Michael Baigent


Michael Baigent was a pseudo-historian, who published a number of popular works questioning traditional perceptions of history and the life of Jesus. He is best known as a co-author of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Biography

Baigent was born on February 27, 1948 in Nelson, New Zealand and spent his childhood in the nearby communities of Motueka and Wakefield. His father was a devout Catholic, and he was tutored in Catholic theology from the age of five years. After his father left the family when Baigent was eight years old, he went to live with his maternal grandfather, Lewis Baigent and took his surname. His great-grandfather, Henry Baigent served as a Nelson city mayor and had founded a forestry firm, H. Baigent and Sons.
His secondary schooling was at Nelson College, and then he moved on to the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, initially intending to study science and continue in the family career of forestry, but switched to studying comparative religion and philosophy.
After graduating in 1972, Baigent made extensive travels to different countries, as a freelancer. He did stints as a war-photographer in Laos and as a fashion-photographer in Spain, before arriving at England in 1976. Whilst working at the BBC photographic department and staking in night shifts at a soft-drinks factory, he came across Richard Leigh via a TV producer who was producing a series on Knights Templar. Leigh was to be his frequent co-author across his entire life, and together they sough to unravel the alleged mystery of Rennes-le-Château in France, whose details were put forward in Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
In 2000, Baigent also earned an MA in Mysticism and Religious Experience at the University of Kent. A Freemason and a Grand Officer of the United Grand Lodge of England, he was an editor of Freemasonry Today from Spring, 2001 to Summer, 2011 and advocated for a more liberal approach to Freemasonry.
Baigent married Jane, an interior designer in 1982 and had two daughters, Isabelle and Tansy along with two children from her earlier marriage. He died from a brain haemorrhage in Brighton, East Sussex on June 18, 2013.

Works

Holy Blood, Holy Grail

Published on 18 January 1982, Holy Blood, Holy Grail popularised the hypothesis that the true nature of the quest for the Holy Grail was that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together, the first of a bloodline which later married into a Frankish royal dynasty, the Merovingians, and was all tied together by a society known as the Priory of Sion.
The theory that Jesus and Mary were in a carnal relationship is based on Baigent's interpretation of the Holy Kiss on the mouth, and spiritual marriage, as given in the Gospel of Philip. It was earlier perpetuated by authors Laurence Gardner and Margaret Starbird.

Popular reception

The book was a bestseller at the time of publication in America; some Catholic countries chose to ban the work for blasphemy. It regained popularity after the publication of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and sold over six million copies.

Critical reception

On the day of publication, historian Marina Warner noted the book to be filled with lurid falsehoods and distorted reasoning. Soon enough, the authors had a public clash on a BBC broadcast with her and the Bishop of Birmingham. In a scathing review of the book for The Observer, critic Anthony Burgess wrote: "It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel." A Kirkus Review described the work as a intriguing phantasmagoria wherein the authors jumped "perilous heights to reach crazy conclusions". Colin Henderson Roberts, reviewing for London Review of Books, noted that the work advanced a preposterous hypothesis and made major blunders in its quest to get simple reductive answers from complex questions.
In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Da Vinci Code, The New York Times Book Review deemed Holy Blood, Holy Grail to be among the all-time great works of pop pseudo-history. John J. Doherty, literature librarian at Northern Arizona University, writing in King Arthur in Popular Culture, describes of the work as being "thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike". Arthurian scholar Richard Barber commented the work to be a "notorious pseudo-history", which advanced its arguments on innuendo and fertile speculations, and would take a book of equal length to be dissected and refuted in entirety.
In 2005, Tony Robinson critically interrogated the main arguments of Brown, Baigent and Leigh over a program on Channel 4, and termed the entire episode to be a hoax. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of a 1,000-year-old Priory of Sion, and described the story as "piffle". With increasing proliferation and popularity of books, websites and films centered around Baigent's works, many critics regard the work to have been highly influential in the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and pseudohistory in public psyche. Damian Thompson noted the book to "employ the rhetoric of authentic history, but not its method, to present myths as fact". Laura Miller writing for Salon described the book to have advanced a preposterous idea in stages - first as a wild guess, then as a tentative hypothesis, and lastly as an undeniable fact - but entirely from within a miasma of bogus authenticity.

Dan Brown lawsuit

Some of the ideas presented in Baigent's earlier book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, were incorporated in the bestselling American novel The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown named the primary antagonist, a British Royal Historian, Knight of the Realm and Grail scholar, Sir Leigh Teabing, KBE, also known as the Teacher, in homage to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The name combines Richard Leigh's surname with 'Teabing', an anagram of Baigent.
In March 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed a lawsuit in a British court against Brown's publisher, Random House, claiming copyright infringement.
Concurrent with the plagiarism trial, Baigent released a new book, The Jesus Papers, amid criticism that it was just a reworking of themes from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and timed to capitalize on the marketing hype around the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code, as well as the attention brought by the trial. In the postscript to the book, Baigent points out that the release date had been set by Harper Collins long before.
On 7 April 2006, High Court judge Peter Smith rejected the copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and Dan Brown won the court case. On 28 March 2007, Baigent and Leigh lost their appeal against this decision and were faced with legal bills of about 3 million pounds.

The Inquisition

Bernard Hamilton, writing in the English Historical Review, described Baigent's treatment of The Inquisition as pursuing "a very outdated and misleading account", which ignored all modern development in Inquisition Studies and grossly exaggerated its power and influence, to the extent of being polemical. Writing in the Spectator magazine, Piers Paul Read deemed the authors to have penned a misinformed diatribe against Catholicism, with nil interest in "understanding the subtleties and paradoxes in the history of the Inquisition". A review over The Independent noted of it to be mostly drab and uncontroversial, in reiterating facts which were already known for decades but which progressively gave way to hysteria, in its bid to draw a parallel between the ancient institution and current abuse of power by Catholic authorities. Dongwoo Kim, writing over Constellations noted the book to not be a significant contribution in the field, in that it was an epitome of Whig historiography which sought for a binary categorization of the past between good and evil, whilst locating the Catholic Church as the "antithesis of modernity and liberalism".
Baigent himself conceded that none of his theories yielded any positive results: "I would like to think in due course a lot of this material will be proven," he said, "but it’s just a hope of mine."

Other

Later, he and Leigh co-authored several books, including The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception in which they primarily followed the controversial theories of Robert Eisenman concerning the interpretation of the Scrolls. This was discredited by Otto Betz and Rainer Riesner in their book Jesus, Qumran and The Vatican: Clarifications.

Sole author