Henry Lincoln - The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail

Henry Lincoln is best known for being one of the co-authors of the controversial 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. During the mid 1970s, while Lincoln was lecturing at a summer school, he met Richard Leigh, an American fiction writer. Leigh introduced him to Michael Baigent, a New Zealand photo-journalist who had been working on a project about the Knights Templar. The three discovered that they shared a common interest in the Knights Templar, and between them later developed a theory that Jesus Christ had started a bloodline that had later intermarried with the Frankish Merovingian royal dynasty. He presented three documentaries in the Chronicle series for BBC2; "The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem" shown in February 1972, "The Priest, the Painter and the Devil" shown in October 1974 and finally "The Shadow of the Templars" shown in November 1979. Excerpts for the latter are still available online. and

The three of them took their theory on the road during the 1970s in a series of lectures that later developed into the 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which became a bestseller and popularised the theory that Jesus had fathered a still extant and powerful bloodline (the true Holy Grail), and was all tied together by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. These ideas were later used as the basis of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code.

The book has been described as "a work thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike".