In the April 29 newsletter, I briefly wrote about a mysterious 17th century manuscript called The Genealogy of Jesus Christ that was recently discovered in Llandovery College in Wales. It seems everyone who's heard of Dan Brown's phenomenally successful novel, The Da Vinci Code, has been clamoring for more details about this latest discovery.
The novel's story revolves around a 2,000-year-old conspiracy, clues to which are allegedly encoded in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci. It's left to Harvard scholar Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveau to discover the truth about the Holy Grail before, as is the custom in such novels, it's all too late. The book has attracted controversy and official condemnation from the Vatican because of its claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that the two had children. Mary Magdalene is portrayed in the New Testament as a prostitute.
College founder Thomas Philips donated the Llandovery manuscript to the institution in 1851, but how he acquired it is yet another mystery. The 594-page book has lain forgotten in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth for the past 70 years. What has Da Vinci Code enthusiasts so excited about this discovery is the fact that the dusty old tome is a who's who of the old and new testaments of the Bible. It shows much more genealogy information than just the ancestry of Jesus Christ; it also shows how many other Biblical personages are related to each other. But when current college warden, Peter Hogan, discovered the book and checked under M for Magdalene, he discovered that a lot of the information about her was crossed out.
Click here to read more about this story on the icWales web site.
