A MESSIANIC BLOODLINE?
- PART 2 -
THE BLOODLINE MOVIE
AND RENNES-LE-CHATEAU
THE GODS OF MEN, Part II:
by Miceal Ledwith
©2008 Miceal F.Ledwith. All Rights Reserved.

Based on Dr. Ledwith's article in
The Bleeping Herald, June 2008
THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS
AND HIS MARRIAGE TO MARY MAGDALENE?

Continued from July 5th - MastersConnection Newsletter....

In short, to return to our main question and where all this relates to Jesus himself, the touchstone of the divinity of Jesus is not whether he resurrected on not on the first Easter Day, and neither did the church’s doctrinal teaching ever maintain that it was. The Rennes-le-Chateau investigation would do well to clarify its thoughts on that position, and the Christian tradition would also do well to perform a reality check on what its own official beliefs actually are on this matter.

Secondly, if you say “The body of Jesus is still in this tomb, therefore he was not divine,” you do not understand what ‘divine’ really means either.
If the reality of Jesus the Christ is central to my life is that then because he rose from the dead after suffering and dying for my sins? I don’t think so, because that would imply that God went to the trouble of devising an incarnation of his beloved only Son only so he would be able to suffer an excruciating passion and death to appease God’s anger and thirst for vengeance and let us off the hook. There’s a lot that could be said about such a view, but suffice it to say for now that such a God could have nothing in common with the God that Jesus preached, nor, by direct implication, with what Jesus was.
Jesus did not come here to suffer and die for our sins, but for something much more wonderful and magnificent: to unveil the eternal that is in the heart of every man and woman who every walked this earth, or any other earth, and to show us how to access it. If we do that he promised we would do all the wonders that he did and greater. He did not come to be worshipped, but to lead.

Jesus deserves to be central in a person’s life because he came here to unveil the eternal that lies at the heart of every man and woman who ever lived. In brief, he came here to reveal that you too could, among other things, walk on water, heal the sick at a touch, raise the dead, and multiply food out of thin air. He taught that it could all be done from the Kingdom of Heaven, which is not in some far distant dimension, but within us all. It is a magnificent image for the quantum field. If that potential were brought into realization in us all, then most assuredly there would be an end to all “weeping and crying and sorrow” in this world, as the New Testament itself puts it. That is surely a far grander motive for the God who sent Jesus here, than to engineer out of a thirst for vengeance the torture and death of his blameless only Son.

So I say that if you can walk on water, heal the sick from incurable diseases at a touch, raise the dead, and produce food directly out of the quantum field into physical reality, then you richly deserve the description “divine.” Why? Because If you can do such things then assuredly it must be because you have been able to bring into realization in the physical realm here, the power of the Zero Point Energy Field, which is how the scientists appear to be more at ease in referring to God.
So if I were to be asked “Is Jesus divine?” my answer would be an emphatic affirmative. That answer would still stand even if his body were to be found at Rennes-le-Chateau, (or in any of the six other places that have also claimed to have his tomb) because allowing your physical body to live or die voluntarily has to be nothing more than a matter of choice for such a being, with no further implications beyond that.
We think because a being is an avatar or a master or has ascended, then that is the end of matters in this world for such a being. Who says so? Are we implying that we know everything that happens for an ascended master and everything about the process that brought them where they are now, and what they can and cannot do subsequently? That would be a very foolish position to take up. There is only one rule for ascended masters, and that is that there are no rules for ascended masters. Their very ascension means nothing more or less than that they are lords of the seven planes of existence and hence not bound by any lesser insight into the reality of the nature and operation of those planes that might appear to us as rules.

DID THE DISCIPLES OF JESUS IN THE EARLY YEARS AFTER HIS PASSION EVER TEACH THAT JESUS DIED AND ROSE FROM THE DEAD?
But we can go further and ask if the death and resurrection was ever actually in the original message about Jesus at all, at least in the form we now know? Two of the brothers of Jesus were among his group of close associates known as “The Twelve” in those days, more familiar to us today as “the Apostles.” Two documents written by his brothers are in the New Testament. They do not mention the death and resurrection at all. Don’t you think they would have if those two elements were as central to what he was as we are now led to believe? In fact in the New Testament Jude Thomas warns about introducing new things that were not in the original message. The Gospel of Thomas, (also written by Jude Thomas who was his twin brother), did not make it into the New Testament, but neither does that Gospel mention the death and resurrection either.
Twenty years after the ministry of Jesus it was Paul – who had never met Jesus during his ministry - (and who did not get on very well with his brother James when he was his house guest for two weeks in Jerusalem) who began to write and preach about him in terms of the suffering lamb who died for our sins, and the goat who took our burdens on its back and bore them away - the two central symbols of the Jewish Festival of Yom Kippur which was based on redressing the vengeance of God against us as a sinful people. (Those who are interested should look at my DVD How Jesus Became a Christ for more details on this aspect of the question).

