On these four points we could only plead guilty. The bishop was right: we had been in error, and we duly accepted his corrections. But what of the other seventy-five "errors of fact" for which the media, quoting the bishop, was vociferously taking us to task? Virtually all of them proved not to be errors of fact at all, but errors of faith or, more specifically, issues of contention and interpretation still being debated by scholars, and we had "erred" only to the extent that we deviated from established tradition. For example, the bishop listed as "errors of fact" a number of statements about which, as he said, "There is much argument," and the explanation we offer "does not have the support of most scholars"—meaning, presumably, the orthodox scholars whom he finds most congenial. Then, too, the bishop included in his list of errors our citation of an apocryphal work he did not know and could not find in his library, even though it is readily available in both hardcover and paperback editions; in other words it was our error that the bishop’s library lacked this particular work. On another point the bishop had labeled as an error a reference that made no sense to him—because he had not read the earlier sections of our book, where the meaning was explained. Finally the bishop castigated as erroneous our assertion that the Gospels "are historical documents like any other." "No," he declared, "they are unique documents, telling the good news of Christ under the form of history." Whatever this might mean, it could hardly incriminate us for factual error. If we had erred at all, it was simply because we did not share the bishop’s view of the Gospels.
These, then, were the kinds of things for which the bishop of Birmingham condemned us. They render the damning charge of "seventy-nine errors of fact" somewhat puerile—not to say misleading. Yet much of the criticism from the theological establishment was of essentially the same order. In our book we had addressed ourselves to matters of historical possibility, probability and, when- ever facts were available, fact. Our theological critics, most of whom had little historical background, could only assail us from the standpoint of faith. Faith is not the best perspective for appraising history, but many of our critics had no choice. We had, it seemed to them, implicitly challenged vested interests which they were obliged to defend, however wobbly the foundations of their arguments.
"Your book hasn’t met with a favorable response from Church authorities," radio and television interviewers would say to us earnestly—and fatuously, As if things could have been otherwise. As if every bishop in Christendom might have been expected to say "fair cop" and summarily surrender his miter.
Then, too, we were chastised for having speculated. We readily admitted it. We had propounded a hypothesis, and hypotheses must necessarily rest on speculation. The sheer scarcity of reliable information on biblical matters obliges any researcher of the subject to speculate, if he is not to remain mute. Granted, one must not speculate wildly; one must confine one’s speculation to the framework of known historical information. Within this framework, though, one has no choice but to speculate—to interpret the meager and often opaque evidence that exists. All biblical scholarship entails speculation, as does theology. The Gospels are sketchy, ambiguous, and often contradictory documents. People have argued, have even waged wars throughout the course of the last two thousand years about what particular passages might mean. In the coalescence of Christian tradition there is one principle that has continually obtained: In the past, when certain historic individuals were confronted with any of the varied biblical ambiguities, they speculated about its meaning. Their conclusions, when accepted, were enshrined as dogma and came to be regarded over the centuries—quite erroneously—as established fact. Such conclusions, however, are not fact at all. On the contrary they are speculation and interpretation congealed into a tradition, and it is this tradition that is constantly mistaken for fact.
A single example should serve to illustrate the process. According to all four Gospels, Pilate alludes to Jesus as "king of the Jews," and an inscription of that title is affixed to the cross. But this is all the Gospels tell us. They offer no indication of whether the title was warranted or not. At some point in the past it was assumed on the basis of speculative interpretation that the title must have been intended mockingly, and today most Christians blindly accept as established fact that the title was used in derision. But it is not established fact at all. If one reads the Gospels with no preconceptions whatever, there is nothing to suggest that the title wasn’t used in all seriousness; wasn’t perfectly legitimate. So far as the Gospels themselves are concerned Jesus might indeed have been king of the Jews and recognized as such by his contemporaries, including Pilate. It is only tradition that has convinced us otherwise. When we suggested that Jesus might in reality have been king of the Jews, we were not therefore at variance with the evidence. We were merely at variance with a long-established tradition, a long-established system of beliefs based on someone’s speculative interpretation.
"You can’t prove your conclusions" was another charge leveled against us by both theological critics and interviewers—as if we might have been expected to produce a sworn personal testimony, signed by Jesus himself and duly witnessed. Of course, we could not "prove" our conclusions—as, indeed, we stressed repeatedly in the book. If we could have proved them, there would have been no controversy at all, only a fait accompli. But what, in the present context, would constitute genuine proof? Can such "proof" be found for any issue of consequence in the New Testament? Obviously not. So far as the New Testament is concerned, there is nothing that can be definitively "proved." If we cannot "prove" our conclusions, neither can it be "proved" that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and rose from the dead. Indeed, it cannot even be "proved" that Jesus ever lived; in fact, numerous writers, past and present, have argued persuasively that he didn’t.
