IN THE BEGINNING, before the recent media frenzy about a dastardly conspiracy over Christian origins, there was Dan Brown who, after writing several detective stories, begot The Da Vinci Code (2003).

He penetrated the dark central mystery and disclosed that the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene had been hushed up for two millennia by a clandestine clique within the Church. The book was fruitful and multiplied. It became a big hit in 70 languages of the creation, procuring Brown royalties from the sale of 40 million copies.

In Chapter 2, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of the 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, begot The Da Vinci Code court case. They accused Brown of plagiarism: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had already told the world that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were Mr and Mrs Christ.

A few weeks ago, a sensible judge rejected their claim and landed them with a six-figure legal bill. But the idea that Jesus married the Magdalene woman was not new. It was foreshadowed by Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, filmed by Martin Scorsese.

An even more picturesque story can be found in Barbara Thiering’s Jesus the Man (1992), a wholly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament in which Jesus fathers two sons and a daughter by Mary Magdalene before divorcing her and finding solace with Lydia, a woman bishop with whom he has another daughter. But in fact there is not a single ancient source for the invention of a sexual relation, marital or extramarital, between Jesus and Mary of Magdala.

Chapter 3 revolves around The Gospel of Judas, recently published in an edition by Rodolphe Kasser and others. In this not very significant late-2nd century text, Judas does not betray Jesus but obeys orders to hand him over to the chief priests.

On Palm Sunday, this “gospel”, originally begotten by an Egyptian Gnostic sect, was turned, with the help of a two-hour programme on the National Geographic television channel, into a rewritten New Testament that could be watched on five continents. The media furore was of almost nuclear proportions. The internet is still buzzing. The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Patriarch of Moscow preached against this new peril to the faith.

Finally, up steps the loser in the Da Vinci Code case, Michael Baigent, having freshly begotten The Jesus Papers. His latest attempt to put the record straight about the New Testament arrives in time for the wave of publicity building up for the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code later this month.

Baigent’s story is familiar in presenting Jesus and Mary Magdalene as husband and wife. What is new is the claim that Jesus did not die on the cross. With the connivance of Pontius Pilate, he was taken down alive, nursed back to health and, in the company of Mary Magdalene, lived happily, if not ever after, at least until the middle of the first century.

How serious a threat are these “revelations” to the picture of Jesus? The Da Vinci Code is a category apart. It is fiction and does not pretend to rewrite history. As a novelist, Brown is free to write whatever he chooses. The phenomenal success of the book and, no doubt, of the movie, does not claim to be anything other than fiction, even if it does not derive wholly from originality or from literary genius. No one would mistake Brown for the new Graham Greene. A good conspiracy yarn is highly attractive, but there is more to it, as I will suggest later.

In The Jesus Papers, Baigent offers a revisionist theory, shown in his subtitle, Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. In his view, Jesus survived Good Friday and enjoyed 15 or 20 years of marital bliss in Egypt. This assertion is counter to the one aspect of New Testament history on which all ancient sources and modern historians agree. For whatever one may think about the birth, miracles or resurrection of Christ, one can be sure that he truly died crucified.

But Baigent’s ideas about the cross are no more original than those about Mary Magdalene. It is a rehash of The Passover Plot, Hugh Schonfield’s forty-year-old flight of fancy about a fake crucifixion. Incidentally, the Koran has also been interpreted as discarding the idea that Jesus died on the cross. According to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, he left the Holy Land and emigrated to India, ending his life in Kashmir.

Baigent’s account is wrapped in mystery. The silliest aspect of it is the title, hinting at previously unknown “Jesus papers”. Having teased his readers with this idea, he comes to the top-secret denouement. In the 1960s, an Israeli friend of Baigent, a wealthy antique dealer who wanted to remain anonymous, laid his hands on two long Aramaic letters on papyrus, apparently dated to AD34. The friend said that he had consulted the greatest Israeli archaeologists of the time, Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad, who had declared the texts “genuine and important”.

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