formal ban against the entire movement, and on 1 September 1910, all priests and Catholic teachers were required to swear an oath against Modernism. Just to be sure that the ever-changing world outside would not intrude upon their delicate theological sensibilities, students at seminaries and theological colleges were forbidden to read newspapers.
But before the veil came down in 1892, the atmosphere at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice had been very heady. The center was a place of learning, stimulated by curiosity and discovery. Adding continuously to a great sense of excitement was a steady stream of new translations and archaeological discoveries. It was in this milieu that Canon Lilley was called to Paris to look at the document or documents that provided incontrovertible evidence that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45. Upon witnessing this level of analytical study, Lilley must have wondered how much longer the Vatican could maintain its rigidly dogmatic position. He must have guessed that it would soon react against these discoveries and shut the door on free scholarship. As he relayed to Bartlett, he believed that the documents he was working on ended up in the Vatican, either locked away forever or destroyed.
When we first heard this story about Jesus being alive in A.D. 45, we were reminded of a curious statement in the work of the Roman historian Suetonius. In his history of the Roman emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54), he reports that, “because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from the city.”6
The events he writes about took place around A.D. 45. This “Chrestus” was evidently an individual present in Rome at the time. We wondered: could this individual have been “Christ”? We should remember that “Christos” was the Greek translation, and “Messiah” the Greek transliteration, of the Aramaic meshiha, which itself derives from the Hebrew ha-mashiah, “the anointed (king).” The Greek “Messiah” thus comes from the Aramaic word, which was the commonly spoken language at the time, rather than from the Hebrew.
Was there a messianic individual active in Rome? And if so, why would the Jews have been rioting? Would they have been attacking the Romans under this agitator’s encouragement, or would they have been attacking the agitator? Or, even more strangely, could this agitator have set one man against another in the Jewish community to provoke rioting among them? Suetonius does not give us any information on the aims of the rioters or who they might have opposed. But we wondered nevertheless, could Jesus, like Paul, have ended up in Rome?
Suetonius wrote his histories in the early second century A.D. and for some years was chief secretary to the Roman emperor Hadrian (117-38). He was official keeper of the Roman archives and controller of the libraries. He would obviously have had full access to all imperial documentation, and so his report can be considered accurate. Who truly was “Chrestus”? No one knows.
There was another visitor to Saint Sulpice in those provocative days of the early 1890s: the Abbé Saunière, the priest of Rennes le Château. The story—which has proved implacably resistant to verification—relates Saunière’s discovery of documents during the renovations of his church. After showing these documents to his bishop, he was ordered to travel to Paris, where a meeting with experts at the Seminary of Saint Sulpice was arranged. This occurred in or around 1891. Reportedly, Saunière stayed in Paris for three weeks. When he returned, he had access to considerable wealth, sufficient to construct a new road up the hill to the village, to renovate and repaint the church, and to build a comfortable and fashionable villa, an ornate garden, and a tower that served as his study.
Could Saunière’s documents have been those seen and translated by Canon Lilley? Could Saunière’s sudden wealth be due to his finding them? The Rev. Bartlett certainly thought so. And if this were true, then it would certainly explain a very curious image still on the wall of the church at Rennes le Château—an image that reveals something very heretical indeed about the beliefs of the Abbé Saunière.
Although the church at Rennes le Château is small, it is decorated inside like a Gothic fantasy, something more at home in a Bavarian castle for King Ludwig II than a Pyrenean hilltop village. It is bulging with images and color. Investigators have spent years trying to decipher the many clues Saunière embedded in the symbolism. But there is one image that is very clear—one image that does not take any great occult or symbolic knowledge to understand.
Like all Catholic churches, this one has, around its walls, plaster reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. They are a set sequence of images depicting the stages of Jesus’s walk along the road to Golgotha after his trial. They are used for contemplation and prayer, serving as a kind of map to the resurrection for the faithful. Those about the walls of the church at Rennes le Château are from a standard pattern of casts supplied by a company in Toulouse that can be found in a number of other churches. At least, the plaster-cast images are identical. They differ in one important respect, however: those at Rennes le Château are painted, and in a very curious manner indeed. One image, for example, shows a woman with a child standing beside Jesus; the child is wearing a Scottish tartan robe. Others are equally curious. But the most curious of all is Station 14. This is traditionally the last of the series illustrating Jesus being placed in the tomb prior to the resurrection. At Rennes le Château the image shows the tomb and, immediately in front of it, three figures carrying the body of Christ. But the painted background reveals the time as night. In the sky beyond the figures, the full moon has risen.
If the full moon has risen, it would mean that the Passover has begun. This is significant because no Jew would have handled a dead body after the beginning of the Passover, as this would have rendered him ritually unclean. This variation of the fourteenth station suggests two important points: that the body the figures are carrying is still alive, and that Jesus—or his substitute on the cross—has survived the crucifixion. Moreover, it suggests that the body is not being placed in the tomb, but rather, that it is being carried out, secretly, under the cover of night.
It is important to note that the Stations of the Cross at Rennes le Château were painted under the direct supervision of Abbé Saunière. He appears to be telling us that he knows—or at least believes—that Jesus survived the crucifixion. Could he have learned this on his visit to Saint Sulpice, we wondered? Did he meet there the same group of scholars who called Canon Lilley to Paris? If we accept the story as it has been relayed to us, then on the face of things the answer to both of these questions seems likely to be yes.
Whatever the answers—and we are hardly in a position to come to any definite conclusions just yet—Station 14 as it is depicted on the wall of this church serves as an eloquent testimony to a secret heretical knowledge that once lay in the hands of a priest in deepest rural France.
It seemed unreasonable for us to suppose that Saunière was alone in his belief. We thought surely there must be other clues in other churches, in documents, and in the writings of those who held the same convictions. Would finding them prove any validity to this story? We needed to know how the crucifixion could have been managed such that Jesus, or his substitute, might have survived. And we needed to know what this might mean. We thought it was time to look at the biblical accounts of the event from this fresh perspective.
The idea of a rigged crucifixion has been around a long time; even the Koran mentions it.1 But just how could a fraudulent crucifixion have been arranged? According to the gospel accounts, everyone except Jesus’s disciples seemed to want him dead, or at the very least, well out of the way. The Jewish authorities and the vociferous mobs gathered in the street wanted to be rid of him, as did the Romans, albeit by default. According to the common interpretation of the gospel reports—which we have seen in countless films—Jesus was tried in public before “the Jews,”