JESUS, MARY MAGDALENE AND RENNES-LE-CHATEAU.
Twenty five years ago Donovan Joyce was the first person in modern times to postulate that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child with her (The Jesus Scroll 1973). It hadn’t been heard of in any notable way since the time of the Valentinians in the second century. Andreas Faber-Kaiser a few years later (Jesus Died in Kashmir 1977) said that Jesus had several children with a woman in Kashmir and was buried there. The book carried an interview with an individual who claimed descent from that couple and who was the current custodian of the famous Jesus Tomb in Srinigar. Holy Blood, Holy Grail five years later asserted that some of the descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene eventually became the Merovingian Dynasty of the Frankish Kings. Allied to this, the 2000 book Rex Deus stated that a Jesus Bloodline was part of a dynasty called “Rex Deus” (‘God King’), that descended from 24 priests of the Jerusalem Temple and Jesus himself. Last year The Lost Tomb of Jesus was produced by James Cameron of “Titanic” fame, and Simon Jacobovici, which said that what is known as the Talpiot Tomb near Jerusalem was likely to be the Jesus family tomb and that it contains his bones and that of Mary Magdalene. The Bloodline movie claims that this tomb near Rennes-le-Chateau may well contain not just the bones of Jesus and Mary Magdalene but also a cache of what might be Templar treasure or the fabled treasure of Blanche of Castile, (Queen and Regent of the Crusader Louis VIII of France, and granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitane).

The Bloodline movie focuses on the person of Bérenger Saunière, priest of Rennes-le-Chateau, who died in April 1917. Rennes is an ancient place steeped in history and shrouded in mystery. Maybe it is largely because of Saunière’s activities that much of Rennes-le-Chateau’s past was resurrected a century ago. However, it is with some regret that I see its notoriety today linked so prominently with his name as he would probably be a relatively unknown figure were it not for the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the flock of conspiracy theories that have been spawned as a result of their work around Rennes le Chateau.

Image from the Bloodline movie.

According to the makers of Bloodline, this movie is based on a series of discoveries made near Rennes-le-Chateau. In 1995 the English researcher Ben Hammott (The Tomb Man) accidentally dropped his camera into a hole in a cave near Rennes–le-Chateau. When he managed to recover the camera later he discovered it had taken pictures of what seemed like a Templar Tomb.
There seemed to be a body inside as well as a substantial amount of ancient treasure. He returned to the site later and took some better footage.

Hammott came back to the tomb in 2007 accompanied by the American film producer Bruce Burgess (well know for his interest in the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot and Area 51), and a better quality movie was made. I have not yet seen the movie but have researched any information available on it from the film’s extensive website and the various media reports and reviews that have appeared.*

According to a press release by the film makers, the find was reported to the French Archeological Authority of Montpellier, “Direction Regionale des Affaires Culturelle – DRAC.
The person the Bloodline people spoke to was a Jean-Pierre Giraud.
According to the reports circulating the DRAC authorities say that Bruce Burgess and Ben Hammott showed them a section of film and asked if they would like to see the tomb. Seeing that that is what DRAC is there for, they readily agreed. Bruce Burgess and Ben Hammott agreed to take them there but in the event it seems they didn’t return to do so, at least not at that time. The DRAC authorities believe the filmmakers only came to them to get a quotation for the film and no more. Apparently the French authorities were angry and appeared at one stage at least to be convinced the whole thing was a hoax. It is always hard to sort out rumor and fact in such situations and I am sure only time will clarify what is exactly the situation or what may have developed since.

Image from the Bloodline movie.

DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCUMENTS
In the movie Ben Hammott claims in his searches around Rennes-le-Chateau to have discovered a series of hidden bottles with messages inside deposited by Fr. Bérenger Saunière a century or so ago. Apparently he was confessing in the bottle messages to a serious crime committed to hide an even graver secret: that he was implicit in the murder of another local priest to prevent something being revealed. The first bottle contains a piece of paper that claims to have the signature of Father Bérenger Saunière.

Sauniere was an educated man who wrote good French in an elegant hand. This alleged signature has the wrong form of accent on his family name. (Some have said that there are other signatures of Sauniere extant that also have the wrong accent?). In French it is essential to put accents in their proper places - an incorrect or missing accent is a spelling mistake just as much as an incorrect or missing letter would be in English.
In the signature of Sauniere which the Bloodline team discovered, the second last “e” in his family name has an accent “aigu” over it, which leans forwards. Instead that ‘e’ ought to have an accent ‘grave” which leans backwards. It is difficult to believe that a cultured Frenchman would make this sort of mistake, least of all about his own family name. Sauniere was an impatient and energetic man; sometimes in his haste the accent appears in some other samples of his signature as a mere dot, but it is difficult to imagine he would mix up the accents entirely in his own name.

It is interesting to note that this signature, with the faulty accent, was not shown to the British handwriting expert Emma Bache when the Bloodline team consulted her about authenticating the messages. However, the signature apparently was shown to Antoine Captier, a researcher of Rennes-le-Chateau, whom it is said condemned it as a forgery. The join between the ‘a’ and the ‘n’ is also untypical of other signatures of Sauniere that are extant, which is a further difficulty with this specimen signature.

Image from the Bloodline movie.

In the Latin text on this piece of paper below “occulttus” is incorrectly spelled with two ‘t’s - as if you were to spell movie as “movvie.” Hardly something Sauniere would do either.
Three or four more bottles were discovered by Ben Hammott with messages inside. Mistakes have been pointed out in the French phrases of those messages.

Really the only way I could see those flawed documents being written by Bérenger Saunière was if he had spent far too much time emptying bottles before stuffing notes into some.
One phrase reads “La route que vous suivre est pleine de danger.” Presumably the intention is to say “The route you will follow, or follow, is full of danger.” But this form of the French is precisely how an English speaking person who knew only a little French would phrase the sentence. It is English using French words. I do not think a native French speaker would phrase the sentence in this way, much less an educated person such as Sauniere. Besides should not “vous suivre’ be “vous suivez,” another very elementary but serious mistake?
                        To be continued next week....