Zsuzsanna Bunyevácz
BY THE GRACE OF GOD
(What was not mentioned in the Da Vinci Code)
One of the basic themes of Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, which became a best-seller, was the theory that the Holy Grail was the blood-line of Jesus Christ. According to the author, Jesus was descended from the blood-line of King David, who lived around 1000 B.C., so the Holy Grail held the blood-line of David. But can this be true? The expression „Holy blood-line” refers to the House of King David. Would it not be more appropriate for it to refer to the House of Árpád, who was the descendant of Nimrod?
If we examine the history of the first civilizations, we see that, without exception, all kings/pharaohs – no matter what they called themselves – received their power, knowledge and chosen status from “the heavens”. It does not matter whether we look at the Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman mythologies; each one of them narrates the same story: In the beginning the Gods ruled over mankind, later they “slept” with their daughters and out of this union demigods were born. From this time on, the Gods ruled, along with these demi-Gods, and after their continued union with the daughters of men – while of course the divine blood was more and more diluted – the rulers were born. The preservation of the pure, royal blood was of great importance since, according to this belief, divine blood circulated in the veins of these rulers.
We find the idea of “Divine Kingship, which came down from Heaven” for the first time among the Sumerians: the first known king-list of mankind came from Nippur in Mesopotamia and was compiled approximately four-thousand years ago. The list begins with the following: “The Kingship came down from heaven…”. Its authenticity is enhanced by the fact that it enumerates seats of Kings, which were known in the already known historical age. Experts tell us that it is uniformly accepted that the Sumerians believed the Kingship to be of divine origin. To them the person of the King, who was basically different from all other persons, could not be questioned.
According to the King-list, eight Kings ruled before the Flood for 67 “sa”-s. Due to the lack of space, I will not offer the calculations, only the end results according to which, experts came to the conclusion that the Kings before the Flood ruled for 24,120 years. If the Biblical Flood – as Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations proved – began in 4,000 BC, then, according to this number, the Kingship “came to Earth” around 28,000 B.C.
According to one inscription, which originated in the ancient city of Nippur, the first empire “which extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean”, was founded by the Chief Priest of the city of Uruk and it is here that the world’s first priests and kings lived. It is known that the Sumerian culture was already flourishing around 4,000 B.C. and the first traces of Semitic presence cannot be proven before 3,200 B.C. The Grail bloodline could not have started then from David, since – if we accept only the time-frame of the Flood as authentic – the bloodline had already existed for eight hundred years before the first Semites arrived in Mesopotamia.
So the Sumerians were the first known people in history, whose charismatic, divine ruler, ruled by the grace of God and was chosen by God. His power was not questioned, since he did not gain his throne by war or election, but was chosen by God himself to be the ruler. The statement, in the afore-mentioned book, that the “Holy Grail” means the “bloodline of David”, can be accepted only when we see it proven that the Jewish kingship came “down from heaven”. But this proof – as we shall see – did not appear in the Old Testament, or in any other source. David was not a charismatic King. His son Solomon was Israel’s first dynastic ruler, even though– according to the opinions of several researchers and Biblical sources – he inherited the Kingship without charisma (the gift of Divine Grace).
Let us go back a little in time! The Grail Kingship, the holy bloodline must have started with the first man. And really, in the Sumerian myth of Creation, on the VI. tablet of Enúma Elis, one can read that the first man was created with the blood of Kingu, the son of Tiamat. The name of the man was Lullú, which means “mixed”. According to another Mesopotamian myth, man was created from the mixture of divine blood and clay.
Samuel Noah Kramer, the famous expert on Sumerian matters, mentions a cuneiform tablet, which was found in Nippur, according to which Anu, Enlil, Enki and Ninhursag created the “black headed men”. He interpreted that this expression – black headed people – meant the Sumerians. According to Enúma Elis, the first man received the name “Adáma”, meaning “earthly man”. He is described in the cuneiform texts as the representation of man. In the Old Testament (Genesis 1:27) we can read the following: “So God Created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Laurence Gardner, the Jacobite royal historian, the internationally acclaimed genealogist of rulers and knights (Laurence Gardner: The Origin of the Grail Kings, Gold Book) states that the blood-line of the Grail Kings originates from the first Sumerian man, Adam. From here on, the Old Testament story is familiar: The son of Adam and Eve, Cain, kills his brother, Abel. The Old Testament states very little about the descendants of Cain. It mentions only a few by name. Then, Genesis 4:25: “And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth”. This is followed by the genealogy of Seth. The two lines of descent – even though there are some differences – are in essence the same.
