QUICK REVIEW by Christine Trzyna
THE JESUS PAPERS BY MICHAEL BAIGENT
c 2006 by author
Harper San Francisco
I'm reading this book because the famous "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown based some of his fiction book research on what Baigent and others of the same intention published as non-fiction, the search for the truth about Jesus. Some say that Dan Brown and his ilk have wanted to dismantle Christianity or the Church (Catholic, but all other Christian faiths that believe in the divinity of Jesus, that he died on the cross for our sins, and through him we have eternal salvation of our souls) through revealing what supposedly the Knights Templer and the Masons have long known; that Jesus survived through a carefully conspired plot, he and his wife Mary Magdalena fled to France, where they had children, and their heirs became known as the Merovingian Kings.
Baigent is one of several authors who are akin to the gentleman travelers of the turn of the 20th century, wealthy men of inheritance mostly who were the unwitting founders of the social science of anthropology. And I am with them on their mountain climbs, sea voyages, and travels across the world, investigating, digging up, and experiencing...and coming up with theories and proofs that perhaps the contemporary establishment of anthropology would debunk. So I'm a sucker for a book that has so many color photos of important temples and underground spiritual centers that he has explored.
He is also on the quest of the Historical Jesus, rather than one of faith, or the one invented to be divine after the fact of life.
Page 39
On page 39 Baigent explains, "According to the gospels, through his father (Joseph), Jesus was of the Line of David, through his mother, he was of the line of Aaron the high Priest (Mathew 1:1 16 Luke 1:5,36;2:4). We suddenly get an understanding of his importance to the Zealot cause when we realize that because of his lineage he was heir to both lines. He was a "double" messiah; having inherited both the royal and priestly lines, he was a "Messiah of Aaron and Israel," a figure, as we have seen, who was clearly noted in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we take as an expression of this fact Pilate's supposedly ironic sign placed at the foot of the cross: This is Jesus The King of the Jews (Matthew 27,37.)
Page 118-119
"Imagine the problem the Zealots, whose entire focus was the removal or destruction of Rome's hold over Judea, had organized a dynastic marriage between Joseph, a man of the royal line of David, and Mary, of the priestly line of Aaron, in order to have a child, Jesus - the "Savior" of Israel - who was both rightful king and high priest."
Egyptology is of interest to me. Baigent goes on about the religious beliefs of the Egyptians. Page 169,
"Dr. Jeremy Naydler, who has made a study of the deeper mysteries expressed in the Egyptian texts, stresses that we must never allow ourselves to forget the experiential (my emphasis) nature of these ancient religious writings."
Speaking of Egyptian temple rituals using the terminology appropriate, Baigent mentions some notions that I believe are equivalent to Hindu spiritual belief and practice, notions that move across cultural lines.
Page 169
"Under usual circumstances, this state would translate as "sleep," but in this specific ritual context, it indicates something more akin to a state of trance or meditation. Its main use, scholars think, was during the animation rite for sacred statues called "the Opening of the Mouth" when divine power was called down to reside in the statue, which was thereby rendered sacred. This same rite also formed part of the funerary practices. it is evident, in the latter case at least, that while in this ritual state the priest somehow moved into the world of the dead, the Far-World, and that on his return he was able to describe what he had experienced as a dead person.... seems to have happened regularly during these rituals.
Page 170
"We can be confident, I would suggest, that this ritual journey was not just an intellectual invention or some kind of priestly drama, a "pious fraud" that provided smoke and noise enough to impress but little true fire.
Around the late third to early fourth centuries A.D. the philosopher Iamblichus of Apamea, one of the most prominent Platonic scholars of his era, was teaching in what is now Lebanon. His teaching was centered upon what he called THEURGY,... that is, "working with" the gods. He contrasted this with THEOLOGY - "Talking about" the gods. He was interested in practical effects rather than intellectual argument; he wanted his students to know, not just to believe.
(THEURY IS A NEW WORD for me!)
