I am posting here the document on Gardner.
NOTES ON LAURENCE GARDNER’S ‘THE BLOODLINE OF THE HOLY GRAIL’.
This is not the work of a competent historian. I begin with a list of the errors I have noticed, points that are not especially related to my work.
(Refs are to the hard cover edition)
p. 22. Roman procurators in the time of Herod the Great! The fact was that Herod was allowed to rule independently from 37 to 4 BC, then the Romans let his son Archelaus try, but when he failed, the kingship was abolished in AD 6 and the country put under procurators. The change from native kings to subsequent procurators is a basic fact of the history, as it led to the zealot uprising.
p. 105. In AD 37 Gaius Caligula 'sacked Pontius Pilate to install his own man, Felix, as Governor in Judea'. Felix did not become governor until AD 52, under Claudius.
p. 409 ‘Augustus died AD 18’. It was AD 14. ‘Claudius AD 41-45’. It was AD 41-54.
p.361, note 1, he gives a reference to one of the Scrolls, which he has got from my book, 1QS 6:4-5, meaning 'Manual of Discipline column 6, lines 4 to 5'. In his hands, this now becomes 'chapter 6, pages 4 -5' !!! This shows that he has no knowledge whatever of the Scrolls.
p. 47. He attributes to Josephus the date of Jesus' appearance as the 15th year of Tiberius. This is from Luke. Josephus gives no exact date.
p. 63. World events being foretold 'using the methodology of Pythagoras'! Untrue. This is a conflation of two facts, a) The Essenes agreed with Pythagoras that number controlled everything and b) they used their own solar calendar, which had nothing to do with Pythagoras, to predict future events.
p.50, note 6. The footnote indicator promises a list of the sources on Simon Magus, of which there are many. But it simply refers to a recent book on levitation. This kind of trick happens often.
Turning to his use of my work, it is clear to me that Gardner has relied heavily on my book Jesus the Man, but uses it in a partial, confused, and misleading way. He knows nothing of its central thrust, that Jesus was part of an existing institution, and the history is that of this institution. He has simply picked out odds and ends that suit him, very often misunderstanding the fact or the methodology, and -worst of all - freely adds invented points, giving the impression that they are part of my work.
He goes from my work to a 'genealogy' of Jesus, and at the point on which his whole case depends, he fabricates. Since he is giving the impression that his inventions are part of my work, I would like it known that they are not.
My book contains certain statements about the family of Jesus, which are derived from the use of the pesher technique on the gospels and from contemporary sources. They have, regrettably but not surprisingly, become the subject of media sensations.
Once it was pointed out that Jesus as a member of a great dynasty had to continue his family line, it was, I suppose, inevitable that there would be speculation about whether that line still continues today. Gardner is telling the public that it does, with the aid of his falsified version of my findings.
There was good reason for saying in Jesus the Man that the Joseph of Arimathea who was present at the cross of Jesus was his brother James. In the 'new Israel' of which his family were a part, there was a new 'Abraham',an 'Isaac' and a 'Jacob', who gave rise to the Pope and patriarchs of the Church. The heir of David who had become involved with this mission to the Diaspora took the position of the 'patriarch Jacob', so his son or successor had the title of 'Joseph'. All such names were titles, passed from one member of the family to another. For example, the 'Miriam' (Mary) was the woman who took part in a liturgical drama led by a 'Miriam' and a 'Moses', so there were a number of 'Marys'.
This observation, that the original Joseph of Arimathea was James, has been taken up by Gardner as the central point in his case for a descent of British royalty from the family of Jesus (pp.132-146, p.236). It is an old case, of course, but lacked genealogical evidence. There was only the tradition of Joseph of Arimathea coming to Britain very early. Now, the identification with James looked like the missing link.
But Gardner meets a snag in the fact that his Joseph was still alive in Britain in AD 82, (p. 138), whereas the death of James the brother of Jesus took place in AD 62. Gardner attempts to get out of this by misusing a point of the pesher technique to say that Flavius Josephus' clear and factual account of James' death (Antiquities 20:200) refers only to excommunication (p. 136 ). But Josephus, an outside historian, knew nothing of the special language of the gospels that uses 'die' in the sense of excommunication, and moreover he goes on to describe the punishment of the perpetrators of the murder.
