This is another comment on “Holy Blood – Holy Grail” by Michael Baigent et al. As my previous essay “The Red Snake” indicates, I don’t agree with the authors’ presentation of Jesus, while I have no quarrel with their basic conclusion that Jesus fathered children and that his blood line still continues.

According to the “Holy Blood” book, Jesus was a man with an ambition to establish that he was a descendent of King David and therefore had a legitimate claim to be King of the Jews, as emerging from the questioning by Pontius Pilate at his trial. But we know that he was tempted by the Devil in the desert to aspire to worldly power, and refused to go in that direction. A minor point: if he was the son of God conceived immaculately by Mary, he was not the son of Joseph, even though Joseph was a descendent of King David.

Quite a different image of Jesus emerges from the book by Jim Douglass, “The Nonviolent Coming of God”, which pictures Jesus as opposing the Zealots’ movement to mount a violent revolution against Roman rule, warning that it would be a disaster, as indeed happened in 70 A.D. when Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple was destroyed and Jews were dispersed into the diaspora. He proposed instead a nonviolent opposition to Roman rule; his triumphal entry into Jerusalem was a typical and inspired nonviolent protest. He was crucified for doing so, but his message survived, long beyond the time when Rome itself was sacked and the Empire fell at the end of the 5th century A.D. Unfortunately, says Douglass, we have not learned the lesson, even though we pretend to worship the man who preached it.

Jesus was one of the great prophets, alongside Buddha and Muhammad and Lao Tse, who preceded the coming transformation of humanity into its successor species, intrinsically ethical and incapable of violent behaviour. In this sense he was the Son of Man, though not the Son of God. He was one of the holy pilgrims approaching the White Hole of God from different directions, as depicted in a painting by Sveva Caetani in her book.

The white hole is in his future, not in his past. But then, time is irrelevant in Eternity, so we may call him the Son of God after all.