Oh, I love getting unexpected gifts in the mail. Especially when those gifts are books, because I especially love books. And particularly especially when those books are sloppily printed, cheaply bound rants by conspiracy theorists. As my long-time readers already know, I have a particular affection for conspiracy theorists.

For Christmas, someone I don’t even know (how did he know my nickname was “Resident”? Only my closest friends call me that) sent me National Sunday Law, a long rant by a splinter Seventh-Day Adventist that shows how the Papists are conspiring with the United States Government to make you stop working on Sunday, in spite of the fact that Saturday is the real Sabbath. Satan is behind it all, you can be sure. (You can read it on line, but nothing can duplicate the experience of holding the actual foul-smelling newsprint pages in your hand.)

Personally, I’d be in favor of a law to make me stop working on Sunday, as long as it was understood that it was merely the first stage in a long-term plan to make me stop working on Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday as well. This working stuff is terribly overrated. But according to the book, it stops at Sunday, which I agree is wrong. A law that places one religion above another has no place in our (theoretically) tolerant society.

This book is such a classic combination of conspiracy theory and eschatological speculation that I can’t help myself. I have to read it, and I have to tell you about it. If I get a rant for Christmas, you get a rant for New Year’s.

There are just so many amazing things about this book. First off is that the national Sunday law is an imminent danger. It’s happening any moment now. And that’s still true in the newly updated edition of the book, even though the first edition was published in 1983. It doesn’t look like we’re any closer to a national Sunday law; in fact, it looks as though the idea of Sunday as just another shopping day has become firmly institutionalized. But, in the immortal words of Dick Martin, That’s what they’d like you to believe! Like every conspiracy theory, any apparent disproof only makes the theory stronger. The diabolical forces must be really diabolical, because they hide their work so well!

I hardly need to tell you that the book of Revelation gives our author most of his best material. Every generation reads Revelation and sees its prophecies coming true in our own time. This book follows the standard pattern. We start out with a standard description of how much more awful our age is than the ages before it were. Lots of stories about horrible murders and perversions lead up to this amazing declaration:

“Crime doubles every ten years.”

This, by the way, is probably the most perniciously evil statement in the book. As far as I can tell, it’s just a bald lie; but it’s exactly what many people, perhaps even most people, believe. We make our political decisions based on perceptions like this, and your freedoms are always in danger of being eroded by them. Habeas corpus? Innocent until proven guilty? Maybe crime has spiraled out of control so much that we can’t afford such luxuries anymore.

Think for a moment what it would mean if the crime rate, usually measured as a percentage of the population victimized, doubled every ten years. Suppose we start at 5%, which was about the property crime rate in 1973. Count with me: 5%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, 160%—it takes less than sixty years for there to be more victims than people.

I’ve written about this kind of PLS before, but here’s one of the clearest examples of it I’ve ever seen. The truth, by the way, is that crime has gone way down; for real crime statistics, see this page from the Department of Justice (“Since 1994, violent crime rates have declined, reaching the lowest level ever in 2005”; “Property crime rates continue to decline”). And then notice how, while the actual crime graphs go down, the generic graph icon for “Crime facts at a glance” shows a line rising steeply upward. That’s how firmly the impression of rising crime is planted in our minds!

Of course, the updated version of the book adds the September 11 attacks, painting terrorism as a new level of horror never experienced before. How easily we forget that the 1970s were the golden age of terrorism. Here in Pittsburgh, the Weather Underground tried to blow up the Gulf Building; radical groups of all sorts terrorized Europe. The September 11 attacks killed more people at once, but terrorism was actually more of an epidemic thirty years ago.

Shortly after that, the number of the Beast is decoded: one of the titles of the Pope is found to add up to 666 in Roman numerals, if we completely ignore the order of the numerals (so that IV denotes 6, for example) and count the letters that aren’t numerals at all as 0. Then we find that the mark of the beast is observing the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, and from there the whole Apocalypse falls neatly into place.

