TheJesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of thehistorical Jesus has persisted, possibly to the present time. Although absent from the Gospels or historical records, the concept of Jesus having descendants has gained a presence in the public imagination, as seen withDan Brown's 2003 best-selling novelThe Da Vinci Code andits 2006 movie adaptation of the same name that used the premise for its plot. It is dismissed generally by scholars. These claimed Jesus's bloodlines are distinct from the biblicalgenealogy of Jesus, which concerns the ancestors of Jesus, and from the allegedBrothers of Jesus and other kin of Jesus, known as theDesposyni.
Ideas thatJesus Christ might have been married have a long history in fringeChristian theology, though the historical record says nothing concerning the subject.[1]Bart D. Ehrman, chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, commented that, although there are some historical scholars who claim that it is likely that Jesus was married, the vast majority ofNew Testament andearly Christianity scholars find such a claim to be historically unreliable.[2]
Much of the literature of this type has a more specific emphasis, on a claimed marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are indications inGnosticism of the belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene shared an amorous, and not just a religious relationship. The GnosticGospel of Philip tells that Jesus "kissed her often" and refers to Mary as his "companion".[3] Several sources from the 13th-century claim that an aspect ofCatharist theology was the belief that the earthly Jesus had a familial relationship with Mary Magdalene.An Exposure of the Albigensian and Waldensian Heresies, dated to before 1213 and usually attributed to Ermengaud of Béziers, a formerWaldensian seeking reconciliation with theCatholic Church, would describe Cathar heretical beliefs including the claim that they taught "in the secret meetings that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Christ".[4] A second work, untitled and anonymous, repeats Ermengaud's claim.[4] The anti-heretic polemicHistoria Albigensis, written between 1212 and 1218 byCistercian monk and chroniclerPeter of Vaux de Cernay, gives the most lurid description, attributing to Cathars the belief that Mary Magdalene was theconcubine of Jesus.[4][5] These sources must be considered with caution: the two known authors were not themselves Cathars and were writing of a heresy being actively and violently suppressed. There is no evidence that these beliefs derived from the much earlier Gnostic traditions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but the Cathar traditions did find their way into many of the 20th-century popular writings claiming the existence of a progeny of Jesus.[4][6]
Produced during the late 19th-century were the first of several expansions of this theme of marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, providing the couple with a named child. The French socialist politician, Louis Martin (pseudonym of Léon Aubry, died 1900), in his 1886 bookLes Evangiles sans Dieu (The Gospels without God), republished the next year in hisEssai sur la vie de Jésus (Essay on the life of Jesus), described thehistorical Jesus as asocialist andatheist. He related that after his crucifixion, Mary Magdalene, along with the family ofLazarus of Bethany, brought the body of Jesus toProvence, and there Mary had a child, Maximin, the fruit of her love for Jesus. The scenario was dismissed as 'certainly strange' by a contemporary reviewer.[7]
During the late 20th century there was a flourishing of a genre of popular books claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a family.Donovan Joyce's 1972 best-seller,The Jesus Scroll, presented an alternative timeline for Jesus that purportedly originated from a mysterious document. He claimed that, after being denied access to theMasada archaeological site, he was met at theTel Aviv airport by an American University professor using the pseudonym "Max Grosset", who held a large scroll he claimed to have smuggled from the site. Relating its contents to Joyce, Grosset offered to pay him to smuggle it out of the country, but then became spooked when his flight was delayed and snuck away; he was never identified and the scroll was not known of again. According to Joyce, the 'Jesus Scroll' was a personal letter by 80-year-oldYeshua ben Ya’akob ben Gennesareth, heir of theHasmonean dynasty and hence rightful King of Israel, written on the eve of the capture of the city by the Romans after a suicide pact ended Masada's resistance. It was said to have described the man as married, and that he had a son whose crucifixion the letter's author had witnessed. Joyce identified the writer with Jesus of Nazareth, who, he claimed, had survived his own crucifixion to marry and settle at Masada, and suggested a conspiracy to hide the contents of theDead Sea Scrolls in order to suppress this counter-narrative to Christian orthodoxy.[8][9]
