The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail - Softcover

Lincoln, Henry; Baigent, Michael; Leigh, Richard

3.5

12,728 ratings by Goodreads

9780099682417: The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099682419 ISBN 13: 9780099682417

Publisher: Arrow, 1996

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A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees which enabled him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1, 300 years ago. The author's conclusions are persuasive at the core is not material riches but a secret - a secret of explosive and contraversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village to all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than the Holy Grail.

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Review:

Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh, authors of The Messianic Legacy, spent over 10 years on their own kind of quest for the Holy Grail, into the secretive history of early France. What they found, researched with the tenacity and attention to detail which befits any great quest, is a tangled and intricate story of politics and faith that reads like a mystery novel. It is the story of the Knights Templar, and a behind-the-scenes society called the Prieure de Sion, and its involvement in reinstating descendants of the Merovingian bloodline into political power. Why? The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail assert that their explorations into early history ultimately reveal that Jesus may not have died on the cross, but lived to marry and father children whose bloodline continues today. According to the authors, their point here is not to compromise or to demean Jesus, but to offer another, more complete perspective of Jesus as God's incarnation in man. They claim that the power of this secret, which has, they say, been carefully guarded for hundreds of years, has sparked much controversy. For all the sensationalism and hoopla surrounding The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail and the alternative history which it outlines, the authors are careful to keep their perspective and sense of scepticism alive in its pages, explaining carefully and clearly how they came to draw such combustible conclusions. --Jodie Buller

Review:

"One of the most controversial books of the 20th Century" (U.P.I)

"Their quest for knowledge possesses all the ingredients of a classic 19th-Century mystery novel ... a book that will be hotly denounced and widely read" (Financial Times)

"A book that cannot easily be dismissed" (Neville Cryer The Bible Society)

"Has all the ingredients of an international thriller ... incredible" (Newsweek)

"It makes compulsive reading" (Times Educational Supplement)

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