Gardner then quotes one record as saying that Joseph of Arimathea was accompanied by a nephew (p. 135). It has been said in my books that when the phrase 'the Word of God increased' appears in Acts, it refers to the birth of a son of Jesus, for whom 'Word of God' was a code name. Jesus as an heir of David had to continue his family line. Once it is established, on a test of consistency, that moral or spiritual terms have a further technical, institutional sense throughout, and a chronology is known, then this phrase, apparently about spiritual increase, has a second level of historical information. Mary Magdalene was Jesus' chosen wife, with whom he lived only for the purpose of procreation, following the rules of the dynastic Essenes. In my book Jesus of the Apocalypse, reason was given why the line of the first son, whose title was Jesus Justus, continued through four generations.
But now, the second son, about whom nothing is known apart from his birth date, has become in Gardner's case the nephew who accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to Britain (p. 135). He is given a wife, and made the ancestor of the line of British royalty (p.236). Jesus Justus is dismissed (p. 140) with the imagined fact that he chose celibacy after two generations, contrary to the evidence in Jesus of the Apocalypse, which Gardner has apparently not read.
The historical reality behind the Joseph of Arimathea tradition will have been that when the mission to the Diaspora was planned, it was intended that it should follow the Roman empire, bringing a hellenised version of the Jewish religion wherever the empire went. The Romans came to Britain in 55 BC, and the emperor Claudius himself visited it in AD 43. When a later British monk wrote that Christianity had come to Britain in the time of the emperor Tiberius (died AD 37) he was recording a true fact, that the original Jewish form of the mission had come there in the first century BC. Britain was 'the uttermost parts of the earth', well known to those in Jerusalem, as the external histories show. When this 'New Israel' was planned as a Kingdom of God, this most remote region was assigned to a 'Joseph', the crown prince of the Davids. But being too important to go there himself; he sent a servant, representing him and using his name, like a royal emissary. There was no actual relative of Jesus in Britain.
Some of Gardner’s inventions on this subject are:
p. 140. The wife of Jesus Justus was 'a granddaughter of Nicodemus'!! No source is given, no reference to it anywhere else in the book, and I certainly did not say it.
p. 140. 'As we have seen (but simply asserted without evidence on the page referred to), Joseph of Arimathea had been to Britain with Mary's elder son, the 12 year old Jesus Justus, in AD 49.' No evidence, and contrary to Jesus of the Apocalypse. But now this boy becomes 'the feet walking on England's mountains green'.
p.109. Thaddaeus (Theudas) was 'trying to escape across the Jordan, and was seized by Chalcis and summarily executed'. Fact: he was not trying to escape anything, but was acting as a 'Joshua' in an Exodus drama, as fully recorded in Josephus. Herod of Chalcis had nothing to do with it. His name appears in my work about this time, and Gardner has simply picked it out, without knowing who he was, and invented this fact.
p. 109. 'Mary (Magdalene) gave birth to her second son in Provence' ! That was quite a journey, from Judea to Provence, in a few days (perhaps there was a manger in Provence!). I said that at the season of the birth Mary was at Qumran, as the doorkeeper Rhoda. He has cited my work at this point for the phrase 'the Word of God increased', and given the impression that I included the Provence bit.
p. 109. Having learnt that under the dynastic rule sex took place in December, he has failed to note that this was not the case for subsequent children, and has the third child conceived in December 43 and born in September 44. But my chronology plainly gave his birth date as March 44.
p. 63. A series of prophecies had predicted the date of the Messiah but were seven years out! I said, of course, that they were using a calendar whose purpose was to make prophecies of major events, such as the Restoration of 21 BC, but he has not understood the facts, and has not grasped that they were not thinking about a Messiah in the sense he means.
My research, and that of others who are also studying new sources for the historical Jesus, has given rise to a whole industry, books by opportunists who have no historical background at all, and who are not able to distinguish between what is accepted fact and what are new conclusions, for which evidence needs to be presented. My chronology, for example, is new at a great many points, and its methodology needs to be fully explained. If it is presented without explanation as fact, and associated with my name, it simply discredits my work.
Gardner’s book is the most extreme example of this industry that I have come across. I do not intend to enter into public controversy with him as it would not be productive, but I have sent copies of this document to anyone who asks me about it.
Barbara Thiering.
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