Plantard reportedly said in an address he gave to a conference held at Rennes-le-Château [in 1964] the following;
"Mary [Virgin Mary] was heiress to her father's possessions. However, as she was underage, Joseph became her tutor and took charge of administering her inheritance, until such day when, out of interest as well as love, he married her secretly, whilst respecting her virtue. One can imagine his bitterness when he had to face the evidence regarding Mary's condition. One can also understand why Joseph, who knew the father, accepted the situation and the fury of King Herod the Great at the birth of Jesus". [My emphasis]
Plantard suggests in this speech that whoever Joseph was he nevertheless married Mary secretly and continued to respect her virtue [i.e a virtuous woman was supposedly chaste, reserving sex only for her marriage]. In other words Joseph did not have sex with this Mary.
Plantard says later that Joseph was 'bitter' [meaning he felt anger and disappointment at being treated unfairly; and harboured resentment] when he 'had to face the evidence of Mary's condition' [ie she was pregnant and he was not the father!]
Was Joseph duped into believing Mary was a virgin, or was this just a later stunt added to other supernatural stories about Jesus written some 80 years later? Was it an arranged marriage as is what customarily happened in biblical times?
Other questions abound - Why marry Mary secretly? How old was Mary when she married? How long after the marriage was she found to be pregnant? Who was the father of the child Jesus that Joseph knew, and why should Herod the Great be furious at the birth of Jesus? Indeed why would Joseph accept the situation and the fury of Herod the Great? At the birth of the child Jesus he had not been declared God and so was born in to a lowly status family - but if you strip away all the supernatural aspects later added by the followers of Jesus in the Gospel accounts, surely this was a birth in political terms, ie a birth that was a threat to King Herod ruling?
And even more pertinent, what has any of it got to do with the story around Rennes-le-Château and it's priest where Plantard was giving this speech?
Plantard continued, referring to this historical Jesus as follows;
'This individual, like so many others, declared himself the Son of God. .... His declaration was considered a crime and the Jewish law was applied by the Romans against a man who had only done his people good. But because of the colour of his skin, his claim to a divine origin, and his personal synthesis of various pre-exisiting mystical concepts, the teachings of Jesus remain those of a Galilean preaching for his race ....Joseph, an eighty year old octogenarian, had children from two or three former marriages when he married Miriam, a thirteen year old girl who was fatherless since the age of ten. Mary was black, as she was the daughter of Joachim 'the black man converted to Judaism', and her mother was Anne, the prophetess. Legally, Jesus was a descendant of David, son of Mary, and was recognised by Joseph. He could also aspire to the title King of the Jews. This truth, revealed by Judas Iscariot to the Jewish priests during his betrayal, did not suit the Church at all, which opted for the subterfuge of a spontaneous generation. Of course, Jesus preached a doctrine to the Jewish nation, but all great philosophers of antiquity did the same for their nations; often, they even wrote admirable works which survived to our times, but they were not martyrs for this simple motive. The revelation of the secret around Jesus' birth was the cause of his martydom. The glory of his Crucifixion gave him a religion' [my emphasis].
Philippe de Cherisey also seems to refer to such things in his original novel CIRCUIT. He wrote ..."Rome would have been directly interested in a project consisting of assimilating the Jewish cult of God into the Roman religious system which attempted to unify Rome under a single system of worship".
The research i am currently undertaking tells me that Cherisey was being very subtle here. By 'Rome' he means the family ties to the rulers of the time - they had power and control over the masses - did they adopt the Jewish family concept of worshiping one God in some way to strengthen their power?
Perhaps this would have been attained by the merging of the state and a belief system which we now call today emperor-worship. Cherisey thought that for Rome, the Jewish concept of belief in one God and their own idea of Emperor-worship [which deified emperors and some members of their families with the divinely sanctioned authority of the Roman State] fitted extremely well with the interests of Rome.
The Romans felt the Jewish cult could be tweaked to serve its own aspirations and would be better suited to Rome if it underwent some minor changes.... reforms that would make possible the remodelling of the One God, in such a way that it would first make him mortal, and supply proof of his death to exist, and to officially ascend to the sky, and unofficially ... to leave descendants on earth.
Now if is the case it would explain how the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors became misled regarding the descendants of Jesus! And while everyone has been talking about the descendants of Christ, the actual important question is what would have happened if Rome amalgamated the Jesus religion and who the antecedents were!
It becomes obvious that the mystery is in the family relations between the Herodians and the historical Jesus.
This was very difficult to imagine as it is so anathema.
Imagine my surprise then when in the NOSTRA – ‘BIZARRE NEWS’ magazine, N° 584, published in 1983, there was an article called Jesus Christ, his wife and the Merovingians by Philippe de Chérisey.
Chérisey goes on and on about the theories of which Mary it was that Jesus may or may not have been married. He does this to confuse the issue probably so that you miss the most important sentence in the whole text. This has worked because no-one has ever referred to its strangeness. He wrote;
".... the motto ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ leaves the listener hungry for more. The links between divine law and political law that could be used to substantiate connections between two Jewish royal families, that of Jesus and that of Herod, are indeed mentioned, but are immediately followed by a deafening silence'. [my emphasis].
He follows this with: One would like to think that the Massacre of the Innocents and the condemnation of Jesus for which the Herods were responsible have only a moral or mystical significance.
Cherisy in other words is saying that the Jewish royal families of Jesus & Herod were connected [how?] and that the death of Jesus has more to do with these two family histories rather than a mystical or moral significance!
One may argue that Herod was not Jewish, but actually his stock does go back to ancient Jewry. Whether Orthodox Jews would accept this may be an issue but there is no getting away from the fact that Herod was of a significant lineage. He tried to legitimise himself even more by marrying in to the Hasmonean family.
Any investigation seems to be with the Idumean lineage of Herod [the Idumeans go back to the Edomites, who are mentioned in the Bible as being the descendants of Esua] and the lineage of Jesus, which looks to be Hasmonean.
A colleague of mine who has approached Roman history around the time of Jesus from a female point of view does indeed point to research which suggests a joining of the two families of this Idumean stock and of the Hasmonean princesses and probably accounts for the whole mystery around the father of Jesus!
In this manner, controlled by Rome, faith in this god Jesus would lead the Roman emperors, within a few generations, to become the pontifex maximus, with a truly sustainable legitimacy.
In a strange twist of fate along the lines proposed by Cherisey the word pontifex and its derivative "pontiff" became terms used for Christian bishops, including the Bishop of Rome, [i.e the Pope]. Plantard continues in 1964;
'A new cycle is beginning; even the Vatican, sensing that the structure of its vessel is cracking up on all sides, knows very well that the volte face of their pontiffs will not prevent the boat from sinking in the tempest'.
Oh for more information and knowledge and truth!
Plantard and Chérisey obviously had access to a different story of Jesus. One wonders if, when Marie Denarnaud taught Catholicism in the Sunday school at Rennes, that the report by one of the village elders who attended these readings may also have referred to this issue. The elder recalled one lesson in particular, saying that Marie, when she had finished the lesson, closed the Bible, looked at all the children and said ‘my poor kids, if you only knew.’