But even after the apocalypse, we’re not done. There are thirteen appendices devoted to individual subjects (numbered 1 through 12 but including a 1A). You can always count on appendices in conspiracy books. As the author gets deeper into the conspiracy, more and more things fall into place, and there just isn’t room for all of them in the main body of the book.

Now, what are we to make of all this? I think the message here is that we live in a state of permanent apocalypse. This book has been predicting the imminent arrival of the tribulation for almost twenty-five years now, and it claims “32 million in print.” I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m predicting that, in 2033, it will still be in print, still announcing the imminent tribulation, and with no excuse offered for the fifty-year delay. Meet me back here in 2033 and see if I’m right.

A more important lesson, though, is that we need to be very suspicious when things start falling neatly into place. Our minds are designed to see patterns; that’s how we learn and survive. But our pattern identifiers are quite capable of going slightly mad. If I told you that you were being pursued by a secret cabal of Masons in blue Chrysler minivans, you’d laugh at me. But the next time you went out driving, you’d begin to notice how many blue Chrysler minivans there are around you, and how many of them seem to be right behind you, and how many of them have Masonic symbols on their license-plate holders. Not all of them would have the Masonic symbols, but that just shows how clever those Masons are. Now, if you’re thinking rationally, you’d realize that Chrysler makes the most popular minivan, and blue is a very popular color. But that pattern-recognizing part of your brain is always working, tempting you to see patterns in random events.

Oddly enough, that ability of ours to see patterns has given us some of the world’s best fiction and some of its worst. The Walter Map Lancelot cycle sees the whole story of Arthur and his knights as a giant allegory of sin and redemption, the whole human experience. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code sees a pattern of conspiracy in the same Grail stories. In each case, the brain of the author has imposed patterns on certain events; the result is a masterpiece in one case, a shoddy mess in the other. I leave it to you to decide which is which.

In honor of the still-striking writers in Hollywood, here’s a rerun. One of the most-emailed items on the BBC’s web site this morning is this crusty old thing, a story that first appeared way back in February. “Jesus tomb found, says film-maker”—with a headline like that it’s got to be true! Actually, it’s not, but apparently some people are still talking about it as though it were. As you might expect, I thoroughly demolished the filmmaker’s argument when the story first ran, but as a public service to all those who might be taken in by the story on its second go-round, here we go again.

By now you’ve surely heard the wonderful news. But I’ll tell you anyway: the tomb of Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene has been found—and found, just coincidentally, by a famous director with a movie to peddle.

Mr. James Cameron is no fool. He knows a pot of gold when he sees one, and that’s exactly what he has on his hands here. Alternative-Jesus theories are big money these days. Just ask Mr. Dan Billion-Dollar-Industry Brown.

If you take all this for the hokum it is, it’s really very entertaining. But apparently some people are taking this tomb-of-Jesus story perfectly seriously, and that’s where I really have to draw the line.

I’m not an archaeologist, so I can’t evaluate the supposed find the way an archaeologist would. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to examine it even if I were a reputable archaeologist—or perhaps especially if I were a reputable archaeologist. But I do know a little about history, and about the history of archaeology in general. My little knowledge doesn’t give me much confidence in this supposed discovery.

First of all, it’s very odd that the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene should go undiscovered until exactly the moment in history when a lot of people are prepared to believe that there was a tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Considering the number of hoaxes that blacken the history of Palestinian archaeology, I’m inclined to doubt the authenticity of this find altogether.

But let’s say that the discovery is authentic: that there really is a group of ossuaries marked Mary, Mary, Jesus son of Joseph, Matthew, and Judah son of Jesus, plus four irrelevant unknowns.

Now, Mr. Cameron says that statistics and DNA analysis prove his claim that this is the tomb of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Let’s dismiss the sillier claim first. DNA can’t prove anything of the sort. The only thing DNA analysis could possibly prove in this case is that some of the people were related in certain ways to some of the other people. DNA doesn’t include a coded curriculum vitae. So it might (I don’t know enough about DNA analysis to say it would) be possible to prove that one of the Marys was the mother of Jesus son of Joseph, and that Judah son of Jesus was the son of the other Mary and Jesus son of Joseph.

