Templar Lore

This is Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas’s second co-authored book in which they investigate the origins of Freemasonry, a discipline in which they are both actively involved and of which they are practising, high-ranking members.

In The Second Messiah, the authors re-visit Rosslyn Chapel in southern Scotland and also bring into play the Turin Shroud.

The nub of the whole thing is that following the failed revolt in Judaea headed up by Yehoshua ben Joseph (better known to us as Jesus Christ), an anointed descendant of the royal house of David, many members of the Jewish aristocracy were forced to flee the Roman held province. They landed up in Septimania, a Jewish Kingdom that had been established on the shores of the Mediterranean in what is now South-western France. Welcomed as high-ranking nobility, these refugees eventually married into the French aristocracy over the centuries and spread into many illustrious families throughout France and Flanders.

But what they didn’t tell anyone was that before taking the last boat from Palestine and in an attempt to preserve it in the event of total disaster, they had committed their corpus of hidden knowledge to scrolls and hidden the lot beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This fact was handed down through the descendants of these families until such time as they were able to return to Jerusalem to reclaim their birthright. The opportunity to do this was presented when the First Crusade recaptured the Holy City and some even consider the descendants of the Jewish refugees responsible for engineering the Crusade in the first place. Oh what a tangled web we weave!

Anyway, to cut a long story short, this little secret society became the Knights Templar whose Grand Master at the time of its dissolution was Jaques de Molay whose burning at the stake in 1314 kind of mirrored the crucifixion of Jesus. As a descendant of one of the exiled Jewish families, it is suggested in the book that Jaques de Molay was the natural successor to Jesus (possibly even ultimately descended from the line of David). As head of a society (the Knights Templar) whose rituals were based on the scrolls reclaimed from Jerusalem and ultimately passed down into Freemasonry, de Molay would indeed have been seen as a Messiah in the Davidic tradition.

Well, what do you think about that little lot ! We’re not even going to start on what the Turin Shroud’s got to do with all this but rest assured, it’s as well researched and plausible as everything else these two come up with. A great read!