the presence of so much conjecture combined with an absence of facts. We present four major objections to such approaches to the life of Jesus.
1. Gospels are trustworthy
First, in our earlier discussions we determined that the New Testament, and the Gospels in particular, are authentic and trustworthy documents for the life and teachings of Jesus. We will not belabor this point any further, except to note that this conclusion is based on both the early and eyewitness testimony behind the Gospels, including authors who were close to the facts, as well as the attestation of the earliest church and overwhelming manuscript evidence. Such facts reveal that the Gospels are a valid basis for the teachings of Jesus, in opposition to these theses which almost always involve vast alterations of New Testament data. On this point alone these theses fail.
2. Swoon theory disproven
Second, most of these theses involve the swoon theory concerning Jesus’ resurrection, without which there would be no basis for any post-crucifixion travels followed by a later, obscure death. But as stated above in our examination of this hypothesis, this hypothesis falls prey to numerous problems which will not be repeated here.
Some sources, such as the Japanese legend cited here, assert that someone else died on the cross in place of Jesus. Other such claims include the Gnostic writing “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth” (55:15-20)70 and the Muslim Koran (Surah IV: 156-159).71 Whereas the Japanese tale claims that the crucified person was Jesus’ brother, the Gnostic source claims that Simon of Cyrene was killed while the glorified Jesus sat in the heavens and laughed at the error. A popular Muslim teaching is that it was Judas who died instead of Jesus.
Such strange “twists” to the swoon theory have been virtually ignored by scholars with good reason, for serious problems invalidate each of these theses.
(1) The sources that report these theories are exceptionally late. While the date of the Gnostic writing is difficult to obtain, it was probably written two or more centuries after Jesus and definitely manifests theological rather than historical interests, since one Gnostic belief is that Jesus could not have died physically on the cross, hence a substitute would be needed. The Japanese legend was not known until about AD 500 when it was introduced in Japan by the Chinese. The Koran is a seventh century AD writing. Works of the third to seventh century are rather late to have much authoritative claim, while the Gnostic and Muslim sources plainly exhibit theological interests for their assertions.
(2) Why would Jesus’ disciples, friends and relatives not recognize a substitute, especially when several were present at the crucifixion and burial? This is almost beyond credulity.
(3) How could Jesus’ enemies have missed the oversight? Since they knew what his appearance was from his trips to Jerusalem and certainly had strong motives to kill him, including the desire to be present at the crucifixion to witness his death, such a mistake would be simply incredible.
(4) Such theories would not be able to adequately explain the reported appearances of Jesus to eyewitnesses after his crucifixion, since such testimony concerned both his glorified body and his healed wounds.
It is no wonder that such a variant hypothesis has had very little following even among critics. The late dates of the sources and the lack of recognition by both Jesus’ loved ones and his enemies alike, even at extremely close range, together with his glorified but scarred post-crucifixion appearances, combine to make this assertion quite unpalatable to scholars.
3. Lack of historical credibility
The third major objection to the thesis that Jesus was an international traveler after his crucifixion is that these theories lack historical credibility. Each of the theses is plagued with a lack of solid historical evidence. For instance, the Japanese legend not only rests on very questionable hearsay testimony but it was not even introduced into Japan until AD 500.72 Certainly a gap of some 450 years should make us question the historical origin of this legend.
Concerning Joyce’s thesis that Jesus died at the age of eighty while fighting the Romans at Masada, the historical basis is perhaps even more questionable. Joyce never knew the professor’s true name, and even admits that he must rely on “hearsay” testimony. If that is not enough, the scroll has since vanished and no one knows the claimed whereabouts of either this document or the “professor” upon whose word the testimony rests! Interestingly, Joyce even wrote to Yigael Yadin, the well-known archaeologist who headed the Masada expedition. Yadin’s response to Joyce’s story was that “anyone with a little knowledge of scrolls and conditions in which they were discovered at Masada would have immediately detected the nonsense in the story.”73 There can be little question that the story of the lost scroll cannot be used in any attempt to formulate the historical facts of the last years of Jesus’ life.
In Holy Blood, Holy Grail we find a similar gap in the historical basis. The authors themselves characterize their own historical argument, before investigating the Christian sources, with the following description:
Our hypothetical scenario . . . was also preposterous . . . much too sketchy . . . rested on far too flimsy a foundation . . . could not yet in itself be supported . . . too many holes . . . too many inconsistencies and anomalies, too many loose ends.74
After their research into Christian origins, does their evaluation change? While holding that their thesis was still probably true, the authors conclude, “We could not — and still cannot — prove the accuracy of our conclusion. It remains to some extent at least, a hypothesis.”75 As we will see below, their thesis also has numerous gaps in argumentation.
Historically, then, such theses lack the data needed for the conclusions. Very late documents, missing evidence and faulty historical reconstructions certainly do not prove one’s case.
4. Illogical arguments
The fourth major problem with these theses is that, in addition to the lack of a historical basis, each exhibits decidedly illogical argumentation. The Japanese legend contains such inconsistencies as Jesus’ brother dying in his place, the fact that Jesus’ teachings reflect none of the Japanese philosophy that he supposedly learned during his “silent years” spent in Japan, and the failure to acknowledge the Christian teachings of Francis Xavier. This Catholic priest visited Japan in the sixteenth century and probably accounts for much of the Christian influence in that country.76 Even so, it is in the works of Joyce, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln where we perceive more glaring gaps in logic.