Barbara Thiering, in her 1992 bookJesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story, republished asJesus the Man and made into a documentary,The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by theAustralian Broadcasting Corporation, also developed a Jesus and Mary Magdalene familial scenario. Thiering based her historical conclusions on her application of what she calls thePesher technique (interpretation based on ancient commentaries) to theNew Testament.[10][11] Thiering dates the betrothal of Jesus and Mary Magdalene precisely to 30 June, AD 30, at 10:00 p.m. She relocated the events in the life of Jesus from Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem toQumran, and related that Jesus wasrevived after an incomplete crucifixion and married Mary Magdalene, who was already pregnant by him, that they had a daughter Tamar and a son Jesus Justus born in AD 41, and Jesus then divorced Mary to wed a Jewess named Lydia, going to Rome where he died.[12][13] The account was dismissed as fanciful by scholar Michael J. McClymond.[12]
In the television documentary,The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and bookThe Jesus Family Tomb,[14] both from 2007, fringe investigative journalistSimcha Jacobovici andCharles R. Pellegrino proposed thatossuaries in theTalpiot Tomb, discovered in Jerusalem in 1980, belonged to Jesus and his family. Jacobovici and Pellegrino argue thatAramaic inscriptions reading "Judah, son of Jesus", "Jesus, son of Joseph", and "Mariamne", a name they associate with Mary Magdalene, together preserve the record of a family group consisting of Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalene and son Judah.[15] Such theory has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars, archaeologists and theologians, including the archaeologist Amos Kloner, who managed the archeological excavation of the tomb itself.[16]
During the same year a book was published with a similar theme that Jesus and Mary Magdalene produced a family, authored bypsychic medium and best-selling authorSylvia Browne,The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus.[17][non-primary source needed]
TheJesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in thequest for the historical Jesus, were unable to determine whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a matrimonial relationship due to the dearth ofhistorical evidence. They concluded that the historical Mary Magdalene was not a repentant prostitute but a prominent disciple of Jesus and authority in theearly Christian community.[18] The claims that Jesus and Mary Magdalene fled to France parallel otherlegends about the flight ofdisciples to distant lands, such as the one depictingJoseph of Arimathea traveling toEngland after the death of Jesus, taking with him a piece of thorn from theCrown of Thorns, which he later planted inGlastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as "pious frauds" produced during theMiddle Ages.[19][20][21]
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In 2014, Simcha Jacobovici and fringe religious studies historianBarrie Wilson suggested inThe Lost Gospel that the eponymous characters of a 6th-century tale called "Joseph and Aseneth" were in actuality representations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.[22] The story was reported in an anthology compiled byPseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, along with covering letters describing the discovery of the original Greek manuscript and its translation into Syriac. In one of these, translatorMoses of Ingila explained the story "as an allegory of Christ's marriage to the soul".[23] Jacobovici and Wilson instead interpret it as an allegorical reference to an actual marriage of Jesus, produced by a community believing that he was married and had children.[citation needed]
Israeli Biblical scholar, Rivka Nir termed their work "serious-minded, thought-provoking and interesting", but described the thesis as objectionable,[24] and the book has been dismissed by mainstream Biblical scholarship, for example by Anglican theologian,Richard Bauckham.[25] TheChurch of England comparedThe Lost Gospel to aMonty Python sketch, the director of communications for the Archbishop's Council citing the book as an example of religious illiteracy and that ever since the publication ofThe Da Vinci Code in 2003, "an industry had been constructed in which 'conspiracy theorists, satellite channel documentaries and opportunistic publishers had identified a lucrative income stream'."[26]The Lost Gospel was described as historical nonsense byMarkus Bockmuehl.[27]