Now let’s talk statistics. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Judah were some of the most common names in first-century Palestine. Jesus had at least two disciples named Judas (the Greek form of Judah): Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him, and Judas “not Iscariot,” who didn’t. (He’s more commonly known as St. Jude.) Almost universal ancient tradition says that the given name of Thomas was also Judas, which would bring the total to three.

As for Mary, think how much trouble average readers have sorting out Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the wife (or mother) of Clopas, Mary the sister of Martha, and Mary Magdalene. Even scholars still debate how many of those were the same person. It’s quite clear that the ground was littered with Marys in first-century Palestine.

Suppose I found a tomb dated roughly the time of George Washington—between 1700 and 1900, let’s say. Suppose it contained the remains of one George whose wife was Martha and whose mother was Mary. Would that prove conclusively that I had found George Washington? No, because those are very common names. Yet I don’t think they’re anywhere near as common as Jesus, Joseph, Mary, and Judah were in first-century Palestine.

Now, let’s look at the assumptions we’re making. Mr. Cameron says that finding the tomb of Mary Magdalene was what convinced him that this must be the real tomb of Jesus. I quote from the BBC article:

Another grave said by producers to be of Mary Magdalene convinced researchers of the truth of their find, Mr Cameron said at a New York news conference.

Unveiling his documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Mr Cameron said the chances of finding that combination of names together was like finding a grave marked Ringo next to others marked John, Paul and George.

“Mariamene is Mary Magdalene - that’s the Ringo, that’s what sets this whole film in motion,” he said.

In other words, what proves that this Jesus is in fact Jesus Christ is the fact that he was buried with his wife Mary, presumed to be Mary Magdalene, with whom he had a son. Without that fact, the find wasn’t convincing even to Mr. Cameron.

Now, let’s step away from the early 21^st century for a moment and remember that, in almost all the rest of history, that fact would have proved conclusively that this was not the tomb of Jesus. Relying only on the known histories of Jesus’ life, every historian—Christian, agnostic, atheist, Satanist, or whatever—would have concluded that he died without marrying.

Now a number of popular books have, without a scrap of real historical evidence, convinced the illiterati that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. Because of that unhistorical popular delusion, Mr. Cameron is convinced that he’s found the tomb of Jesus.

In other words, the premise is pure fantasy, which is why I can’t really accept the conclusion.

We were asking why the story of the Holy Grail brings out the nuts, and I think to answer that, we have to decide what makes the story of the Holy Grail so appealing in the first place.

First of all, the story of the quest for the Holy Grail, as refined by the medieval writers, is simply perfect. It’s the story every other story wants to be when it grows up.

If I were to take any random novel and tell you that it was really, underneath it all, the story of man’s quest for what is ultimately desirable and how his own failings stand in the way, you’d probably tell me I’d got it just about right. Tom Jones, or Mardi, or A Christmas Carol, or War and Peace—I’ve just given you the facile undergraduate key to interpreting them all. Feel free to use it in your papers. You’ll get at least a C minus, which is better than nothing.

But the story of the Holy Grail is the story of that quest, not underneath it all but through and through, with no fillers and no artificial additives. I’m tempted to say that it’s the story, the one we’ve been telling each other since Gilgamesh, but refined and purified until it can’t be refined any more. It’s pure essence of story, or at least as pure as our current storytelling technology will allow.

But why does a story so good bring out the nuts? Probably because it’s so good—so good that we really want to believe it’s true, at least in some sense. Unfortunately, many of us don’t want to believe the Christian part of it, because we’re still rebelling against the cartoon Christianity that pop culture mistakes for the real thing.

But if you can’t have Christianity, what’s left of the story? Not much. When you unceremoniously dump out the blood of Christ, the Holy Grail is as achingly empty as—well, as a heart without Christ. It has to be filled with something: something ultimately desirable. What do we want most of all? That’s what we’ll put in it. Love, or sex, or the Holy Grail of Information Architecture—whatever we think we want the most, we put that at the center of the story. And then the story is just about magic, which actually isn’t very interesting in itself.

