OFFICIAL APOLOGETICS

In this snippet, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail explain their approach to their book, and they also point out that their findings do not diminish Christ’s acheivements nor reputation—if one remains open to the real message of the Gospels. From the facts in this book and from facts much like the facts in this book, The Davinci Code was imagined which I have not read. But I saw the movie!!!!!!!!

[SNIP]
Even before we began our research, we ourselves were agnostic, neither pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. By virtue of our background
and study of comparative religions we were sympathetic to the core of validity inherent in most of the world's major faiths and indifferent to the dogma, the theology, the accouterments that make up their superstructures. And while we could accord respect to almost every creed, we could not accord to any of them a monopoly of truth.

Thus, when our research led us to Jesus we could approach him with what we hoped was a sense of balance and perspective. We had no prejudices or preconceptions one way or the other, no vested
 interests of any kind, nothing to be gained by either proving or disproving anything. Insofar as "objectivity" is possible, we were 
able to approach Jesus objectively—as a historian would be expected to approach Alexander, for example, or Caesar. And the conclusions 
that forced themselves upon us, though certainly startling, were not shattering. They did not necessitate a reappraisal of our personal convictions or shake our personal hierarchies of values.

But what of other people? What of the millions of individuals
 across the world for whom Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior, the Redeemer? To what extent does the historical Jesus, the priest-king who emerged from our research, threaten their faith? To what extent 
have we violated what constitutes for many people their most cherished understanding of the sacred? To what extent have we committed an act of desecration?

We are well aware, of course, that our research has led us to conclusions that, in many respects, are inimical to certain basic tenets of modern Christianity—conclusions that are heretical, perhaps even blasphemous. From the standpoint of certain established dogma we are no doubt guilty of such transgressions. But we do not
 believe that we have desecrated, or even diminished, Jesus in the eyes of those who do genuinely revere him. And while we ourselves cannot subscribe to Jesus' divinity, our conclusions do not preclude
 others from doing so. Quite simply there is no reason why Jesus
 could not have married and fathered children while still retaining 
his divinity. There is no reason whatever why his divinity should be dependent on sexual chastity. Even if he were the Son of God, there is no reason why he should not have wed and sired a family. [Let me point out that many gods of this world who are just as authentic (or inauthentic?) as Jesus have sexual identities—some Greek gods, certain Egyptian gods, Hindu gods, at any rate, many gods are sexual as well as godly. So godliness and a healthy sexual appetite are not mutually exclusive.]

Underlying most Christian theology is the assumption that Jesus is
 God incarnate. In other words, God, taking pity on His creation, incarnated Himself in that creation and assumed human form. By doing so He would be able to acquaint Himself at first hand, so to speak, with the human condition. He would experience at first hand the vicissitudes of human existence. He would come to understand,
in the most profound sense, what it means to be a man—to confront from a human standpoint the loneliness, the anguish, the helplessness, the tragic mortality that the status of manhood entails. By dint of becoming man God would come to know man in a way that the Old Testament does not allow. Renouncing His Olympian aloofness and remoteness, He would partake directly of man's lot. By doing so He would redeem man's lot—would validate and justify it by partaking of it, suffering from it, and eventually being sacrificed by it.

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience—exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity?

We do not think so. In fact, we do not think the incarnation truly symbolizes what it is intended to symbolize unless Jesus was married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels and of established Christianity is ultimately incomplete—a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our rcsearch enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.

On the whole, then, we do not think we have compromised or belittled Jesus. We do not think he has suffered from the conclusions to which our research led us. From our investigations emerges a living and plausible Jesus—a Jesus whose life is both meaningful and comprehensible to modern man.
[PASTE]