Michael Baigent,
Richard Leigh, and
Henry Lincoln developed and popularized the idea of a progeny descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene in their 1982 book
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (published as
Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the United States), in which they asserted: "... we do not think the Incarnation truly symbolises what it is intended to symbolise unless Jesus were married and sired children". The role of the Priory was inspired by earlier writings primarily by
Pierre Plantard, who in the 1960s and 1970s had publicized documents from the secretive Priory that demonstrated its long history and his own descent from the lineage they had protected that traced to the Merovingian kings, and earlier, the biblical
Tribe of Benjamin. Plantard would dismiss
Holy Blood as fiction in a 1982 radio interview, as did his collaborator
Philippe de Cherisey in a magazine article, but a decade later Plantard admitted that, before he incorporated a group of that name in the 1950s, the very existence of the Priory had been an elaborate hoax, and that the documents on which Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln had relied for inspiration had been forgeries planted in French institutions to be later "rediscovered". The actual lineage claimed for the portion of the Plantard and
Holy Blood bloodline that passes through the medieval era received very negative reviews in the genealogical literature, being considered as consisting of numerous inaccurate associations that were unsupported, or even directly contradicted, by the authentic historical record.
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, a 1993 book by Margaret Starbird, built on Cathar beliefs and Provencal traditions of
Saint Sarah, the black servant of Mary Magdalene, to develop the hypothesis that Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Starbird also considered Mary Magdalene as identical with
Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus. Her opinion of Mary Magdalene/Mary of Bethany as wife of Jesus is also associated with the concept of the
sacred feminine in
feminist theology. Mary Ann Beavis stated that unlike others in the genre, Starbird actively courted scholarly engagement concerning her ideas, and that "[a]lthough her methods, arguments and conclusions do not always stand up to scholarly scrutiny, some of her
exegetical insights merit attention . . .," while suggesting she is more
mythographer than historian. His 2000 sequel
Genesis of the Grail Kings: The Explosive Story of Genetic Cloning and the Ancient Bloodline of Jesus is unique in claiming that not only can the Jesus bloodline truly be traced back to
Adam and Eve but that the first man and woman were
primate-alien
hybrids created by the
Anunnaki of his
ancient astronaut theory. Gardner followed this book with several additional works in the bloodline genre. In
Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-Le-Chateau and the Dynasty of Jesus, published in 2000, Marylin Hopkins, Graham Simmans and Tim Wallace-Murphy developed a similar scenario based on 1994 testimony by the pseudonymous "Michael Monkton", that a Jesus and Mary Magdalene progeny was part of a shadow dynasty descended from twenty-four
high priests of the
Temple in Jerusalem known as
Rex Deus – the "Kings of God". The evidence on which the informant based his claim to be a
Rex Deus scion, descended from
Hugues de Payens, was said to be lost and therefore cannot be verified independently, because 'Michael' claimed that it was kept in his late father's bureau, which was sold by his brother unaware of its contents.
The Da Vinci Code The best-known work depicting a progeny of Jesus is the 2003 best-selling novel and global phenomenon,
The Da Vinci Code, joined by its 2006 major cinematic release
of the same name. In these, Dan Brown incorporated many of the earlier progeny themes as the background for his work of
conspiracy fiction. The author attested both in the text and public interviews to the veracity of the progeny details that served as the novel's historical context. The work became so well known that the Catholic Church felt compelled to warn its congregates against accepting its pseudo-historical background as fact, which did not stop it from becoming the eleventh highest-selling novel in American history, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide. Brown mixes facts easily verified by the reader, seemingly-authentic details that are not actually factual, and outright conjecture. An indication of the degree to which the work became popular is given by the numerous imitations that it inspired, replicating his style and thesis or attempting to refute it. In Brown's novel, the protagonist discovers that the grail actually referred to Mary Magdalene, and that knowledge of this, as well as of the progeny descended from Jesus and Mary, has been kept hidden to the present time by a secret conspiracy. Still, Brown relied so much on
Holy Blood that two of its authors, Baigent and Leigh, sued the book's publisher,
Random House, due to what they considered to be plagiarism. Brown had made no secret that the progeny material in his work drew largely on
Holy Blood, directly citing the work in his book and naming the novel's historical expert after Baigent (in
anagram form) and Leigh, but Random House argued that since Baigent and Leigh had presented their ideas as non-fiction, consisting of historical facts, however speculative, then Brown was free to reproduce these concepts just as other works of
historical fiction treat historical events. Baigent and Leigh argued that Brown had done more, "appropriat[ing] the architecture" of their work, and thus had "hijacked" and "exploited" it. Though one judge questioned whether the supposedly-factual
Holy Blood truly represented fact, or instead bordered on fiction due to its highly conjectural nature, courts ruled in favor of Random House and Brown. Formatted as a footnoted scholarly study and claiming to be the culmination of almost three decades of research, the work was produced partly as a response to "a fuzzy gnostic, leftwing, liberal, and adamantly feminist bias" regarding the divine feminine and sacred marriage that pervaded recent literature concerning the subject, and that the author considered as "ideologically corrosive to faith in Jesus Christ". by
Bruce Burgess, a moviemaker with an interest in
paranormal claims, expands on the Jesus progeny hypothesis and other elements of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Accepting as valid the testimony of an amateur archaeologist codenamed "Ben Hammott" relating to his discoveries made in the vicinity of
Rennes-le-Château since 1999, Burgess claimed Ben had found the treasure of
Bérenger Saunière: a mummified corpse, which they believe is
Mary Magdalene, in an underground tomb they claim is associated with both the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion. In the movie, Burgess interviews several people with alleged connections to the Priory of Sion, including a Gino Sandri and Nicolas Haywood. A book by one of the documentary's researchers, Rob Howells, entitled ''Inside the Priory of Sion: Revelations from the World's Most Secret Society - Guardians of the Bloodline of Jesus'' presented the version of the Priory of Sion as given in the 2008 documentary, which contained several erroneous assertions, such as the claim that Plantard believed in the Jesus progeny hypothesis. In 2012, however, Ben Hammott, using his real name of Bill Wilkinson, gave a
podcast interview in which he apologised and confessed that everything to do with the tomb and related artifacts was a hoax, revealing that the 'tomb' had been part of a now-destroyed full-sized
movie set, located in a warehouse in England.
Jesus bloodline claims in South and East Asia Claims to a Jesus bloodline are not restricted to Europe. An analogous legend claims that the place of Jesus at the crucifixion was taken by a brother, while Jesus fled through what would become
Russia and
Siberia to
Japan, where he became a rice farmer in the village of
Shingo,
Aomori Prefecture, at the north of the island of
Honshu. It is claimed he married there and had a large family before his death aged 114, with descendants to the present. A there attracts tourists. This legend dates from the 1930s, when it was claimed that a document was discovered written in the
Hebrew language and describing the marriage and later life of Jesus. The document has since disappeared. In
South Asia, the founder of the reformist Ahmaddiyya religion, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), likewise claimed that Jesus survived the crucifixion and escaped the Levant, but instead placed his subsequent activities in Afghanistan and India. Specifically, he identified Jesus as the holy man, Yuzasaf, buried at the
Roza Bal shrine in the
Kashmir Valley of
Srinagar. Fida M. Hassnain, as part of a 1970s study of this myth that brought it to the attention of western popularizers, found that the guardian of the shrine claimed to be a descendant of Jesus and a woman named 'Marjan'.
Other fiction Other works of fiction including Jesus's descendants in the story include
Harry Harrison's 1996 novel
King and Emperor, the 1995 comic book
Preacher and its 2016
TV-adaptation. ==Adherence==