The question of "proof" is ultimately beside the point. Given the scarcity of both documentary and archaeological material, there is very little, if anything, that can be "proved" about Jesus. The most one can honestly do is deal with evidence—which is not the same as "proof." Evidence, in the context of New Testament studies, cannot "prove" anything, but it can suggest greater or lesser possibilities, greater or lesser plausibilities. One must survey the available evidence and draw conclusions from it: for instance, that one sequence of events is more likely to have happened than another. If one employs this criterion, the matter becomes largely one of common sense. It is quite simply more likely that a man would have married, fathered children, and attempted to gain a throne than that he would have been born of a virgin, walked on water, and risen from the dead.
Contrary to the assertions of both theologians and interviewers, such a conclusion does not entail "an attack on the very core of Christianity and the Christian ethos." The core of Christianity and the Christian ethos resides in Jesus’ teachings. Those teachings are in some significant sense unique, for they constitute the "new message," the "good news" for humankind and are valid in themselves. They do not need miraculous biographical details to support them, especially not the kind of miraculous biographical details that attended rival deities throughout the ancient world. If the teachings do require such details, it suggests one of two things: Either there is something seriously defective in the teachings or, more likely, there is something defective in the believer’s faith. Any thoughtful Christian would concur that Jesus’ primary significance resides in the message he sought to communicate. And that message gains nothing by virtue of Jesus’ having been celibate, nor does it lose anything by virtue of his having been married.
The high-level theologians and ecclesiastics who attacked us were almost all Protestant. In fact, the majority were Anglicans, like the bishop of Birmingham, while the Roman Catholic Church remained essentially silent on the matter. But an important exfunctionary in the Catholic Church confided to us personally that the upper echelons of his hierarchy (although they would never make a public statement on the matter) privately acknowledged the plausibility, if not the veracity, of our conclusions. During
our publicity tour of the United States, in a radio discussion, Dr. Malachi Martin, one of the leading authorities on Vatican affairs and former member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Institute, conceded that there was ultimately no real theological objection to a married Jesus.
Few established historians deigned to accord us their attention. This was not surprising, since egg becomes nobody’s face, and scholars, like politicians, are especially sensitive to such mishaps. To damn us definitively might have entailed the risk of some future embarrassment—some document perhaps coming to light that may support our conclusions. To endorse us could have been even more perilous—a matter of placing one’s professional reputation prominently "on the line." So far as the historians were concerned it was altogether more prudent to equivocate, to reserve judgment or remain conscientiously silent or, on occasion, to adopt a tone of aloof, ironic, Olympian condescension. These responses implicitly reduced our book to the proverbial storm in a teacup while dexterously circumventing all confrontation with the material.
There was nevertheless the odd barrage here and there, fired with the earnest and urgent desperation of a bastion threatened with siege by uncouth barbarians. Thus Marina Warner assailed us not only on Omnibus but also in a piece in The Sunday Times (of London). In this piece (which one commentator called "the rudest review of the year" and another simply "hysterical"), Ms. Warner castigated us for relying on questionable sources, upon which we had not, in fact, relied. In The Times Literary Supplement Jonathan Sumption took us to task on the same grounds. He cited as an unreliable source a reference which, unbeknown to him, we had found in a work by Marina Warner. Dr. Sumption also taxed us with an average of an error per page. When an interviewer from the Telegraph asked him to enumerate some of these errors, Dr. Sumption waxed suddenly vague.
The serious historical criticism that appeared was of essentially two kinds. Some was undeniably valid and valuable, correcting us on certain specific details: statistics, dates, and other such minutiae which we had got wrong but which had no bearing on our arguments, hypotheses, or conclusions. There were other historians, however, who questioned the validity of our overall approach. We had not proceeded, they maintained, by "the rules." By established academic research standards our methods had been highly unorthodox, irregular, and heretical. We had not observed certain enshrined protocols of scholarship, certain dogmatically cautious approaches to material, and had thereby (in their opinion) betrayed ourselves as amateurs who did not warrant serious consideration and who had, moreover, committed the transgression of trespassing on the sovereign domain of experts. Consequently they could only regard us with solemn, even righteous disapprobation.
We were all trained in the techniques of "official" academic research and knew well enough how to deploy them. If we had recourse to other methods, we used them. We were not hell-bent on a best seller, although to the eyes of Fundamentalist Christians it may have seemed so. At the same time we did not want to produce a book exclusively for specialists, which would then molder on the shelves of university libraries: we wanted to produce a work which, while not compromising its integrity, would be accessible to the reading public at large. (After all we had an exciting story to tell and wanted to convey not only the story but also something of its excitement.) We believe that our research had conformed to the most fastidious criteria. But we chose to present the results of that research in an accessible and readable form.
Ultimately, though, our approach was dictated by other, more important factors; indeed, it was dictated by the essential nature of our subject. Our material spanned an immense spectrum, in origin, character, and chronology. It was necessary for us to synthesize into a coherent pattern material extending from the Old Testa- ment to a secret society in Europe today, from the Gospels and Grail romances to accounts of current affairs in modern newspapers. For such an enterprise the techniques of academic scholarship were sorely inadequate; to make the requisite connections between radically diverse material, we were obliged to adopt and develop a more comprehensive approach, based on synthesis rather than on conventional analysis. (This approach is explained in the book itself in the section on page 309 entitled "The Need to Synthesize.")
