In spite of what The Da Vinci Code would have you believe, there’s not much of a challenge in looking for the historical Jesus. The life of Christ is one of the best-documented lives in all antiquity.

But Arthur is a real mystery. Four detailed lives of Christ were written while witnesses to the events were still alive; the first mention of Arthur’s name comes generations after Arthur would have died.

Was there really a King Arthur? Or was he just a legend, born in a dark age that couldn’t separate myth from history?

And does it matter?

I’m going to spend a few days looking at those questions, and even trying to answer them. Of course, the answers I come up with might not be the answers anyone else would come up with. This Arthur turns out to be a slippery character.

Looking for the historical Arthur is easy enough. In fact, it’s a good general rule that anyone who seeks the Arthur of history finds him. The only problem is that we all find different Arthurs.

Faced with such a bewildering array of contradictory conclusions, a few old grumps lapse into hopeless Arthurian agnosticism. But most of the rest proudly announce their conclusions with trumpet fanfare, and then confidently await the applause of the world. I might as well join the cacophony. Like the rest of the seekers, I’ve read most of the primary sources, which you can do in one afternoon.

Before we set off on an Arthur hunt, we ought to know what we’re looking for. What will Arthur look like if we find him?

There are so many different legends about Arthur that we might despair of ever pinning him down. But most of the stories seem to assume the same skeleton outline of his life:

1. He united the previously disunited Britons.

2. He defeated the Saxon English at the famous battle of Badon.

3. He ruled in peace and security for some time after that.

4. He died in battle with Mordred.

This is the life of Arthur in the broadest possible outline - what we might think of as the unalterable core of the Arthurian tradition. We can make a hasty scribble of what Arthur might look like, the way a police sketch artist might do, and take it with us to see if we find anyone who looks like that.

But where will we look first?

The best place to look would be in the British histories of Arthur’s time. As it happens, there is exactly one history from about the time Arthur would have lived, and it does indeed mention Arthur’s famous battle of Badon. It even gives us a date for the battle, which by a lucky coincidence happened in the very year the author of the history was born. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t mention Arthur anywhere.

Is our quest doomed from the start? Is this gaping historical silence proof that there never was an Arthur?

Probably not. In the next installment, we’ll take a good look at the great work of St. Gildas the Wise, and we’ll notice one particular quirk of his style that has important implications in our search for the real Arthur. Meanwhile, if you want to get a head start, you can find links to Gildas in Latin and in English in the Scriptorium. Read his book for yourself - it’s not very long - and form your own conclusions. Then you can tell me where I’m wrong.

…as a twenty-first-century Caesar might say. There is a thing called a “podcast” at www.spiritedtalktoday.com where you can hear, through the magic of MP3, the voices of Mike and me talking about The Grail Code. If you like to hear voices on a telephone but can’t get anyone to call you, this podcast is just the thing for you.

It was a gnomon, Silas had been told, a pagan astronomical device… [From The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.]

This business of claiming everything good for the pagans can only go so far before it gets a bit silly. A gnomon is a pagan astronomical device only in the same way that a reflecting telescope is a Christian astronomical device.

If you don’t know what a gnomon is, here’s Dr. Johnson’s definition: “The hand or pin of a dial.” (By “dial” he means a sundial.) In other words, a gnomon, in its most primitive form, is a stick that casts a shadow. In its most advanced form, it’s a stick that casts a shadow, although it may have some fancy filigree decoration. Yes, it certainly was invented long before the time of Christ.

A gnomon seems a silly choice to represent the mysterious wisdom of the ancient pagans. But granting for a moment that it is “a pagan astronomical device,” should we be surprised to find such a thing in a Christian church?

I don’t think so. Christians honor the achievements of all human thought, Christian or otherwise, as gifts of the same God. A truth discovered by a pagan is no less a truth. “Whatever things were rightly said among all men,” said Justin Martyr, “are the property of us Christians.” (Second Apology, 13.)

Justin didn’t disparage the pagan thinkers. Quite the reverse: Justin had spent his life studying the great philosophers of the past, and he himself proudly wore the robes of a classical philosopher. Their wisdom was good, because it was a gift from the God of the Christians - even if the pagan philosophers didn’t know God.