Based upon his own research, Gardner came to the conclusion that one of the genealogies was invented by the editors of the Old Testament. According to him, the real Grail-bloodline is the one that originated from Cain and not Seth. He believes that the descendants of Cain ruled the territory, which extended from Ur, in Southern Mesopotamia, to the city of Assur in the North. This territory was once Sumer. The Sumerian kings were the most outstanding kings of that era. Even so, -- says Gardner -- or maybe because of this, the compilers of the Bible decided that, for the sake of the dynasty of Adam’s son, Seth, they would ‘forget’ the parallel ruling family, the line of Cain … The main goal was to hide the real heritage of a later member of the Cain bloodline, the son of Tubalcain, who was the most important link with the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Hebrew scribes strove to erase this connection from the history of their people. They would have liked to show a clear bloodline from Adam all the way to David and the later Kings of Judah.
Gardner came to the conclusion that the “holy bloodline” continued through the Biblical Ham. It is known from Genesis 5:32 that Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. The Semites came from Shem, the Japhetites from Japheth, two of Ham’s sons were Cush and Canaan. “And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.” (Genesis 10:8)
The compilers of the Old Testament were well aware that the holy bloodline came not from Noah’s son Shem, but continued through the grandson of Ham, who was Nimrod.
According to Gardner, we can state that the dynasty of Ham and Nimrod (Cain, Lamek and Tubalcain) are the real inheritors of the Grail Kingship, while the line of Shem was of lesser importance. Gardner emphasizes frequently that, in the history of the Grail kingship, the line of Ham, from which Nimrod descended, has the primary role. He also says that this bloodline later continued in Egypt and Shem’s line continued in the Bible’s patriarchal lines beginning with Noah. The descendants of Ham and Japheth moved from Arabia, through Anatolia and Scythia near the Black Sea, through Europe and finally settled in Ireland. Ham and Japheth are also the ancestors of the Scottish Celts. Canaan’s cursed descendants are the Canaanites, whose land stretched from the shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea, from Sidon to Gaza or, in other words, to Sodom and Gomorrah on the Dead Sea. This means that the bloodline of the Grail Kings, who ruled by the grace of God, continued through Ham and not Shem. Moreover, according to the renowned sumerologist, Professor Kramer, the history of the Sumerians and the Hebrews was the life and death struggle between two nations.
It should be noted that the Magyar folk tradition supports the above. Tamás Gönczi mentions, in his book Nimród gyűrűje (The Ring of Nimrod, Sárosi Publ.) that, in the Magyar ancient traditions, Nimrod was the world’s first king, the progenitor of the Magyars, the good Giant of ancient Magyar folk stories, the star-eyed Giant King of Magyar myths. At one time, he was with the Magyars in the fabulous East. He built the cities that can be found only as ruins under the sand, in the place from where “all cultures originated”. He was the one who knew the “one language” of the ancients. And it is he whom the Bible – contrary to the Magyar traditions -- calls a man, a tyrant King who fought against the heavens and rebelled against God. All this fits completely into Gardner’s statement: the Hebrew compilers of the Old Testament very consciously painted an inaccurate picture of the world’s first king because the true picture would damage the glory of the Royal House of Judah.
It is also a well-known fact that the Hungarian Chronicles and popular traditions believe that Attila and the House of Árpád are descended from Nimrod and we also know that the Kings of the House of Árpád were Kings by divine right, who ruled by the Grace of God.
The Israelite tribes, who broke into Canaan, were not prepared to form a kingdom. “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”(Judges 17:6) However, they needed some kind of unified leadership and the Judges, who also had military power, ruled the people for 250 years.
