I can vividly remember how it was when The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was first published in 1982. How the book seemed to be ridiculed by everybody and anybody – by the esoterics and the sceptics alike. Some people only became interested in Christianity through this book. Those who watched the three “Chronicle” documentaries and were hoping for a Rennes-le-Château update were really disappointed with what they got. Of course, most people were ignorant about Henry Lincoln's “lecture tours” and how he and Baigent and Leigh were plugging the “Jesus Bloodline” – and much more to the point, how they wanted to use the “Jesus Bloodline” as the conclusion to the third “Chronicle” documentary but that it was scuppered by the producer Roy Davies, who instead preferred to use the private conclusion offered by Fred Gettings (1937-2013) in the final and third documentary, “Shadow of the Templars” (1979), agreed upon by Henry Lincoln. It all seems a long time ago now, as if it existed in a different time and space, with most of those people dead today. The resurgence of this tripe on the internet resulted in the monumental success of the novel by Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code”.

The damnedest fool of all was Michael Baigent, who devoted his life to the study of this non-entity – even joining Freemasonry to further pursue this nonsense – without even once acknowledging the fact that the “Line of David” (or “House of David”) became extinct in 586 BC with the Babylonian invasion of Judea – and it was never restored (routine textbook stuff). It's all found in the Old Testament. Furthermore, mainstream scholarship (Neil Asher Silberman, Israel Finkelstein) argues that such a dynasty never existed because there is no archaeological evidence to support it. This, of course, also invalidates the historicity of the Gospels.

Anyway, those people always look to join their dots, however irrational.