As we show you in The Grail Code, Pope Gregory the Great used Justin’s principle in evangelizing the barbarian English. Instead of tearing down their beloved shrines and canceling their favorite festivals, Gregory told his missionaries to keep everything good, but convert it to Christian uses. People would be led to the faith by the places and celebrations they loved best.

This is exactly what the great writers of the Middle Ages did with the old Celtic myths that still cropped up in minstrels’ tales. Instead of trying to prohibit everyone’s favorite popular entertainment, they used those stories to lead people closer to Christ.

So the next time you see a pagan astronomical device in a church, you can thank God for the wise pagan who discovered it. Then you can give thanks for the wise Christians, Justin and Gregory, who taught us that all wisdom has a place in the Christian church.

We talk a lot in The Grail Code about the Otherworld in ancient Welsh tales—in particular, how it seems to break into our world without warning in a burst of beauty and terror. Here’s an episode from Nennius’ History of the Britons that illustrates perfectly how the Welsh of the Dark Ages treated the Otherworld as part of ordinary life and history.

Nennius is not an elegant writer. He writes as though the writing cost him some effort, and his sentences are thrown together in heaps, just the way he tells us his whole history was thrown together. The well-known J. A. Giles translation renders Nennius in good English style; I’ve stuck more literally to the style of Nennius, because I think a genuine personality of the Dark Ages comes through in this awkward prose.

Bear in mind, though, that I scribbled this translation in a waiting room where several other people were having a loud conversation about The Da Vinci Code and the sacred feminine, which is a distracting environment. Please forgive me if some of the awkwardness comes from me instead of from Nennius.

The episode, like most of these Welsh stories, begins in the ordinary world: it’s a history of the early colonization of Ireland. We get absolutely no warning that the Otherworld is about to burst in on us.

“Finally came the Scots from parts of Spain to Ireland.

“First came Partholomus with a thousand people, men and women, and they grew to four thousand. And a plague came over them, and in one week they all perished and not even one of them remained.

“Second to Ireland came Nimeth, son of a certain Agnomen, who is said to have sailed on the sea a year and a half, and afterward came to a port in Ireland, his ships having been wrecked. And he stayed in the same place for many years, and went back again to Spain with all his people.

“And afterward came three sons of a Spanish soldier with thirty boats among them, and with thirty wives in every boat. And they stayed there for the space of one year.

“And afterward they beheld a tower of glass in the middle of the sea, and they beheld people on top of the tower, and they kept trying to speak to them and they would never answer. And in one year they prepared for an attack on the tower with all their boats and with all their women except one boat, which was wrecked by shipwreck, in which were thirty men and as many women. And the other ships sailed to assault the tower, and while they were all alighting on the shore that was around the tower, the sea overwhelmed them, and they were sunk and not one of them escaped. And from the family of that boat which was left behind because of the shipwreck all Ireland has been populated to this day.” [Historia Brittonum, no. 13.]

It’s hard for a modern reader to hear this story without rationalizing it, and my first thought was that Nennius might preserve, in garbled form, the ancient story of an encounter with a stray iceberg. A quick search found that a few people on slightly crackpot sites had the same impression.

But the thing to notice in Nennius is that there is not a wisp of rationalization. There was suddenly an inhabited tower of glass in the middle of the sea, and approaching it brought sudden death; those are the facts as far as Nennius is concerned, and for him it’s all perfectly consistent with the way the world works.

This wild and lawless Otherworld generated haunting tales, and one of the glories of medieval literature is the way great literary artists like “Walter Map” tamed the Otherworld and made it follow definite laws—the laws of orthodox Christian theology. In the same way that God’s grace does not destroy but rather builds on nature, the writers of the great medieval romances took what was mesmerizingly beautiful from Celtic myth and built it into their own profound Christian allegories.

If you’re up early, you can hear Mike and me talking about The Grail Code Friday morning (May 12) from 7:15 to 8:00 a.m. Central Time on the Spirit Morning Show on KVSS in Omaha. That’s 8:15 Eastern, or 6:15 Mountain, or 5:15 Pacific; for the rest of the world, Central Time in North America is five hours less than Coordinated Universal Time.