EarlyMormon theology posited not only that Jesus married, but that he did so multiple times. Early Mormon officialsJedediah M. Grant,Orson Hyde,Joseph F. Smith andOrson Pratt stated it was part of their religious belief that Jesus Christ waspolygamous, quoting this in their respective sermons.[28][29] A number of the early church officials claimed to be the lineal descendants of Jesus by such a marriage.[30] The Mormons also used an apocryphal passage attributed to the 2nd-century Greek philosopherCelsus: "The grand reason why the gentiles and philosophers of his school persecuted Jesus Christ was because he had so many wives. There were Elizabeth and Mary and a host of others that followed him".[31] This seems to have been a summary of a garbled or second-hand reference to a quote from Celsus preserved in the apologetics workContra Celsum ("Against Celsus") by theChurch FatherOrigen: "such was the charm of Jesus's words, that not only were men willing to follow Him to the wilderness, but women also, forgetting the weakness of their sex and a regard for outward propriety in thus following their Teacher into desert places."[32]
Michael Baigent,Richard Leigh, andHenry Lincoln developed and popularized the idea of a progeny descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene in their 1982 bookThe Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (published asHoly Blood, Holy Grail in the United States),[33] in which they asserted: "... we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children".[33] Specifically, they claimed that thesangraal of medieval lore did not represent theSan Graal (Holy Grail), the cup drunk from at theLast Supper, but both the vessel of Mary Magdalene's womb and theSang Real, the blood royal of Jesus represented in a lineage descended from them. In their reconstruction, Mary Magdalene goes to France after the crucifixion, carrying a child by Jesus who would originate a lineage that centuries later would unite with theMerovingian rulers of the earlyFrankish kingdom, from whom they trace the descent into medieval dynasties that were almost exterminated by theAlbigensian Crusade against the Cathars, leaving a small remnant protected by a secret society, thePriory of Sion.[34][35] The role of the Priory was inspired by earlier writings primarily byPierre Plantard, who in the 1960s and 1970s had publicized documents from the secretive Priory that demonstrated its long history and his own descent from the lineage they had protected that traced to the Merovingian kings, and earlier, the biblicalTribe of Benjamin.[36] Plantard would dismissHoly Blood as fiction in a 1982 radio interview,[37] as did his collaboratorPhilippe de Cherisey in a magazine article,[38] but a decade later Plantard admitted that, before he incorporated a group of that name in the 1950s, the very existence of the Priory had been an elaborate hoax, and that the documents on which Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln had relied for inspiration had been forgeries planted in French institutions to be later "rediscovered".[39][40][41] The actual lineage claimed for the portion of the Plantard andHoly Blood bloodline that passes through the medieval era received very negative reviews in the genealogical literature, being considered as consisting of numerous inaccurate associations that were unsupported, or even directly contradicted, by the authentic historical record.[42]
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, a 1993 book by Margaret Starbird, built on Cathar beliefs and Provencal traditions ofSaint Sarah, the black servant of Mary Magdalene, to develop the hypothesis that Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.[4] In her reconstruction, a pregnant Mary Magdalene fled first to Egypt and then France after the crucifixion.[3] She considers this as the source of the legend associated with thecult atSaintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.[citation needed] She also noted that the name "Sarah" means "Princess" inHebrew, thus making her the forgotten child of the "sang réal", theblood royal of theKing of the Jews.[43] Starbird also considered Mary Magdalene as identical withMary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus.[3] Though working with the same claimed relationship between Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Saint Sarah that would have a major role in many of the published progeny scenarios, Starbird considered any question of descent from Sarah to be irrelevant to her thesis,[4] though she accepted that it existed.[44] Her opinion of Mary Magdalene/Mary of Bethany as wife of Jesus is also associated with the concept of thesacred feminine infeminist theology. Mary Ann Beavis stated that unlike others in the genre, Starbird actively courted scholarly engagement concerning her ideas, and that "[a]lthough her methods, arguments and conclusions do not always stand up to scholarly scrutiny, some of herexegetical insights merit attention . . .," while suggesting she is moremythographer than historian.[3]