Let us see now who their first king was and how he became a king! A fight broke out between the Israelites and the Philistines around 1050 B.C. for Jerusalem. At this time, Samuel was the Judge. The people said to Samuel: “…Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways; now make us a king to judge us like all the nations” (Samuel I. 8:5) Later the Lord told Samuel that he would send a man from the land of Benjamin, who should be anointed as their ruler. Samuel did this and thus Saul became the first king. He was shown to the people who cheered him on: Long live the King! Some malicious people asked: How can he help us? They looked down on him and did not take any gifts to him. This appears to be unusual, since Saul was a charismatic King and charismatic Kings were never questioned by the people.
The Lord later regretted that he had made Saul a King. This is also unusual in the case of an anointed charismatic King. Later the Lord sent Samuel to another nominee, David, who was anointed by Samuel. Saul began to be afraid of David because the Lord was with David and had abandoned Saul. Saul gave his daughter to David, in marriage, and later became the enemy of David, until he died. Saul saw that David posed a danger to him and wanted to remove him, but it was Saul, in the final outcome, who lost his life.
The later events do not appear to be appropriate for a divine Kingship: David fell in love with Bathsheba and ordered her husband to be slain. David’s son, the Crown Prince Amnon, was killed by his brother, Absalom, after Amnon had violated his own half-sister Tamar. Absalom attempted to occupy the throne by force. David reoccupied his throne in a civil war, in which his son Absalom died. David was already on his deathbed, when his successor Adonias was crowned King. Interestingly, before the coronation feast was over, with the support of David, Zadok anointed another son, Solomon, as King. Solomon was accepted as the true King and later got rid of his brother and his followers. We must not forget that earlier David served in the army of the Philistines against Israel. It is an interesting résumé for a man who became the originator of the most influential bloodline in Israel’s history. We should also know that the wife of David was the wife of one of his generals, Urias, and that both – Urias and Bathsheba – were Hittites, and so non-Semites. (If we continue Jesus’ genealogy on this line, the Jewish descent becomes unrealistic.)
Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, both Freemasons, in several books (Hiram’s Key, The Book of Hiram, Gold Book) mention David and his son, Solomon. Through their research, they came to the conclusion that neither David nor Solomon had their own traditions, by which they could become anointed Kings and rule by the Grace of God. They did not have sanctuaries or churches like the Canaanite Kings. They did not have any architects and, it is for this reason that Solomon had to ask for help from the King of Tyre to build his church. According to these authors, the ceremony of the anointing of the King was taken from the Canaanites and the anointing of Saul and David appears to be an imitation of a Canaanite rite.
The line of David seems to have come to an end at the time of the Babylonian captivity, when Zedekiah, the last King of Judea from the line of David, was blinded and was taken in chains to Babylon. His sons were murdered even before this event. The Old Testament ended approximately 400 years before the birth of Jesus. Since David’s sons were killed, it is impossible that Jesus was descended from the line of David. This is maintained only by the New Testament – which received its final form several hundred years after Jesus, in the 4th century – but not by all the evangelists. Neither Mark, nor John talks about Jesus’ genealogy. There is a difference between Matthew and Luke concerning the blood-line of David: Matthew starts it from Solomon, while Luke starts this blood-line from another son of David, Nathan.
One has to wonder about the statement of Gardner that the Old Testament apparently explains the genealogy of the people but there are problems originating from the beginning of the history of the Jews in Egypt. Centuries before the age of Abraham, in Mesopotamia, it was the custom to write the genealogy of the ruling families. Gardner says that the creators of the Book of Genesis, became familiar with this custom while they were in captivity in Babylon but, from the time of Abraham’s migration to Canaan until the time of King David and his descendants, there is hardly any information about the existence of this Biblical people.
Knowing all this, one can hardly give any credence to the Da Vinci Code’s supposition that the Holy Grail is the Davidian bloodline. On the other hand, it is very probable that Christ Jesus’ Holy Blood is the Grail. From the afore-mentioned information, we can conclude that this is only possible, if Jesus is descended from the bloodline of the true Grail Kings: not from Shem, but beginning with Ham and Cush, from Nimrod.