The amazing thing about the Holy Grail legends is the way they use our mundane desires to lead us toward what we really desire. The Grail appears at Camelot and gives each knight his favorite meal: a straightforward appeal to the stomach. The quest is actually undertaken on that basis. But if it never went beyond the stomach, it wouldn’t be much of a story. Things really get interesting when the quest, or the Grail itself, begins to lay bare all the knights’ deepest spiritual failings.

Now, as we said in The Grail Code, there’s a longing born into our hearts. It’s like a spiritual DNA, as Mike always says: everyone is programmed to feel it. It’s designed to lead us toward God, and it takes a powerful act of the will to force it to lead us away from God.

The combination of that profound longing and our willful avoidance of its real goal is what produces silliness in the most benign cases, and madness in the most extreme. Here we can see what’s so appealing about the various perversions of the Grail legend into crazy conspiracy theories: it’s as though, by taking control of what may be the world’s most perfect story, we can somehow take control of God—who is, after all, at the center of the story—and mold him into what we want him to be. That, of course, is madness; but it’s a very common madness. It’s almost an inevitable madness. And that’s why every nut with a grudge against God wants to take over the Holy Grail.

Nestled among the multiple copies of Dan Brown’s masterpieces in the clearance section of a local bookstore, I found—no, wait a minute, that sounds like I was nestled among the copies, etc., which is not a position I would put myself in. Let me start over, without taking the opportunity to bash poor old Dan Brown, who, after all, has been the target of a lot of ill-natured abuse these last few years, and only has a billion dollars to show for it.

While I was looking through the clearance books, I found a book by one Giles Morgan with the pleasingly utilitarian title The Holy Grail. For the small price I could afford to take a chance on it, even though the author’s other credits included writing for the Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to the belief that the world is inexplicably weird, or weirdly inexplicable, I forget which. I was surprised to find the book a mostly sensible and balanced history of the Grail in legend, literature, and popular entertainment. It’s a small book and a huge subject, so it skates lightly over the things The Grail Code dwells on at length: Walter Map and Thomas Malory get about a page each. But it presents a good overview of the whole story of the Grail in culture, and it doesn’t dwell on the kind of tabloid-friendly “mysteries” that make up the bulk of most Grail books.

Now, why did I say I was “surprised” to find that the book wasn’t loopy? Partly, I’ll admit, it was just the mention of the Fortean Times on the jacket. If you haven’t experienced the peculiar kind of intellectual loopiness that grows at the Fortean Times, I can’t honestly say that you ought to, but I do sneakily admire it from a distance. Charles Fort, the eponymous founder (don’t you just love the word “eponymous”? Eponymous eponymous eponymous), spent his life searching out odd phenomena that were difficult to explain—a rain of frogs, for example—and cataloguing them in charmingly rambly books (The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents) whose basic theme seems to be that the world is really weird and scientists are deliberately covering up the weirdness. It’s like paranoid conspiracy theory without the invective. Fort’s followers keep up the tradition, searching the world for unusual phenomena and grinding their brains down to the corpus callosum to come up with reasons why all scientific explanations fail. You can probably imagine what sort of Holy Grail book I might have expected from a Fortean.

But the Fortean connection wasn’t actually the main reason I was surprised. I was surprised because, without ever really thinking about it, I’ve learned to expect that almost every book about the Holy Grail will be full of hooey.

It’s almost impossible to find a book about the Holy Grail that doesn’t ignore all history and logic in the most cavalier manner imaginable. There’s something about the Grail legends that brings out the wacko in everyone. Mike and I wrote The Grail Code precisely because almost all the other books about the Holy Grail went so wildly off the rails, and none of them showed much interest in what we thought was the most interesting stage of the development of the legends: the magnificent allegories spun out of the Grail legends by great literary figures like Walter Map. We had to write it because it was the book we wanted to read.

What is it about the Holy Grail that makes nutters of us all? I’m going to start right off by admitting that I don’t really know the answer, so all you’ll get from me is a bunch of speculation. Which is all you ever get from me on this site anyway. Stay tuned: in the next installment, we look at what it is that makes the Holy Grail legend the greatest legend of all.

