by Michael Baigent
Baigent's earlier book (Holy Blood, Holy Grail) stirred a lawsuit of plagiarism against The Da Vinci Code. Baigent loves the provocative, and this book followed suit. I suspected I might disagree with him, but I set out to give this author/historian a fair shake.
His blatant lack of intellectual integrity, however, was overwhelming.
Baigent references "incontrovertible evidence" (pg 7) that Jesus survived the crucifixion and was alive on earth in A.D. 45. With some digging, we find his source: a letter from Rev. Bartlett who in the 1930s heard that his mentor Canon Lilley had been invited by a former student to Saint Sulpice in the 1890s to translate a document which may have come from Abbe Sauniere. Lilley, by the way, is now deceased, and the document is now either "concealed or destroyed."
Really?
I don't mean to get snarky, but a disappeared document that is (at best) three-times removed is "incontrovertible evidence"?
I had a hard time believing Baigent's future claims after that. Yet it grew worse. He spends dozens of pages debunking the Bible as "bad history... inconsistent, incomplete, garbled, and biased" but then turns and makes an argument for Jesus' cross survival based meticulously on a turn of phrase in Mark's gospel (a rare portion, I suppose, that isn't bad history). To top it off, Baigent even briefly questions Jesus very existence, which (if true) negates all of Baigent's own work. (See also the following MSNBC interview with Baigent)
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The author does finally acknowledge the difficulty of his "evidence," saying that the date itself (A.D. 45) is "the only part of Bartlett's letter that I can accept without dispute or suspicion" (pg 263). I had to wonder why he waited 250 pages to point that out, however.
Baigent seems primarily driven not by fact or historical congruity, but by a thirst for conspiracy theory. (I started counting the number of times he wrote, "Could it be that [such and such]?") Just look at the subtitle: "Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History."
This book masquerades as scholarship, but I'd put it closer to works on Sasquatch and Area 51:
Mildly entertaining with scant facts.
GRADE:
_ _ _ _ F
Not badly written in style, but an insult to intelligence.
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