In his 1996 bookBloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed,Laurence Gardner presentedpedigree charts of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as the ancestors of all theEuropeanroyal families of theCommon Era.[45] His 2000 sequelGenesis of the Grail Kings: The Explosive Story of Genetic Cloning and the Ancient Bloodline of Jesus is unique in claiming that not only can the Jesus bloodline truly be traced back toAdam and Eve but that the first man and woman wereprimate-alienhybrids created by theAnunnaki of hisancient astronaut theory.[46] Gardner followed this book with several additional works in the bloodline genre.[citation needed]
InRex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the Dynasty of Jesus, published in 2000, Marylin Hopkins, Graham Simmans and Tim Wallace-Murphy developed a similar scenario based on 1994 testimony by the pseudonymous "Michael Monkton",[47] that a Jesus and Mary Magdalene progeny was part of a shadow dynasty descended from twenty-fourhigh priests of theTemple in Jerusalem known asRexDeus – the "Kings of God".[48] The evidence on which the informant based his claim to be aRex Deus scion, descended fromHugues de Payens, was said to be lost and therefore cannot be verified independently, because 'Michael' claimed that it was kept in his late father's bureau, which was sold by his brother unaware of its contents.[48] Some critics state that the informant's account of his family history seems to be based on the controversial work of Barbara Thiering.[49]
The best-known work depicting a progeny of Jesus is the 2003 best-selling novel and global phenomenon,The Da Vinci Code, joined by its 2006 major cinematic releaseof the same name. In these, Dan Brown incorporated many of the earlier progeny themes as the background for his work ofconspiracy fiction. The author attested both in the text and public interviews to the veracity of the progeny details that served as the novel's historical context. The work became so well known that the Catholic Church felt compelled to warn its congregates against accepting its pseudo-historical background as fact, which did not stop it from becoming the eleventh highest-selling novel in American history, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide. Brown mixes facts easily verified by the reader, seemingly-authentic details that are not actually factual, and outright conjecture. An indication of the degree to which the work became popular is given by the numerous imitations that it inspired, replicating his style and thesis or attempting to refute it.[50]
In Brown's novel, the protagonist discovers that the grail actually referred to Mary Magdalene, and that knowledge of this, as well as of the progeny descended from Jesus and Mary, has been kept hidden to the present time by a secret conspiracy.[50] This is very similar to the thesis by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln inHoly Blood and the Holy Grail though not associating the hidden knowledge with the Cathars,[4] and Brown also incorporated material from Joyce, Thiering and Starbird, as well as the 1965The Passover Plot, in whichHugh J. Schonfield claimed that Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea had faked the resurrection after Jesus was killed by mistake when stabbed by a Roman soldier.[51] Still, Brown relied so much onHoly Blood that two of its authors, Baigent and Leigh, sued the book's publisher,Random House, due to what they considered to be plagiarism. Brown had made no secret that the progeny material in his work drew largely onHoly Blood, directly citing the work in his book and naming the novel's historical expert after Baigent (inanagram form) and Leigh, but Random House argued that since Baigent and Leigh had presented their ideas as non-fiction, consisting of historical facts, however speculative, then Brown was free to reproduce these concepts just as other works ofhistorical fiction treat historical events. Baigent and Leigh argued that Brown had done more, "appropriat[ing] the architecture" of their work, and thus had "hijacked" and "exploited" it.[52] Though one judge questioned whether the supposedly-factualHoly Blood truly represented fact, or instead bordered on fiction due to its highly conjectural nature,[53] courts ruled in favor of Random House and Brown.[52]
A presentation of analogous concepts in a Mormon context was published in 2006:Dynasty of the Holy Grail: Mormonism's Sacred Bloodline by art historian Vern Grosvenor Swanson.[54] Formatted as a footnoted scholarly study and claiming to be the culmination of almost three decades of research, the work was produced partly as a response to "a fuzzy gnostic, leftwing, liberal, and adamantly feminist bias" regarding the divine feminine and sacred marriage that pervaded recent literature concerning the subject, and that the author considered as "ideologically corrosive to faith in Jesus Christ".[30][54] He nonetheless drew from the same pseudohistorical grail legend asHoly Blood, combining it with concepts related toBritish Israelism, beliefs of the early Mormon fathers, and moderngenetic genealogy.[30][54]