The BBC reports that the writers’ strike has delayed the production of Angels and Demons, the “prequel” to The Da Vinci Code. It’s based on a book Dan Brown wrote before he wrote The Da Vinci Code, using the same hero and the same plot. Apparently “the script needs more work,” which is a bit of a puzzle for a number of reasons. First, couldn’t they just use the same script they used for The Da Vinci Code? I didn’t read Angels and Demons, but my wife (who read it for her book club at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop) tells me that a few global search-and-replace runs would take care of all the minor differences. Second, why does a script that needs more work bother them now if it didn’t when they made The Da Vinci Code? Third, doesn’t delaying until the script can be polished pose a slight danger that the fascination with all things Dan Brown could fizzle before the movie is released? Fourth, when you announce to the world that the script for a Dan Brown story isn’t quite good enough, aren’t you just inviting long paragraphs of dripping sarcasm from the grumposphere? Fifth, if you’re adapting “a novel so bad that it gives novels a bad name” (as Salman Rushdie said about The Da Vinci Code), isn’t a bad script what you actually want? And sixth, if you’re a writer struggling to make a living from your writing, can you avoid lapsing into unseemly grouchiness when you see the Dan Brown empire poised to make another few hundred million dollars? Apparently not.

This afternoon I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore and happened to notice a copy of Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress. It was remaindered at $5.98, then marked 50% off that price, then plunked on the “LAST CHANCE” table.

All of which reminds me that no one is talking about Dan Brown anymore, which is a pity because he’s such an easy target. I have not read any of his other novels; my wife read Angels and Demons for her book club, which she thought was pretty much the same book as The Da Vinci Code except with a different MacGuffin. Other people have told me the same thing about his other books. Perhaps he was the sort of writer who only had one book in him, but he kept writing it until it caught on. I admire persistence. According to the Wikipedia’s article, his future projects include two books that also sound like the same book with a different MacGuffin—one about a secret society that’s kept a vast conspiracy going for centuries and the other about, um, a secret society that’s kept a vast conspiracy going for centuries. The fans won’t be disappointed.

What makes me proud to be an American is that none of the members of these age-old conspiracies, all of which have members at the highest levels of government, have been allowed to kill Dan Brown, or even to imprison him on charges of blasphemy. “Should you kill people because you don’t like their books?” Salman Rushdie (a real novelist) once asked rhetorically. His answer was that you shouldn’t. “Even Dan Brown must live,” he said. “Preferably not write, but live.”

Meanwhile, Dan Brown’s descent into irrelevant remainderhood reminds me how glad I am that Mike and I didn’t write a book about The Da Vinci Code. If you haven’t read The Grail Code yet, now is an excellent time—now that you can actually enjoy the history of the Grail legends without worrying about what Dan Brown said about them.

It’s time to play everyone’s favorite game, “Silly or Not Silly,” in which we mock other people’s sincerely held religious beliefs.

People sometimes ask me, “Is it right to mock the sincerely held religious beliefs of others?” And I answer, “Yes, it is, if they’re silly.”

But everything hinges on how we define “silly,” doesn’t it? And it’s very hard to put a definition into words that will distinguish what makes one set of beliefs silly and another not silly.

Perhaps the best way to get a feeling for the distinction is by looking at a few examples.

Christianity: Not silly.

“Those cars weren’t made for the sinners, they were made for the righteous”: Silly.

Traditional Sioux religion: Not silly.

Herds of Rayon-clad suburbanites in fume-belching SUVs stampeding down to a little zoo in the countryside outside Pittsburgh to hear what the white buffalo has to say to them: Silly.

Darwinian evolution: Not silly.

Energy, in physics, as the capacity to work: Not silly.

Practically everything anyone says about “evolution” or “energy” in a “journal of meaningful living”: Silly.

Ancient Maya cosmology and mathematics: Not silly.

Ancient Hindu philosophy: Not silly.

Christianity: Again, not silly.

