"Brother Michael" Baigent’s job as editor of the quarterly Freemasonry Today can hardly pay much, though that and his books force him to keep the family address in Somerset secret. Being a prominent Freemason and critic of the Catholic Church seems to attract strange and not necessarily friendly types, the family feels. Tansy says she once suggested her father use a nom de plume: "At the time he wrote Holy Blood Holy Grail, he got quite a lot of stigma. I think he had to face quite a few hostile people but he didn’t want to hide away."
Jane adds: "Obviously the Pope and the Catholic Church got upset about him because he criticised the Catholic Church in his book The Inquisition. But if he thinks something needs to be exposed or brought into the public domain, he will say it."
And perhaps that is why Baigent seems so composed in the witness box. For him, it is not just a legal battle but also a philosophical one. He is playing for higher stakes.
Maybe that’s why Dan Brown, a devout Christian, looks concerned.
Outside the court, the usually reclusive Brown insisted that he would never deny the crucifixion: "I am well aware of Christ’s crucifixion and ultimate resurrection as the very core of the Christian faith," he said.
But Baigent believes his arguments about Jesus’s mortality, if accepted, have the potential to mend fences between religions.
Islam already recognises Jesus as a prophet, Judaism is happy with Messianic contenders, and some strands of Christianity already accept Jesus’s mortality – he argues it is just the Catholic Church that feels threatened.
Um, whatever. Is this the new meme? Dan Brown, Christian is threatened by the heterodox stylings of Holy Blood, Holy Grail?
Not to mention the almost unmentionable…that both books are published by divisions of Random House. Oh, you want a conspiracy theory? Here’s one for you…free.
Read Previous Post