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On the Other Hand The Profits of Conspiracy Hucksterism
Events of the last few months have once more illustrated a growing trend—'infotainment' rules the media more and more relentlessly. Fact and fiction make no difference; they can be intertwined, exchanged, confused, turned upside down, and set the perfect stage for conspiracy theorists to have a field day. The Internet has contributed to this, since any who have access can concoct their own version of the truth, post it, and then act as authorities to proclaim and confirm their own imaginings. Some culture-critics find the trend hilarious (“how gullible can the public get?”), while others think it quite insidious (“who are the manipulators preying upon folks for mercenary or other ulterior motives?”). Consider a few of the whoppers: January 15, 1983, New Zealander Michael Baigent, with cohorts Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, burst onto the scene with their book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. They announced that so-called secret documents had recently been discovered in France, which completely overturned the traditional story of Christian origins. 'What really happened' twenty centuries ago had been covered up by the fabrications of deceitful early churchmen. The conspiracy began with the Gospels themselves and has deceived poor unenlightened Christians ever since. These new 'evangelists' put forth their 'revelation' as a shocking international best seller. Although panned by authentic historians because of its ludicrous lack of evidence, the book climbed in the profit charts. These 'secret documents' had led the authors to the startling realization that Jesus did not die on the cross, but survived, married Mary Magdalene, moved to Egypt, then to France, had a family, and that his bloodline still exists. All these claims, according to the blurb on the book, are "not only possible—they are probably true," and "so convincing that the most faithful Christians will be moved." Moved to what—is not specified. But wait; there's more. In a 1993 political scandal, a French judicial court ordered a search of the home of Pierre Plantard (died 2/23/2000), an oddball royalist with a checkered career of run-ins with the law. Elaborate equipment was found with which he had forged a hoard of medieval manuscripts. The phony documents, supposedly from an eleventh-century ‘Priory of Sion,’ were planted in the bowels of the Bibliotheque Nationale and, when discovered, they were seen to trace the Plantard family back to the Merovingian King Dagobert, making Pierre—the fraud extraordinaire—the rightful king of modern France. He admitted to the Court under oath that he had fabricated all the controversial documents. The exposure of this humongous hoax, however, did not kill it. Baigent had met Plantard in 1979 to discuss the documents. He had no idea that the Priory of Sion and all the rest were inventions which Plantard had been working on since the 1950s, so he (Baigent) pushed ahead, using the documents as part of the basis for his 1983 bombshell. Twenty years later (2003) Dan Brown published The DaVinci Code, drawing so heavily on Baigent's wild imaginings, especially the Priory of Sion, that he was sued for plagiarism in 2005. The case threw light on the conspiratorial underworld of crank historians. Brown had put together one author's name, Leigh, and scrambled the letters of the other's name, Baigent, creating Leigh Teabing, the vicious despiser of all things Catholic whose savage views of Opus Dei were more fanciful than Plantard's Priory of Sion. Even the novel's hero, professor of symbology Robert Langdon, had to tone down the worst of Teabing's outlandish ravings so that poor Sophie might be persuaded to swallow them as true. When Brown was cleared of perjury for a second time on March 23, 2007, the UK Court of Appeals accepted that at least "fifteen plot points" were indeed common to both books, but ruled that they were too general to be protected under UK copyright law. The judge socked the prosecution with $1 million of the defendant's legal fees. But not to worry. Hucksters are well aware that there is no such thing as bad publicity in a good market. Before the trial was over, Holy Blood, Holy Grail had new life on the Best Seller list. Even before the 2006 phase of the lawsuit was over, however, Baigent was angling for much bigger game. He put together a far more bizarre book, The Jesus Papers, with the tabloid-style subtitle Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. This is the new hucksterism at its wildest. He spends 269 pages rehashing his earlier conspiratorial interpretations and adding new ones, bashing the Vatican every chance he can, questioning the integrity of any Christian who continues to believe the old lies. Only in the last twenty pages of the book does he finally get around to the so-called ‘Jesus papers,’ telling a tale that makes Plantard look like a piker. According to Baigent, "In the often strange world of Middle Eastern antiquities, there have always been rumors...talk of the existence of some documents that are dangerous to the Vatican, documents that in touching upon Jesus in an unspecified manner, are, it is suggested, some sort of 'smoking gun'." He finally tracked them down around 1990; "I reached the source of the rumors and the owner of the documents that were the subject of the rumors, ‘a very cultured, impeccably mannered, highly intelligent’ wealthy Israeli businessman. (p. 267). In the early 1960s he had bought a house in the Old City and in excavating in its cellar "found two papyrus documents bearing an Aramaic text, together with a number of objects that allowed him to date the finds at about A.D. 34." The letters were written to the Sanhedrin by someone who called himself Messiah, and says he did not claim to be the son of God. The writer "must be the teacher we know as Jesus," and his statement that he is not divine, "we can be sure, is something the Vatican would not like to be made public." Baigent's friend refused to release the letters for over twenty-five years because he felt that doing so would "just cause problems between the Vatican and Israel and inflame anti-Semitism." Eventually he agreed to let Baigent see them. They were in a Jerusalem bank's large walk-in safe. "He presented me with two framed papyrus documents covered with glass. Each was about eighteen inches long and nine inches high. I held them. These were ‘the Jesus papers,’ the letters from Jesus to the Sanhedrin. They existed. I held them in my hands. I was awestruck and speechless as I thought of the changes in our history that these letters might cause were they to be released publicly. I wanted everyone to know about the papers. I wanted to stand in the street and cry out to every passerby that the 'smoking gun' exists. I have seen it and held it!" Even a few years ago, Baigent would have been dismissed as a charlatan rather than offered exposure on the History Channel and given space in all the media. When British writer Hugh Schonfield, the first of the post-World War II conspiracy theorists, came out with The Passover Plot in 1965, he did no special pleading and claimed no secret evidence. He merely tried to provide an alternate interpretation of the traditional texts. No such restrictions for Baigent. The big difference, of course, is the vastly changed market-place. Credible evidence is irrelevant to infotainment. Baigent had 150,000 copies of The Jesus Papers printed, knowing that they would sell like hot-cakes after his tangle with Brown over the The DaVinci Code. Since he has elaborated conspiracy theories as a crank historian for over thirty years, he has recognized a basic strategy of the new hucksterism: maintain maximum secrecy right up to the closing pages, then finish it quickly as the public gasps. Before closing, without identifying any of the principals, he simply assures us thus: "That day I resolved to make every effort to get these letters to an experienced scholar for checking and translating." One might have expected that to have been done before the book was rushed into print. Baigent is probably grinning from ear to ear, all the way to the bank. There have already been several other recent writers who have learned well the Plantard-Baigent-Brown game. And as a result you can expect to be infotained in a growing number of media venues. It is therefore all the more devoutly to be wished that the few who remain committed to distinguishing fact from fiction will not be snuffed out by the profit-margins of the hucksters. Perhaps truth-force will at least occasionally vanquish market forces.
Jim Megivern is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religion at UNC Wilmington. He is a contributing founder of CCV and a regular columnist. |
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Carolina Civic Voice Spring 2007 Vol. 7, No 1 |