Pittsburgh new-agers gathering in the West End to celebrate some milestone in the Maya calendar by transmitting energy through the crown chakra in order to bring about the return of Christ consciousness, prepare for the next stage in human evolution, and celebrate the Four Rivers (one of them spiritual) of Pittsburgh as a mirror of the Milky Way Galaxy: Silly.

Looking at these examples, I think we can begin to see what distinguishes certain systems of belief as “silly.” Well-developed and internally consistent systems of belief taught and expanded by generations of the wisest minds in ancient cultures are inherently not silly. That’s true even if you believe they’re false. A Hindu would say that Christian theology is at best an imperfect understanding of the world, but Hindu philosophers admire the subtle wisdom of Christ and never hesitate to say so. Likewise, Christians may not approve of the ancient Maya religion, which included liberal doses of human sacrifice; but no one can say that it was silly, and no one can fail to marvel at the brilliant Maya mathematicians who calculated numbers in the billions when Europeans were still struggling to multiply CXLVI by LXXIV.

But when people raid these ancient systems of belief, take a few technical terms and a misinterpreted idea or two, and toss them all in the blender on the “puree” setting, the result is always silly.

In fact, we can put the matter more simply than that. Swallowing a religion whole is not silly; cherry-picking the bits of it you want to believe is silly.

That’s a very hard saying for Americans to hear. People like me are used to being told we should think for ourselves. We bristle at the idea of someone else telling us what we should believe. Why, that’s fascist or communist or something, isn’t it?

But what does the Bible say about it? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That’s so important the Bible says it at least twice, once in Psalm 111:10 and once in Proverbs 9:10; Proverbs 1:7 gives us the almost identical variant “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”

Now, scientists instinctively know that principle. Not that all scientists even believe in God, although probably most of them do. (It depends, of course, on how you define “scientist”; if you’re an atheist who defines “scientist” as “someone who doesn’t believe in God,” you’ll come up with a different result.) But scientists know that you can’t build your own wisdom on nothing. You can’t decide what you want to believe about physics without first learning the accumulated knowledge of generations of orthodox physicists. You can’t learn what you need to know about dentistry without first accepting that dentistry is already a well-developed science about which your knowledge is less than adequate.

Or, in more general terms, you can’t learn anything until you accept that you have something to learn.

That’s why cherry-picking bits of different religions according to your own whims invariably leads to silliness. When you pick just the beliefs you like from a cafeteria of religions, you’re merely confirming your own prejudices. You don’t learn anything at all, because you never admit any ideas into your mind that weren’t there already. And a closed mind feeding on itself is—well, it tends to be rather silly.

Lancelot (funny how I managed to work him in after 750 words or so) spends the first half of Walter Map’s giant Lancelot cycle pretty well convinced that he knows what’s what. It takes the quest for the Holy Grail to teach him that he has something to learn. Only after he has failed abjectly in his quest is he willing to admit that he doesn’t know everything.

That’s a classic conversion experience. It’s exactly the opposite of the middlebrow cafeteria approach to religion. Instead of picking the beliefs that correspond most closely to what he’s sure he already knows, Lancelot finally realizes that there’s a gaping emptiness inside him, and prays that it might be filled. He acknowledges that the wisdom outside himself is greater than the wisdom inside himself. He’s ready to learn.

And that is why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The truly wise, like Socrates and Solomon, know that they know nothing. Until we’re willing to admit the possibility of a wisdom greater than our own, we’ll never learn anything at all. And if we can’t learn anything, then we’ll never really have the precious freedom to choose what we believe.

I promised I’d spend some time talking about what books are really “great,” so I’ll do that now. But first, a few warnings.

1. Not everyone agrees on what books are “great,” because—obviously—not everyone agrees on what makes a “great” book.

2. Some books that are almost certainly “great” don’t fit well in some versions of a great-books education. A book must be not only great, but also discussable.

3. The books actually matter less than the method. This is the most startling fact about the “great books” method of learning: it really doesn’t depend nearly as much as you’d think on the greatness of the books. It depends much more on the method of approaching the books and learning from them.

