The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

By: Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

A nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of the Pyrenees which enable him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story, a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago. The authors' conclusions are persuasive. At the core is not material riches but a secret, a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village to all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than the Holy Grail.

©1983 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (P)2006 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Enough to seriously challenge many traditional Christian beliefs, if not alter them." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)
"Like Chariots of the Gods?...the plot has all the elements of an international thriller." (Newsweek)

Abridged and still good

Read this book decades ago and loaned it to many people, and got it back too.
Not everyone cares what has happened in the last 2000 years, nor what happens in the future.
This is really a book for the curious, people who would like to understand better about a lot of things. Tell some people Jesus had a wife and kids and heck no he did not get nailed to a cross and well it is just one of those conspiracy stories like the Earth is round.

Picket and Prince were probably investigating 'The Templar Revelation' at about the same time Michael Baigent , Richard Leigh , Henry Lincoln were investigating 'Holy Blood..'. In this abridged form a lot of the actual researching is not there, and the main thrust, the big story is there. Well I found it really exciting back then lifetimes ago and still do.. How many people were brutally murdered because they thought and said.."Hang on a sec." Joseph was not Jesus' dad?" or worse. And wars waged because some idiots wanted to read the Good Book themselves.
Simon Prebble does a good job reading this.

Even though this is abridged, it is a good listen for interesting people and if you really want to read it all, go on buy the hard copy.

If nothing else it is a story about the hoodwinking of the west, for a few thousand years.

Intriguing

At points I thought too much detail. In hindsight the conclusion sought guidance from that detail.

changing history as we believe it to be

Very thorough, am enjoying back and listening a second time to absorb all the information. I recommend this book for those interested in the "Jesus as man, not Messiah" idea. Great for French history as well.

Entertaining and Still Controversial

I first read this book in the late 80's and I remembering recognising it in the plot of the Da Vinci Code many years later. Of course, the authors famously sued Dan Brown's publishers for breach of copyright, but a Court found there was no infringement (Baigent & Ors v Random House). It was controversial then and it remains so now.
I do not intend to set out the thesis here. It unfolds like a good thriller (in some ways in a more interesting manner than the devices adopted in the Da Vinci Code). However, as most will know, the tale concerns the alleged bloodline of the Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth (or Galilee), the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion and a traipse between Britain and the Middle East guided by Leonardo, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and other notables. Fun, exciting stuff, indeed.
The text is written like a great adventure (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comes to mind) and is punctuated with a lot of dramatic rhetorical questions and leaps of logic (on the basis that the detail is too complex to set out in full, but "Trust me, I'm an historian!) Thoroughly entertaining, if a bit short on chain of proof (exacerbated by the abridgement of this production that does not include the the Introductions (either edition), the Afterword and Appendices).
All of this is made more the worthwhile by the excellent narrative by Simon Prebble (one of my favourites).
There's no need to take this too seriously, trying to follow the convolution in the tale on Wiki as you might with another doco. Just take it in, have the odd giggle and grin and enjoy the drama.

Exciting and Controversial.

Open your eyes and your mind. Having done so remember that hypothesis is not fact and facts do not change.