But what exactly is this "information"? The theories encompassed in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and its derivative, "The Da Vinci Code," have a certain invincible panache. They are proof of the adage that the hardest lie to refute is the Big Lie. Unlike, say, speculation about the "real" author of Shakespeare's plays, these theories span so many historical specialties -- ancient Hebrew customs, early Christian texts, regional French folklore, ancient and contemporary church history, medieval dynastic minutiae, Renaissance and neoclassical art, esoteric movements of the early modern age, and so on -- that no one person has the expertise to refute all of the fabrications.

In fact, as enormous crocks of nonsense go, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is a kind of masterpiece, certainly more so than its pipsqueak descendant. In "The Da Vinci Code" Brown had one really good idea: to use a rudimentary thriller plot to spoon-feed readers the Grail theory concocted by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. You get the impression Brown never expected "The Da Vinci Code" to take the world by storm or that it would invite the kind of scrutiny his novel cannot withstand. As a result, Brown makes several dumb, careless mistakes that put the lie to his pretensions of extensive research, such as having a "Grail expert" describe the Dead Sea Scrolls as being "among the earliest Christian records," when the documents are Jewish and do not mention Jesus Christ at all.

The authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," who girded their loins against attacks from legitimate historians from the very start, knew better than this (although they do erroneously refer to the collection of largely Gnostic texts found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, as "scrolls" rather than books, and they include the Gospel of Mary among the texts in that collection, though it was found elsewhere). When it comes to spinning a masterful line of bull, they have few equals, and if we cannot admire them, we can at least respect their peculiar genius, much as Sherlock Holmes respected the Napoleon of crime, Professor Moriarty.

Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln are the Moriartys of pseudohistory, and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" is their great triumph. Their techniques include burying their readers in chin-high drifts of factoids -- some valid but irrelevant, some uncheckable (the untranslated diaries of obscure 17th century clerics, and so on), others, like the labyrinthine family trees of various medieval French noblemen, simply numbing, and if you trouble to figure them out, pretty inconclusive. A preposterous idea will first be floated as a guess (it is "not inconceivable" that the Knights Templar found documentation of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's marriage in Jerusalem), then later presented as a tentative hypothesis, then still later treated as a fact that must be accounted for (the knights had to take those documents somewhere, so it must have been the south of France!).

Each detail requires extensive effort to track down and verify, but anyone who succeeds in proving it false comes across as a mere nitpicker -- and still has a blizzard of other pseudofacts to contend with. The miasma of bogus authenticity that the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" create becomes impenetrable; you might as well use a rifle to fight off a thick fog.

Nevertheless, the Grail theory touted in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" can be broken down into two main parts: One concerns the historical details of Jesus' life and the establishment of orthodox Christian tenets in the three centuries after his death. The second part describes the survival of the suppressed, hidden and unorthodox "truth" about Jesus and his descendants via the Priory of Sion and its military arm, the Knights Templar. Clues to this truth are supposedly embedded in the art, architecture and literature produced by the intellectual superstars who, with the occasional aristocrat, are said to have run the Priory of Sion. (Why people who are sworn to keep this secret would go around planting all these clues is never explained.)

Almost all the furor "The Da Vinci Code" has caused in America surrounds the first part of this theory. In the past year, numerous books have been published refuting the novel's depiction of Jesus' life and Christianity's early years, but most of these have been written by defensive evangelicals. They aren't particularly interesting to a secular reader -- or reliable, since their authors are deeply invested in a particular view of Jesus. They don't apply standards of proof (or, to be precise, plausibility) of much use to nonbelievers.

Fortunately, Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just published "Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" (Oxford University Press), a book-length expansion of his list of 10 errors in Brown's novel, first circulated widely on the Internet. Ehrman's specialty is the ancient history of the Christian church, and he is the author of two books, "Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew," and "Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It Into the New Testament" (both Oxford University Press), so he can hardly be accused of participating in a coverup of the unorthodox and heretical early Christian texts that the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and Brown claim support their theories.

"Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" is written in eminently clear, basic English (a pleasant surprise, because Ehrman's previous books can be pretty heavy sledding), and its tolerant, "more in sorrow than in anger" tone is probably more effective than the annoyance to which most of the novel's critics (including this one) succumb. It's a little repetitive, but given the many relatively unsophisticated readers Ehrman is addressing, that's probably justified.

Ehrman methodically demolishes a sizable chunk of the conspiratorial claims in "The Da Vinci Code," which are mostly cribbed from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." To hit some of the high spots: Early Christian texts excluded from the New Testament did not depict Jesus as human rather than divine; in fact, quite the opposite. The emperor Constantine was not involved in establishing the New Testament's canonical texts; it was a process that began before his reign and continued after his death. Jesus' experiences and teachings were not recorded by "thousands" of his followers during his lifetime, as nearly all of them were almost certainly illiterate. It was not unheard-of for a Jewish man of Jesus' time to be either single or celibate, particularly if he was part of the apocalyptic prophetic movement of the day, as Jesus most likely was.

Some of Brown's mistakes are minor but telling. For example, his "Grail expert," Leigh Teabing, smugly declares that "any Aramaic scholar will tell you" that the word "companion" used in the uncanonical Gospel of Philip in describing Mary Magdalene's relationship to Jesus, "in those days, literally meant spouse." But, as Ehrman explains, the Gospel of Philip is written in Coptic, not Aramaic, and the word in question is borrowed from yet another language, which is also not Aramaic, but Greek. And it does not mean "spouse" or "lover," but "companion," and is "commonly used of friends and associates."

Brown picked up this bit of bogus "proof" from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." (In a lumbering stab at playfulness, Leigh Teabing is named after the coauthors, "Teabing" being an anagram of "Baigent.") The authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" in turn got it from the Protestant theologian, William E. Phipps, who, in an admirable effort to liberalize church attitudes toward women and sex, made the claim in "Was Jesus Married?" a "theological potboiler" published in the early '70s. The mistranslation of the Gospel of Philip has been kicked around for a while (it turns up in the National Geographic documentary, for example), but not, seemingly, by anyone who can read the languages in question.

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