In 1956, in a small town in the south of France, a 36-year-old draughtsman called Pierre Plantard founded the Prieuré de Sion as part of a massive hoax to prove his right to the throne. Nearly half a century later – and, unfortunately for Plantard, a few years after his death – a bestselling novel publicized the Priory and Plantard’s alleged Merovingian lineage. Had he been alive, he would, quite possibly, have been borne in triumph to Notre Dame on the shoulders of a jubilant crowd. His acknowledgement as King of France and last living descendant of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene would have been fraught with controversy; one way or another he would have been several million euros richer and his eventual death would have had people bombarding the Vatican with demands for his immediate sainthood. 

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I personally have no opinion on whether Magdalene was a princess of the House of Hur and wife to Christ. Being neither a historian nor an archaeologist, and having no further information on the subject than the diametrically opposite views of two groups of people, I have little choice but to suspend judgement. I do feel, however, that the evidence for any claim of historical significance should be built on a foundation stronger than the word of a man who was a convicted fraud and confessed to fabricating every word he propagated about the Priory.

What’s even more amazing than the flood of allegations and counter-allegations unleashed by a few forged documents strategically placed in the Bibliothèque Nationale is the number of people who have suddenly seized on the Grail story as a good thing, to be clasped tightly with both hands and milked for every penny it can give in royalties and ticket sales. Some of the books have fared well, but several are simply vaguely-remembered names from newspaper articles; they have merited neither shelf space in bookstores nor web space on Wikipedia. 

Books based on Grail legend usually delve into the history of two organizations. The Cathars are best remembered for their philosophy that individuals can pray directly to God, without intercession from a priest, which led to their violent suppression by the thirteenth-century Church. 

The second group is far more widely known than the first, principally for its near-mythic feats of valour during the Crusades. But “The Legacy of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon” isn’t a snappy title for a book, so writers have preferred to use the abbreviated version of the name: the Knights Templar. 

The plots are usually worth at least a sizeable fraction of the price you paid for the book. If the truth is established beyond a shadow of doubt it will be a disappointment, for it will be hard-pressed to rival the romance of the jealously-guarded secrets and arcane quests that writers have woven around the bare facts of history. But by the time you have several hundred pages of conspiracy theory under your belt, it becomes a little difficult to separate fact from fiction.  

Renaissance art has taken the brunt of the apocrypha. The Renaissance was the era of artistic freedom, when Michelangelo dared to paint nude figures on the walls of the Sistine Chapel – and, when he was forced by the Pope to cover the most offensive of their nakedness, expressed the hope that someone in more tolerant times would divest his archangels of their garments. It is, therefore, logical to choose as tantalizing hints of a massive mediaeval conspiracy the works of one of the greatest artists and thinkers of the age. 

Of the Last Supper I have this to say: the figure to the right of Christ could be a woman in that it lacks a beard and a distinctively masculine physique. Peter’s expression could be construed as animosity. There is a disembodied hand with a dagger jutting from the melee. There is no chalice on the table. But even if all this is more than an artist being whimsical, and does in fact add up to Christ’s bloodline still existing, the most it proves is that da Vinci believed it. 

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Poussin’s two versions of Et in Arcadia Ego are disturbing, to say the least. Guercino’s painting of it is the kind of thing that makes you close the Internet Explorer window in a hurry, turn on every light in the room, and reach for the teddy bear that was your brave defender from the demons conjured by the eight-year-old mind. But there was no suggestion of veiled meanings to the inscription until Latin went out of popular curricula; the faulty assumption that the phrase was ungrammatical led to the belief that it must conceal some mystical message. 

That, in fact, is the strongest piece of evidence against the theory: the complete lack of any suggestion, until the 1960s, that the Grail was anything other than the chalice of Christ – especially if the Grandmasters of the Priory left clues to the secret scattered like barley for the pigeons. It is astonishing that in the aftermath of a bestseller, writers have, in a handful of years, revealed in art and literature hidden messages not understood – indeed, not even noticed – by generations of historians proficient enough in Latin to have conducted an intelligent conversation with Julius Caesar. 

Until the advent of Dan Brown, the most well-known mentions of the Grail were in the Arthurian cycles. Some feminist writers, like Rosalind Miles, replaced Tennyson’s Christian world with the pagan religion of early Britain. By and large, though, they were content to let Galahad find the chalice that stood on the table at the Last Supper. Umberto Eco’s reference to the Christ-Magdalene theory in Focault’s Pendulum is brief and his opinion, expressed from a rationalist standpoint, is negative. 

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The Gnostic Gospels, of course, did exist long before Robert Langdon; their purging from the Bible as a prelude to the birth of the Holy Roman Empire is sometimes regarded as irrefutable proof of an alternate history. That is a non sequitur. The purging of the Bible does not prove that the expunged books contained perfect truth. It proves that the expunged books were not beneficial to the Emperor of Rome. 

Each of the original books would have contained its own Impressionist version of the facts of Christ’s life; Constantine picked and chose to create a legend to suit his purposes. He could as well have chosen to create another legend, and we have equal historical reason to believe either. 

Quite apart from the principle of freedom of speech, there is as much sense in protesting about historical theories as there is in protesting about Einstein’s light barrier. If there is extant documentary evidence of what the Grail truly was, it will be found. If there is archaeological evidence, it will be excavated. If everything was lost in the sack of Alexandria, the theory will remain a theory. Either way, the facts cannot be established on the basis of the most vehement expression of outrage.

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