A new book by one of the co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail is being released today, coincidentally (not?) on the heels of the mass paperback version of DVC. Here’s an LATimes review, and I really want to know what goofy idea I can dream up to write about that will get me substantial review space in the LA Times.

Much light is also shed on Baigent. "The Jesus Papers" is a very personal book. He’s outraged by the early Catholic Church’s consolidation of power, its crushing of dissent, its exclusion of women from leadership; he laments that vibrant texts like the Gnostic gospels were buried in the desert to protect them. He includes photos of himself at excavation sites and crouching in tunnels as if to suggest that understanding the faraway past requires some kind of physical contact.

"I love to travel to sacred sites and to feel them, to seek to understand them," he writes. "Are such places intrinsically sacred, or do we make them so? Perhaps both. Sacred sites demand participation from the visitor, an entering into a relationship with them, an experience. And there lies the difference between a pilgrim and a tourist."

Pretty soon, the reader realizes that there probably won’t be any "Jesus documents" — that this book is really a private credo, an intimate declaration of belief dressed up to be the religious bombshell of the millennium. But then the long-anticipated appearance of the documents comes (or does it?) near the end. Baigent meets with an unidentified antiquities dealer who shows him two pieces of parchment:

"Each was about eighteen inches long and nine inches high…. These were … the letters from Jesus to the Sanhedrin. They existed. I was silent as I fully enjoyed the moment."

Then he adds, "I wished above all that I might have a familiarity with ancient languages. . . . It’s like holding a treasure chest but not having the key to open it."

Earlier in the book, Baigent described himself as a devoted student of ancient history for many years, but here he can’t even pick out Jesus’ name nor does he have the dealer, who is elusive and disappears from the story, show him what it says. It is deeply insulting.

Why this ploy? Baigent’s theory of Jesus’ life seems compelling enough on its own. Did Jesus go to Egypt? Who was Mary Magdalene? Would Pilate go to such trouble over one Jew’s life?

Experts will debate such details for a long time, but the disappointing thing about "The Jesus Papers" is that Baigent’s personal search for the figure of Jesus is obscured by the hype of the book’s packaging — as if to say such personal quests don’t mean much anymore.

Gnostic texts – vibrant? Well, chacun son gout, I suppose.

I continue to wonder about people who find everything else in the world except the actualy canonical gospels and other 1st century documents interesting and intriguing. It is odd and unfortunate that our presumed familiarity with the Gospels leads us to become totally unfamiliar with them. I dare you – read, say, Mark’s Gospel, carefully, as if you’ve never heard of Jesus before. Fail to be intrigued? I doubt it.