Holy Grail Conspiracy

I’ve recently been reading quite a lot of holy grail and Christianity conspiracy novels. And I’d have to say, they make some sense. Not in terms of the existence of some relic, or bloodline, but how they view religion.

There is one particular book, The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry that mentions how the entire Christian faith is predicated on rising from the dead. It is that precise moment where the son of God came back that people believed that he’s not a quack. Sure, he’s done his share of miracles, but non-believers wrote these miracles off as witchcraft, magic, that shouldn’t be performed. But coming back from the dead is different. And so the bottomline is, what if he didn’t come back from the dead after all? That it is all the wishful thinking of the apostles, or even worse, mistranslation from Old Hebrew?

And then there’s Kathleen McGowan’s The Expected One which revolves about how Mary Magdalene is, and should be considered an apostle of Christ because she was one of those who watched him die, and the first to watch him rise from the dead. Yet the Church and human authority wrote her off as a prostitute. What if Kathleen McGowan is right, that there is a conspiracy? Not the one about bloodline, but the one about how the Bible as we know today is a pure construct of man? What if it isn’t meant to be?

And I just finished finished Matthew Reily’s Seven Ancient Wonders at 1.30am this morning. It isn’t strictly what I would consider Holy Grail literature, but it is certain every bit a relic novel. This book mainly involves the seven ancient wonders of the world, and midway Reilly had to crack Da Vinci Code jokes (in his own word) and make links to the Christian faith. Although a little incredulous, but according to this novel, Catholics are sun worshippers. How when Christians say Amen it actually means Amun which is one of the gods of ancient Egypt. Well, Egyptian Orthodox Christians maybe? :P

Nonetheless, these books are great fun to read. The adventure, the globe-trotting, the amazing amount of information the protagonists store in their heads … I know atas literature students and arty farters scorn these books. I think they themselves are in denial about reading for pleasure.