Swanson presents a Jesus who was the son of an English- or Irish-bornMary, and who visited England to studyDruidism before wedding Mary Magdalene.[54] After Jesus's death, Swanson portrays his widow as taking her children by Jesus, whom he refers to as the 'Shiloh Dynasty', to England, and that one of these became a male-line ancestor ofJoseph Smith, to whom the author also attributes amatrilineal derivation from the same Shiloh Dynasty.[30] He claims that in uniting patrilineal and matrilineal descents from the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a marriage that itself, according to Swanson, healed a longstanding breach between the houses ofJudah andEphraim, Joseph Smith was not only a prophet but the 'Davidic king of all Israel', and that all of the Mormon presidents and major officials were members of this lineage either by birth or ritual adoption.[30] Reviewers found aspects of his argument problematic, particularly his utter rejection of the work of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln as authentic history, while at the same time using their work as a basis for the 'Holy Grail' portion of his own reconstruction.[30][54]
The 2008 documentaryBloodline[55] byBruce Burgess, a moviemaker with an interest inparanormal claims, expands on the Jesus progeny hypothesis and other elements ofThe Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.[56] Accepting as valid the testimony of an amateur archaeologist codenamed "Ben Hammott" relating to his discoveries made in the vicinity ofRennes-le-Château since 1999, Burgess claimed Ben had found the treasure ofBérenger Saunière: a mummified corpse, which they believe isMary Magdalene, in an underground tomb they claim is associated with both the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion. In the movie, Burgess interviews several people with alleged connections to the Priory of Sion, including a Gino Sandri and Nicolas Haywood. A book by one of the documentary's researchers, Rob Howells, entitledInside the Priory of Sion: Revelations from the World's Most Secret Society - Guardians of the Bloodline of Jesus presented the version of the Priory of Sion as given in the 2008 documentary,[57] which contained several erroneous assertions, such as the claim that Plantard believed in the Jesus progeny hypothesis.[58] In 2012, however, Ben Hammott, using his real name of Bill Wilkinson, gave apodcast interview in which he apologised and confessed that everything to do with the tomb and related artifacts was a hoax, revealing that the 'tomb' had been part of a now-destroyed full-sizedmovie set, located in a warehouse in England.[59][60]
Claims to a Jesus bloodline are not restricted to Europe. An analogous legend claims that the place of Jesus at the crucifixion was taken by a brother, while Jesus fled through what would becomeRussia andSiberia toJapan, where he became a rice farmer in the village ofShingo,Aomori Prefecture, at the north of the island ofHonshu. It is claimed he married there and had a large family before his death aged 114, with descendants to the present. A Grave of Jesus (キリストの墓,Kirisuto no haka) there attracts tourists. This legend dates from the 1930s, when it was claimed that a document was discovered written in theHebrew language and describing the marriage and later life of Jesus. The document has since disappeared.[61]
InSouth Asia, the founder of the reformist Ahmaddiyya religion, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), likewise claimed that Jesus survived the crucifixion and escaped the Levant, but instead placed his subsequent activities in Afghanistan and India. Specifically, he identified Jesus as the holy man, Yuzasaf, buried at theRoza Bal shrine in theKashmir Valley ofSrinagar. Fida M. Hassnain, as part of a 1970s study of this myth that brought it to the attention of western popularizers, found that the guardian of the shrine claimed to be a descendant of Jesus and a woman named 'Marjan'.[62]
Other works of fiction including Jesus's descendants in the story includeHarry Harrison's 1996 novelKing and Emperor,[63] the 1995 comic bookPreacher and its 2016TV-adaptation.[64]
In reaction toThe Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,The Da Vinci Code, and other controversial books, websites and movies with the same theme, a significant number of people during the late 20th and early 21st centuries have become intrigued by a Jesus bloodline hypothesis despite its lack of substantiation. While some simply entertain it as a novel intellectual proposition, others consider it as an established belief thought to be authoritative and not to be disputed.[65] Prominent among the latter are those whoexpect a descendant of Jesus will eventually emerge as agreat man and become amessiah, aGreat Monarch who rules a Holy European Empire, during an event which they will interpret as amystical second coming ofChrist.[66]
