THERE seems to be no end to the industry surrounding theories and wild speculation about the burial place of Jesus. In recent months, we have seen a serious BBC documentary claiming it has found the real burial place of Christ in Jerusalem, with inscriptions to prove the claim. Last Easter, the debate about the Resurrection made the front covers of popular magazines like Time and Newsweek.
It is an industry that has been churning away for years now. In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were books claiming Christianity had been brought to earth by space aliens or had been founded as a result of the disciples "tripping" on hallucenogenic mushrooms. In the 1980s, we had books linking Jesus to the first foundations of Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians, esoteric sects and even linking "the Holy Grail" and the Merovingian dynasty through a child Jesus fathered with Mary Magdalene during a post crucifixion exile in France.
In recent years, the net has spread wider, with claims that the delay in translating and publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls are due not to the slow pace of academic work in Jerusalem, Oxford and Harvard, but to a conspiracy in the Vatican to suppress the "true" origins of Christianity and its links with early Gnostics.
Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger have provided the latest product of this industry, with a book claiming to provide "the solution to a 2,000 year old mystery".
Their book opens with the story of an obscure parish priest in southern France, the Abbe Francois Berenger Sauniere (1852-1917), and his alleged discovery of parchments hidden in his church in Rennes le Chateau in 1886 or 1887.
Andrews and Schellenberger admit from the beginning that the date of discovery, the provenance and the current location of the parchments is unknown; some say there may even have been five parchments, others doubt they ever existed, and the authors admit they have never seen them. And yet they proceed, through a tortuous series of geometric tricks, to argue that the parchments point to a remote and secret site at Cardou in southern France.
A similar tortuous exercise is played out with old masterpieces, such as Nicholas Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie II interpreting the painting, with its cryptic inscription "Et in Arcadia Ego", as a map leading them to the site at Cardou.
And in a hasty conclusion, they decide that this site is nothing less than the final tomb of Christ, who had not died on the Cross, but had been resuscitated by Joseph of Arimathea and died many years later. Without any evidence, they also conclude that Christ's body had been hidden for centuries beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, until it was discovered during tunnelling by the Knights Templar, who dug it up, wrapped it up, and brought it back to France. There they tunnel led into a mountainside, hid the body and the new tomb, and built towers' and castles to protect Cardou from prying intruders.
The authors argue that the secret they have uncovered has been hidden from the world for centuries, due to conspiracies in the Vatican, or by Freemasons, cover ups involving heads of state, celebrated painters and academics, involving secret societies, ancient parchments and hidden treasures. And they would have us believe that their beliefs are confirmed by chance discoveries of obscure heraldic devices in libraries in St Petersburg, maps in The Hague, and sculptures in Lord Lichfield's garden in Staffordshire.
One has to turn to the acknowledgments to find that it was Schellenberger's teenage son Andrew who offered the authors an anagram for the inscription in Poussin's painting, but this anagram - a vital key in the puzzle - depends on adding an extra word to the inscription.
Andrews and Schellenberger are hardly authors with great credibility in this field - one is a diver who specialises in mine clearance, wreck salvage and restoring firearms, the other has worked variously as an architect, an engineer and a furniture restorer. But they claim to be experts on theology, history, art, mathematics, archaeology.
For these two experts, Christianity can, be reduced to an esoteric teaching about personal enlightenment. And yet, in over 500 pages, they pay scant attention to the New Testament accounts of the life of Christ and the story of the early Church, and manage to misspell the name of Paul's companion Barnabas.
When the New Testament is quoted, the authors have chosen extracts not from any modern translations but from a 1753 edition of the Book of Common Prayer or a translation of the Bible published in 1854. And while there are few references to the Bible accounts of the life of Christ (and these are dismissed totally), they give great credibility to the so called Gnostic Gospels discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945.
It takes a lot to swallow a book like this whole. And yet at the end of the 20th century it is extraordinary that such books can be taken seriously. The recent, tragedy of mass murder and mass suicide associated with the Solar Order of the Temple in France and Switzerland, and the activities of similar cults, are unfortunate warnings about the dangerous degrees to which people can go in following weird theories about the Knights Templar, hidden secrets and the revival of Rosicrucian myths. Happily, the only harm that will come to readers of this book is the time and money they will lose.