If you can’t get to Omaha for the occasion (although I understand they have paved roads and everything out there now), you can hear the broadcast at the KVSS site. You might want to check out the site anyway: you can always listen to what’s on the air right now. If you’re a talk-radio addict, you could do a lot worse. In fact, if you’re not listening to KVSS, you probably are doing a lot worse.

The Da Vinci Code has left a lot of people asking important questions, and Fr. John Wauck has all the elegantly simple answers in his Da Vinci Code Catechism. Note especially his answer to the question “Does a Holy Grail really exist?” His must certainly be the right answer, since he agrees with Mike and me completely.

I should warn you that Fr. Wauck is a member of Opus Dei, but I’ve visited his site several times and so far the black helicopters haven’t come to get me.

According to accurate research by the Associated Church Press, I am America’s third-funniest Christian writer. A silly parody I wrote for Touchstone came in third in the “Humor Written” category in the ACP awards.

I’m mildly proud of this moderate honor, and my family and I held a temperate celebration at a fairly nice medium-sized restaurant in a decent middle-class neighborhood. The food was pretty good.

Langdon strained to hide his emotion, and yet he could not believe what he was hearing. Sophie Neveu had unwittingly witnessed a two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony. [From The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.]

The best thing about The Da Vinci Code is that it’s getting a lot of people interested in Christian history. You can get a conversation about the Gnostics started in the dentist’s office; you can talk with a stranger about Mary Magdalene while you’re waiting on the safety island for the streetcar. These things didn’t happen before Dan Brown.

People are genuinely interested in genuinely interesting things. Some people have swallowed some wrong ideas, but the fascination with history is entirely good. Many of the book’s readers are truly curious, and they’re asking the right questions.

What did Jesus really teach? Did orthodox Christianity pervert Jesus’ original message? How do we know the Gnostics didn’t have it right?

These are exactly the right questions to be asking. But how will we get the right answers out there?

That brings us to that little snippet from Dan Brown’s famous novel. Ancient secrets have a powerful attraction for us.  A two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony - imagine that! Imagine the excitement of seeing for yourself a ritual that has been handed down, essentially unaltered, for twenty centuries! It would be the experience of a lifetime!

Or at least it should be. But how many of the same readers who tingled with excitement when they came to that line have stumbled blindly by and missed exactly that experience in real life?

In any Catholic church, or any Orthodox church, or any Lutheran or Anglican church - wherever the Christian liturgy is celebrated, you can witness a two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony. More than that, you can participate in it.

This is the message we we’re trying to get out with The Grail Code: that the experience of a lifetime is waiting for you just around the corner. The current obsession with historical mysteries is a wonderful thing, because we have the most profound mystery of all to share with the world. We’ve kept it miraculously intact for two thousand years.

The Wikipedia, that giant repository of everything we think we know, has an interesting and amusing List of Holy Grails. Were you wondering what the Holy Grail of Historical Linguistics was? Or how about the Holy Grail of High-Energy Physics? It’s all here.

What’s noticeably absent is—well—anything that actually looks like the Holy Grail. Wouldn’t the Holy Grail of All Holy Grails be something like meeting God face to face?

That’s what the best of the Grail romances were about. The memory of those romances still inspires us when we think about the possibility of “solving the equity premium puzzle” or “a proof of the Riemann hypothesis” (to mention two of the Holy Grails listed in the Wikipedia article).

But these lesser Grails are nothing compared to the big one. And we can have the big one! That’s the amazing message of those medieval romances—and, of course, the message of our book.

With the Da Vinci Code movie coming out, everyone is quite naturally going to want a copy of our book, which is the best way to learn the real scoop on the Holy Grail. We are, of course, happy to oblige. The book is already in print, and copies of it are slowly making their way to major dealers.

You can get your copy at least three easy ways.

1. Our publisher, Loyola Books, will sell direct. They have the books now, ready to order. Their web site requires Macromedia Flash software.

2. On-line dealers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble may sell the book at a discount, but you might have to wait a bit for them to get it in stock.

3. Your local bookstore may already have copies, or can order a copy for you. We found a stack at the Mystery Lovers Bookstore in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, which also does on-line ordering.

So much for self-promotion. Now that that’s out of the way, we can go back to something more fun.