Transcription
I gave a talk in, uh, about Roslyn Chapel here in London in 1994. And I announced to that talk that I was going to Jerusalem and I hoped to get permission to go into the tunnels under the Temple Mount.
And after the talk, I was approached by a gentleman called Michael, uh, an elderly Englishman, who told me to look out for certain carved signs and symbols in the tunnels. And I said, "Well, how do you know about this?" And he said, rather startlingly, that he was a direct descendant of Hugh de Payen, one of the founders and the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar.
I later was able to substantiate his claims. And he told me a story that European nobility and royal families had been permeated by a series of bloodlines who claimed descent from the 24 High Priests of the Temple of Jerusalem. And that these people had preserved a totally different version of the teachings of Jesus to that put out by the Catholic Church and the later Christian churches who sprang from that.
A story that said Jesus did not come to die on the cross to redeem us from sin, but to reveal a spiritual pathway of initiation leading to sacred knowledge or Gnosis. A stream of Gnosticism that, if the story were true, could be traced back not merely to Israel, but back to Egypt.
I spent some nine, eight or nine years investigating this story and seeing how I could substantiate it. And in 2000, myself and my collaborator, Marilyn Hopkins, published a book which we called "Rex Deus: The True Mystery of Rennes-le-Château and the Dynasty of Jesus."
When the book was published, I received a letter on some rather impressively headed notepaper. And it was very curt. And it had me worried. It said, "Dear author, I wish you'd contacted me before you rushed so precipitately into print. We'd better talk, or better yet, meet."
Now, I was quite concerned because there had been gaps in our research which we couldn't verify. And we'd filled those gaps with our own rather extensive knowledge of medieval and biblical history. And I was concerned in case we got something wrong. So I rang this gentleman and introduced myself. And after a few minutes' conversation, I said, "Uh, well, Professor, where did we go wrong?" He said, "Oh, you didn't, de Bois. It's just incomplete. Do you want the rest?" "Well," is the Pope a Catholic? Of course I wanted more.
So I was invited around to visit him for a weekend with my collaborator, Marilyn Hopkins. And we were given very strict instructions to arrive before dusk on a Friday. Now, my mother was Jewish, so the alarm bells started to ring. We duly did as we were instructed. And when we saw the dining table with the challah laid beside the plate and the menorah, I knew we were in for a shock.
Because this gentleman bears a very proud Scottish name that goes back for over nine centuries. And yet the meal was a proper Sabbath meal. And the prayers were said in Hebrew, which gave me an indication that here was somebody who was living his beliefs, not merely talking about them.
As a result of the investigations that followed that weekend, we published yet another book called "Custodians of Truth," which traces this line of initiatory teaching not merely back to biblical Israel, but through the, uh, life of the people of Israel back to ancient Egypt. And it is an initiatory teaching of Gnosticism, which, of course, Holy Mother the Church regards as outright heresy.
So there is a bloodline? Yes. Oh, very definitely there is a bloodline. And there is a bloodline within the bloodline. Within the wider group of the Rex families, there is also a group known as the Nazarenes, who are the descendants of the Master, the man known as Jesus the Nazarene. Not Jesus of Nazareth, because Nazareth didn't actually exist at the time of Jesus. The Nazarenes were an initiatory sect, an offshoot of the Essenes. And Jesus was one of their principal teachers.
Was he divine in the sense that we are all children of God? Yes. Uh, was he God? No. And he never claimed to be. He never even claimed the nominal title of Son of God, which any holy man in the Israelite tradition could have claimed. I mean, uh, King David himself was referred to as a Son of God. But that does not mean a son in the paternal, filial sense. It means a pupil of God, a highly developed pupil of God, an initiate of the Gnostic streams.
Jesus was as human as you or I. And by deifying him, the Church, in the figure of St. Paul, who was the first person to suggest that Jesus was God, actually put his teachings beyond reach. Because it's very easy for any Christian today to say, "Well, I try my best, but I can't live like Jesus. After all, he was God." But if Jesus was human and a good teacher, then yes, he is capable of emulation. And people from many devout spiritual streams are trying to do that as we speak.