Holy Blood, Holy Crap

Tomorrow's Dateline NBC is airing a story about Michael Baigent's new book The Jesus Papers, exploring Baigent's "startling new theory" that Christ survived the crucifixion. I guess no one remembers that Baigent's/Leigh's/Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail briefly went into this idea over 20 years ago. I am so not paying around $40 Cdn just to read the same old crap, especially when Baigent is in the middle of suing Dan Brown for scads of money.

From the 1983 Corgi edition of Holy Blood, Holy Grail:

"Is there any evidence that Jesus did indeed survive the Crucifixion - or that the Crucifixion was in some way a fraud?" (371)

"There is, quite simply, no reason why his Crucifixion, as the Gospels depict it, should have been fatal." (372)

"He should have survived...for a good two or three days. And yet he is on the cross for no more than a few hours before being pronounced dead." (372)

"In the Gospels Jesus's death occurs at a moment that is almost too convenient, too felicitously opportune. It occurs just intime to prevent his executioners breaking his legs...
Modern authorities agree that Jesus, quite unabashedly, modelled and perhaps contrived his life in accordance with...prophecies, which heralded the coming of a Messiah...And the details of the Crucifixion seem likewise engineered to enact the prophecies of the Old Testament."

Baigent speculates that the sponge soaked in vinegar offered to Christ might have been soaked in opium or belladonna. "But why proffer a soporific drug? Unless the act of doing so, along with all the other components of the Crucifixion, were elements of a complex and ingenious strategem - a strategem designed to produce a semblance of death when the victim, in fact, was still alive." (374)

"According to Roman law at the time, a crucified man was denied all burial...Yet Pilate, in a flagrant breach of procedure, readily granted Christ's boy to Joseph of Arimathea...In the Greek version [of Mark] when Joseph asks for Jesus's body, he uses the word soma - a word applied only to a living body." (376)

"the priest-king would seem to have had friends in high places; and these friends, working in collusion with a corrupt, easily bribed Roman Procurator, appear to have engineered a mock crucifixion...an execution was then staged - in which a substitute took the priest-king's place on the cross, or in which the priest-king himself did not actually die. Towards dusk..a 'body' was removed to an opportunely adjacent tomb, from which, a day or two later, it 'miraculously' disappeared." (377)