The Great Mysteries of the Languedoc

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Did Jesus die on the cross? Many ancient traditions including early Gnostics, medieval Cathars and Moslems say not. Many people now believe that the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian Churches have conspired to conceal the evidence.

A persistent underground tradition holds that the mainstrean Christian Churches have deliberately distorted the history of Jesus and over the centuries have rooted out and destroyed as much of the evidence as they could.

According to this ancient tradition, Jesus was the illegitimate child of a Roman centurion and Mary, who was far from the virgin created in later Catholic imaginations. As an adult Jesus was married to the woman we know in a distorted version as Mary Magdalene from our familiar canonical gospels. Jesus did not die on the cross, but lived to raise a family.

Astonishing as this alternative version sounds at first sight, there are reasons not to dismiss it out of hand. Here are just a few. First, the threads of the tradition are unusually tenacious. They were known to early Christians and contemporary Jews. They were held by some Gnostic traditions and by some medieval Cathars. Over many centuries a series of atheist blasphemers were executed for repeating the same assertions. Christopher Marlow believed them but was killed in mysterious circumstances before he could be prosecuted for atheism. In modern times many books have made the same claims, and even films have dared make reference to them. Two notable examples are Jesus of Montreal and Monty Python's Life of Brian (which despite its comic theme is far more theologically sophisticated than any devotional film).

There are other reasons for not dismissing these ideas. For example we know beyond all doubt that early Christians devoted much time and effort to destroying works of history and theology that they did not like - including documents mentioning one particular person that Jesus "loved". We know that later Catholics created a vast range of forgeries. We know that the gospels we now recognise as canonical represent only a small selection of those that once existed, and that even these have been tampered with (The nativity and resurrection stories are known to be additions). Even the canonical gospels show Jesus living his whole life as a Jewish teacher, a Rabbi, as the John Gospel calls him. That a 30 year old Rabbi in Jesus's time should remain single would be unthinkable, certainly remarkable. As Jewish scholars have pointed out, the silence of the gospels on this matter is good evidence in itself that Jesus was married - just like all other contemporary rabbis.