Jesus Bloodline - Criticism

Criticism

Jesus bloodline hypotheses parallel other legends about the flight of disciples to distant lands, such as the one depicting Joseph of Arimathea traveling to England after the death of Jesus, taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as "pious fraud" produced during the Middle Ages.

The Jesus bloodline hypothesis from the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is not contained in any of the "Priory of Sion documents" and was dismissed as fiction by Pierre Plantard in 1982 in a French radio interview, as well as by Philippe de Cherisey in a magazine article. However, Plantard's "Priory of Sion" documents prior to 1956 were found to be forgeries which were planted in French institutions to be later "rediscovered". Plantard only claimed that the Merovingians were descended from the Tribe of Benjamin, which contradicts the hypothesis of a Jesus bloodline as the missing link between the Merovingian line and the Davidic line from the Tribe of Judah. The notion of a direct bloodline from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and its supposed relationship to the Merovingians (as well as their alleged modern descendants: House of Habsburg, Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg, Clan Sinclair, House of Stuart, House of Cavendish, House of Bourbon, House of Orléans and other noble families), is strongly dismissed as pseudohistorical by a qualified majority of Christian and secular historians such as Darrell Bock and Bart D. Ehrman, along with journalists and investigators such as Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has an extensive archive on this subject matter.

In 2005, UK TV presenter and amateur archaeologist Tony 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 on Channel 4. The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists, and cast severe doubt on the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France, among other related myths, by interviewing on film the inhabitants of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the centre of the cult of Saint Sarah.

The Jesus bloodline hypothesis from the book Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the Dynasty of Jesus hinges on the testimony of the authors' anonymous informant, "Michael", who claimed to be a Rex Deus scion. Evidence supporting the hypothesis was supposedly lost, and therefore cannot be independently verified, because Micheal claimed that it was contained in his late father's bureau, which was sold by his brother unaware of its contents. Some critics point out the informant's account of his family history seems to be based on the dubious work of Barbara Thiering, and identify him as being Michel Roger Lafosse.

Robert Lockwood, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh’s director for communications, sees the notion of the Church conspiring to cover-up the truth about a Jesus bloodline as a deliberate piece of anti-Catholic propaganda. He sees it as part of a long tradition of anti-Catholic sentiment with deep roots in the American Protestant imagination but going back to the very start of the Reformation of 1517.

Although Jesus bloodline hypotheses were not submitted to the judgment of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus from a liberal Christian perspective, they were unable to determine whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a matrimonial relationship due to the dearth of historical evidence. They concluded that the historical Mary Magdalene was not a repentant prostitute but a prominent disciple of Jesus and a leader in the early Christian movement. Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs 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 of New Testament and early Christianity scholars find such a claim to be historically unreliable.

Ultimately, the notion that a person living millennia ago has a small number of descendants living today is statistically improbable. Steve Olson, author of Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins, published an article in Nature demonstrating that, as a matter of statistical probability:

If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet.

Historian Ken Mondschein ridiculed the notion that the 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.

Chris Lovegrove, who reviewed The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when first published in 1982, dismissed the significance of a Jesus bloodline even 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.