The eclectic spiritual opinions of these adherents are influenced by the writings oficonoclastic authors from a wide range of perspectives. Authors like Margaret Starbird and Jeffrey Bütz often seek to challenge modern beliefs and institutions through a re-interpretation ofChristian history andmythology.[65] Some try to advance and understand theequality of men and women spiritually by portraying Mary Magdalene as being the apostle of aChristian feminism,[67] and even the personification of themother goddess orsacred feminine,[68] usually associating her with theBlack Madonna.[69] Some wish the ceremony that celebrated the beginning of the alleged marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene to be considered as a "holy wedding"; and Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and their alleged daughter,Sarah, to be considered as a "holy family", in order to question traditionalgender roles andfamily values.[70] Almost all these claims are at odds with scholarlyChristian apologetics, and have been dismissed as beingNew AgeGnosticheresies.[2][71]
No mainstreamChristian denomination has endorsed a Jesus bloodline hypothesis as adogma or an object ofreligious devotion since they maintain that Jesus, believed to beGod the Son, was perpetuallycelibate, continent and chaste, andmetaphysically married to the Church. Hedied, wasresurrected,ascended to heaven, and will eventuallyreturn to earth, thereby making all Jesus bloodline hypotheses and relatedmessianic expectations impossible.[65]
Manyfundamentalist Christians believe theAntichrist, prophesied in theBook of Revelation, plans to present himself as descended from theDavidic line to bolster his false claim that he is theJewish Messiah.[72] The intention of such propaganda would be to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior ofJews andphilo-Semites to achieve hisSatanic objectives. An increasing number of fringeChristian eschatologists believe the Antichrist may also present himself as descended from the Jesus bloodline to capitalize on growing sympathy with the hypothesis in the general public.[73]
The notion of a progeny from Jesus and Mary Magdalene and its supposed relationship to theMerovingians, as well as to their alleged modern descendants, is strongly dismissed aspseudohistorical by a qualified majority of Christian and secular historians such asDarrell Bock[74] andBart D. Ehrman,[2][75] along with journalists and investigators such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has an extensive archive on this subject matter.
In 2005, UK television presenter and amateur archaeologistTony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, "The Real Da Vinci Code", shown onChannel 4.[76] The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists, and cast severe doubt on the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene inFrance, among other related myths, by interviewing on film the inhabitants ofSaintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the centre of the cult of Saint Sarah.[citation needed]
Robert Lockwood, theRoman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh's director for communications, considers the notion of the Church conspiring tocover-up the truth about a Jesus bloodline as a deliberate piece ofanti-Catholic propaganda. He considers it as part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic sentiment with deep roots in the AmericanProtestant imagination but going back to the very start of theReformation of 1517.[77]
Ultimately, the notion that a person living millennia ago has a small number of descendants living presently is statistically improbable.[78] Steve Olson, author ofMapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, published an article inNature demonstrating that, as a matter of statistical probability:
If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet.[79]
Historian Ken Mondschein ridiculed the notion that a distinct bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene could have been preserved:
Infant mortality in pre-modern times was ridiculously high, and you'd only need one childhood accident or disease in 2,000 years to wipe out the bloodline … keep the children of Christ marrying each other, on the other hand, and eventually they'd be so inbred that the sons of God would have flippers for feet.[80]
Chris Lovegrove, who reviewedThe Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when first published in 1982, dismissed the significance of a Jesus bloodline, even if it were proven to exist despite all evidence to the contrary:
If there really is a Jesus dynasty – so what? This, I fear, will be the reaction of many of those prepared to accept the authors' thesis as possible, and the book does not really satisfy one's curiosity in this crucial area.[81]
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