This is the last chapter in this story & the one which goes earliest. Anyone who still takes religion seriously is well advised to skip it, unless they get a sensuous thrill from being upset. Some people do...

What was the special reason why the Pope picked Clovis to back as the effective Western Roman Emperor, when the Goths in Spain might have had as good a claim?

Legend has it that the Merovingians carried the blood of Christ, which is at least as credible as 'anyting you li’ble to read in the bible', although I am dubious about the genealogy published by Helen Hohenzollern of Romania and Robin Medforth-Mills & similar ones. This is the story, as I understand it, & I will try to cut it short:-

The Story of Jesus ben Joseph

Jesus (Joshua) was the son of Joseph, a member of the Jewish royal family. His genealogy can be traced in the Gospel of St. Luke, not that of St. Matthew, the whole book of which is entirely a propaganda construct, written so as to ensure that every prophecy in the Old Testament relating to the Messiah should be fulfilled in Matthew’s record of the life of Jesus. It was clearly, the last to be written, possibly not even with Jesus’ approval. He was born in 7BC about ‘Easter’, rather earlier than he should have, because orthodox Jews of the time married at 36 & so the earliest proper date of Jesus’ birth can be computed as June 7BC. However, Joseph & Mary (Miriam) ‘jumped the gun’ & one can only approve, as it shows that it was a love match.

They had several other sons & two complications now arise in the politics of Judaism:-

(1) because the new head of the family was either the first-born Jesus or the unquestionably legitimately-born James.

(2) because there was a split in the church between those on the ‘right’ who wanted to keep Judaism for the Jews and those on the ‘left’ who wanted to share the religion they thought was a good thing, with the gentiles.

Jesus was on the left & James on the right. Matters were further complicated by the presence of the Roman occupiers, who were running the Nabatean Herod family as quisling kings. The Herods, a remarkably smart bunch, juggled this explosive mixture, both temporal - the Jewish Resistance versus the Romans and spiritual - the Jesus faction versus the James one, with considerable skill. As a good orthodox Jew (whether the deeply anti-semetic Catholic chuch likes it or not), Jesus married at 36, in 29AD, to Mary Magdalene, a person that bible-bashers always have a problem with & they had some children. That some Christian sects assume or insist that Jesus was celibate tells one more about their hang-ups about sex than anything relating to this distant possible Delaforce. (As we have noted earlier, Islam has no problem with descendants of the Prophet, which Delaforces are).

Inevitably, the religious & resistance elements became involved with each other. The Romans were particularly keen to lay hands on the man we know as the Apostle Simon, apparently the Gerry Adams of his day. Herod (Herod Agrippa by this time) was as keen that they should not but they did & Jesus’ faction were also arrested. Fortunately, the notoriously venal Pontius Pilatus (see Tacitus, who thought Pilate crooked even by contemporary standards) was the governor when they were caught & the usual bribes were arranged. Although Pilate had to hold a crucifixion (Simon the terrorist in the middle, Barabbas, which means the Son of the Father or Jesus, on one side & Judas, who lost the bribery battle, on the other), he had the victims taken down after only nine hours when it normally takes about three days to die of exhaustion & dehydration.

Early Christian texts say that Jesus suffered on the cross but this was edited much later to ‘died’ to conform with a reality that was created. The faction that wanted to spread Judaism now took off to spread the Word but the story of the faith had to be amended to remove those elements that made it exclusively Jewish. Meanwhile, the story of Jesus’ resurrection was spreading on the grapevine in parallel, so Jesus himself had to keep his head down. He dictated the Gospel of John to Mark, as with his injured hands, he could no longer write. In John, he refers to himself as ‘The Word’ & also all through the Acts of the Apostles. John contains no sentimental stories about mangers & shepherds. It is largely allegorical philosophy. (Incidentally, he could not have been ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, as Nazareth is a ‘new town’ the Harlow of Palestine, which did not exist in Jesus’ time).

The new faith began to spread rapidly, assisted by the literary efforts of Paul, clearly a close associate of Jesus’ & credited by Thiering with being his son-in-law. To a world accustomed to Godhead by Government, with different gods running different departments, such as Love, Wisdom & War, a mono-theistic religion makes a lot of sense, particularly when deceased Roman emperors were ‘promoted’ to godhead by their successors but it is definitely a threat to temporal authority, as its credibility is so much greater than multiple gods.

‘Acts’ suggests that Jesus was in Rome at the time of Nero’s persecution of the Christians but out of the hands of the authorities. He would have been an old man of about 74 at the time. The credibility of the Merovingian connection relies on Jesus’ family fleeing persecution in the only direction likely not to be heavily policed - away from Palestine, up Italy & into Gaul. Whether Jesus ever realised that, rather than just spreading Judaism, he had created a new religion, is moot.

If thoughts such as "incredible farrago" come to your mind, consider two concepts:-

1. There has been a rather greater amount of incredible Christian propagandising for the last 1900 years, which may affect your judgement.

2. This all reads so much like the goings-on in any modern political context, both public and intra-party.

And it certainly makes a dramatic ending to what is in any case, a dramatic story.

Sources for Ken's additions to Part Three

Web sites of James Allen, Greg Bard, Hervé Gros, David Wiley, American Pictures, Pierre Driout, Bernard Fournie (clearly wrong), Karl-Heinz Schreiber, Reimert family, François Marchi, others not recorded

The unattributed site: web.genealogie.free.fr/Les_dynasties/Les_dynasties_celebres/France/ is one of the more circumspect where data is in doubt.
François Jaunais' site: fjaunais.free.fr/h0gascogne.htm etc
The Jewish site: www.orthohelp.com/geneal/SEPH_who.htm, which has an agenda.
The Spanish History website: /www.sispain.org/english/history/, which also has an agenda.
Website of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, www.metmuseum.org.

The Columbia Encyclopaedia
The Catholic Encyclopaedia (but careful about its wacky agenda & extreme anti-semetism)
Wikipedia (a contributary encyclopaedia)
‘Jesus the Man’ by Barbara Thiering
‘The Book that Jesus wrote’ by Barbara Thiering
‘The Fall of the Roman Empire - the Military Explanation’ by Arthur Ferrill
‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ by Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln (handle with care as it contains large amounts of apparent tosh)
Tacitus ‘Histories’
'The Merovingian Kings' by Ian Wood