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Holy Texts of Deception: Christian Gnosticism and the Writings of Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Gerard Loughlin
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John Milbank, in his important and magisterial study Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990), advances the claim that ‘secular reason’ is but a form of Christian deviancy. By secular reason Milbank intends ‘secular social theory’ or sociology. Milbank offers an ‘archaeology’ of secular social theory which is also an archaeology of the secular, since for him ‘the genesis of discourse is intertwined with the genesis of a new practice’. His genetic account of the construction of secular reason traces it first in ‘the discourses of liberalism— “scientific politics” and political economy’, where the human construction of the cultural world is discovered, and where human making is thought to ‘mark out an autonomous human space’, as in Hobbes. The secular is not that which is discovered when the sacred is removed, but that which is first constructed within the space of the sacred.

It is Milbank’s contention that, as he puts it, ‘secular discourse does not just “borrow” inherently inappropriate modes of expression from religion as the only discourse to hand ... but is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Thus for Milbank ‘“scientific” social theories are themselves theologies or anti-theologies in disguise’. The Hobbesian construction of man as the maker of society, the myth, as Milbank puts it, of the ‘self-present and self-sufficiently initiating “person” who echoes the pure will of a creator God’, is not, as the idea of ‘voluntarist sovereignty’, simply a notion transferred from the divine to the human, from the sacred to the secular.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 76 , Issue 894 , June 1995 , pp. 293 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p.23Google Scholar.

2 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.3.

3 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.4.

4 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.3.

5 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.3.

6 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.28.

7 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.28.

8 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p.28.

9 Baigent, Michael, Leigh, Richard & Lincoln, Henry, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982Google Scholar).

10 Baigent, Michael & Leigh, Richard, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991.Google Scholar

11 Press release.

12 Baigent, Michael & Leigh, Richard, The Messianic Legacy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986)Google Scholar; Baigent, Michael & Leigh, Richard, The Temple and the Lodge (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989)Google Scholar. More recently Baigent and Leigh have published Secret Germany: Claus von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade against Hitler (London: Jonathan Cape. 1994)Google Scholar.

13 Baigent, Michael, Leigh, Richard, & Henry Lincoln The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Corgi Books, 1983), pp.2–3Google Scholar.

14 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.16.

15 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Seas Scrolls Deception, p. xix.

16 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.25.

17 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.106.

18 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.133.

19 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.244.

20 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.281.

21 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.291.

22 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.328.

23 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.328.

24 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.329.

25 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), pp.346–9.

26 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.355.

27 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), pp.365–6.

28 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.366.

29 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.371.

30 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.375.

31 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.377.

32 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p. xvii.

33 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p. xvii. Robert Eisenman's principal works are James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher (Marra Editore Cosenza, 1984), and Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran (Leiden: Brill, 1986). Eisenman, who is the ‘American hero’ of Baigent & Leigh's book, ‘having published two small, poorly argued and widely unread monographs, is naturally “a foremost expert in biblical archaeology and scholarship’” (Jones, Peter, ‘A Case of Publish and be Damned’, The Times Saturday Review, 18 May 1991, p.22Google Scholar). More recently Eisenman, with Michael Wise, has published Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents Withheld for Over 35 Years (Element Books, 1992). Of related interest to the work of Eisenman, Baigent & Leigh is Barbara Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secret of His Life Story (Toronto: Doubleday, 1992). All these writers, like other scholars, suffer the pathos of belatedness: they want to be first on the scene with the real story of jesus from Nazareth

34 See Allegro, John, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956)Google Scholar; Milik, J. T., Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judea (London, 1959)Google Scholar; Dupont–Sommer, A., The Essene Writings from Qumran (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar; Driver, G. R., The Judean Scrolls (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar; and Vermes, Geza, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975)Google Scholar. See also Fitzmyer, Joseph A., Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993)Google Scholar.

35 John Ray, ‘Re–covering the Texts’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1991, p.27. The collaborator who went ‘freelance’ and wrote about ‘hallucinogenic mushrooms’ was John Allegro, who in 1970 published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross; and the ‘former chief editor’ is John Strugnell.

36 Quoted in Edward Rothstein, “The Battle of the Scrolls', The Independent Magazine, 18 May 1991, p.29.

37 Davidson, Robert & Leaney, A. R. C., The Pelican Guide to Modern Theology, Volume 3, Biblical Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 172Google Scholar. See further Davies, P. R., Qumran (London, 1982)Google Scholar, and Callaway, Philip R., A History of the Qumran Community: An Introduction (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

38 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p.99.

39 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, pp.122–5. On Kung and Schillebeeckx see further Hebblethwaite, Peter, The New Inquisition? Schillebeeckx and Kung (London: Collins, 1980)Google Scholar.

40 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, pp. 136–7.

41 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p.165.

42 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p.174.

43 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p.207.

44 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p.199.

45 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), pp.432–3.

46 Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood (1983), p.406.

47 Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, p. xviii. See Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose, translated by Weaver, William (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980)Google Scholar.

48 I have to thank Dr Dermot Killingley for bringing to my attention both the similarity and the irony between Baigent & Leigh's secret ‘gospel’ and Eco's semiotic/delective novel.

49 See Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980), p.15Google Scholar.

50 An earlier version of this article was read to the Conference on the Sociology of Sacred Texts at the University of Newcastle–Upon–Tyne, July 1991. I express my gratitude to those who discussed the paper with me at the time, in particular Ms Elisabeth Erdman–Visser, Dr Peter Hayman, Dr Dermot Killingley, Mrs Iren Lovasz and Dr Helmut Waldmann.