Such an approach was even more necessary because traditional techniques had already demonstrated their inability to deal with large tracts of our material. Much of what we were exploring lay in spheres which, from a professional historian’s standpoint, were academically suspect. If one surveys any period of the past, one will find a number of ostensible anomalies: incidents, phenomena, groups, individuals which call attention to themselves but do not seem to coincide with the "mainstream" of historical development. Most historians, when confronted with anomalies of this sort, choose to ignore them—to dismiss them as transient aberrations, as peripheral and/or incidental. So Nostradamus, for example, is deemed an irrelevant oddity and receives only scant attention in studies of sixteenth-century France. So the Knights Templar, and many of the questions surrounding them, are regarded as a mere footnote to the Crusades. Secret societies by virtue of their very secrecy have often kept historians at bay, and the historians, reluctant to confess their ignorance, prefer to diminish the consequence of their subject. Freemasonry, to cite another example, is of vital importance to any social, psychological, cultural or political history of eighteenth-century Europe, and even to the founding of the United States; but most history books don’t even mention it. It is almost as if an implicit policy obtained: If something cannot be exhaustively documented, it must be irrelevant and thereby not worth discussing at all.
Until quite recently the seventeenth-century Rosicrucians were dismissed as a mere "lunatic fringe" sect, and the spectrum of disciplines known collectively as "esoterica"—astrology, alchemy, the Cabala, the Tarot, numerology, and sacred geometry—were deemed similarly irrelevant, and similarly taboo. Now, however, through the work of Frances Yates and her colleagues at the Warburg Institute, such subjects can be seen in perspective; and in perspective they are indeed significant. The mysterious Rosicrucians can now be discerned as having played a crucial role in the events leading to the Thirty Years War and in the foundation of the Royal Society in England. The spectrum of "esoterica" can now be viewed not as mere quaint marginalia of Western history but as a vital key to any understanding of the Renaissance. If anything, these "aberrations" constitute more of a "mainstream" than what was usually labeled as such.
Much of our material was as academically suspect as "esoterica" and the Rosicrucians, and consequently very few historians had addressed themselves to it. Few books existed; few relevant connections had been made. We were therefore forced to break new ground by confronting and reconsidering such "anomalies" with a sufficiently flexible and comprehensive approach. We were forced to make new connections, to find genuine historical links in hitherto neglected spheres of study, to restore certain taboo subjects to the status they had actually enjoyed in the context of their own times. We needed to explore the subject matter of occult and mystical writers and place it in its true historical framework while not lapsing into the pitfall of their credulous gullibility.
And so, our approach was dictated by our material: by a need to synthesize and a need to confront and accommodate historical "anomalies" habitually ignored by conventional scholars. It was therefore not surprising that conventional scholars questioned our approach. But it was also significant, and not just coincidental, that the most sympathetic responses to our book seemed to come from literary figures—from important novelists like Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, and Peter Vansittart. For, unlike the professional historian, the novelist is accustomed to an approach such as ours. He is accustomed to synthesizing diverse material, to making connections more elusive than those explicitly preserved in documents. He recognizes that truth may not be confined only to recorded facts but often lies in more intangible domains—in cultural achievements, in myths, legends, and traditions; in the psychic life of both individuals and entire peoples. For the
novelist knowledge is not subdivided into rigid compartments, and there are no taboos, no "disreputable" subjects. History is not for him something frozen, something petrified into periods, each of which can be isolated and subjected to a controlled laboratory experiment. On the contrary it is for him a fluid organic and dynamic process wherein psychology, sociology, politics, art, and tradition are interwoven in a single seamless fabric. It was with a vision akin to that of the novelist that we created our book.
We have perhaps unduly stressed the hostile response elicited by our book. There was also a favorable response—from reviewers, from interviewers in the media, and from the reading public at large. This favorable response, and the kind of interest it reflected, differed markedly in Britain and the United States.
In America attention was focused almost entirely upon the last four chapters of our book—the chapters pertaining to Jesus, "The Grail Dynasty," the origins of Christianity, and the history of the early Church. For the American public the most important aspect of our book seemed to have been our discussion of Christianity and the attendant implications of our theories. During our publicity tour of the United States we found an audience energetically and enthusiastically reappraising many of the religious tenets it had previously taken for granted. Many people were fascinated by the process of bureaucratic selection whereby certain works were incorporated into the New Testament and others excluded. It seemed to come as a welcome revelation that the New Testament was less an accurate portrayal of events in the Holy Land during Jesus’ lifetime than a reflection of the values and attitudes of the fourth-century Church. What was more, our arguments were eagerly seized upon by American feminists, who were quick to discern the implications of what we had said—implications which were indeed considerable regarding a number of controversial contemporary issues, such as clerical celibacy and the role of women in both Church and society. We had naturally been aware of these implications, yet we were surprised to be so warmly endorsed by the feminist movement.
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