4. Different books are appropriate for different ages. Second-graders are probably not ready for Einstein yet. (Although my six-year-old son has recently been captivated by string theory and M-theory, which has taught me not to make too many assumptions about what a child is ready for.)

Having said all that, I’ll venture a definition of a “great book”: A great book is a book we keep coming back to. We may not even like it, but we can’t escape it. It has become part of our shared cultural heritage, and even people who haven’t read the book have somehow absorbed something about it.

Lots of people hate Moby Dick, for example, and curse the literature professors who made them read it. But it’s always there on the reading lists. You can’t get away from it, because in the end it’s always worth thinking about, even if you hated it. And even if you haven’t read it, you still know about it. Animated cartoons aimed at children (I’m talking about you, SpongeBob) are quite willing to parody Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the great white whale—and the children know what’s going on.

Another example we might mention is the romances of the Holy Grail, especially the Walter Map version. We couldn’t giggle over our periodic lists of holy-grails-of if everybody hadn’t absorbed some notion of the Holy Grail, though almost always without reading the romances.

No two people will make exactly the same list of great books, and the lists will change over time. I’m sure many people thought The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a shoo-in for “great book” status, but who reads it now? (Robert Benchley gets credit as the lonely voice who called it right: “Of course it is possible for a man to write a great book from which no one would quote. That is probably happening all the time. But it is because no one has read it. Here we have an author [Vicente Blasco Ibáñez] whose vogue in this country, according to statistics, is equal to that of any writer of novels in the world. And as soon as his publicity department stops functioning, I should like to lay a little bet that he will not be heard of again.”)

But, on the whole, the lists will be remarkably similar, and they’ll be more similar the farther back in time we go. The colder the author is in his grave, the more sure we can be that the book is really “great.”

Homer, the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Rousseau, Marx, Einstein, just to name a few—these will always be on lists of great books, because they changed the course of human thought forever. It doesn’t matter if you love Luther and hate Calvin, or love Calvin and hate Luther, or hate both, or love both because you have a strangely split and warped personality: their ideas are just too big and important to ignore.

So much for determining which books are great; that leaves us with the problem of which great books are suitable. The answer varies widely according to the subject and according to the target audience.

For high-school or college students learning geometry, for example, Euclid is the obvious and only choice. For biology, you’ll want to start with Aristotle and work up through Harvey and into more modern writers; similarly, for physics, Aristotle through Galileo and Newton up to Einstein and beyond.

The assumption, of course, is that you’ll be using some variant of the great-books method to teach every subject. Many students will be lucky to get a literature class taught that way.

For young children, some of the best things to read are in the Bible. Jesus’ parables are perfect. They’re short, but infinitely thought-provoking. The best discussion I ever saw in a Sunday-school class was on the parable of the workmen in the vineyard, in which the employer pays the last to arrive as much as he pays the ones who worked all day. “That’s not fair!” multiple children shouted at once. Well, why not? Didn’t the first to arrive agree on the payment? And so the discussion goes. Our ordinary assumptions are questioned and our complacency offended right away, which is exactly what Jesus intended. Before you know it, an hour has gone by, and everyone—not least the teacher—has met new ideas and thought new thoughts.

Little fables like Aesop’s are also good for young children. Even The Cat in the Hat is worth talking about—or perhaps I should say especially The Cat in the Hat, with its slightly frightening moral ambiguity. It even ends with a perfect opening question for a discussion.

Experiment often shows which books are good for discussions and which aren’t. Some books that are first-rate just never seem to lead to good discussions.

Finally, there’s the cultural question, which is tricky. St. John’s and some other great-books schools follow mainly the western tradition—not because no one outside the West ever wrote anything worthwhile, but because the readings build one upon another. It can be very hard to approach books that come from a tradition completely outside our own without some serious training in the languages and culture of that tradition. The Graduate Institute at St. John’s offers an Eastern Classics program that includes tutorials in either Sanskrit or Chinese, just as the regular undergraduate program includes tutorials in ancient Greek and French.

Anyway, why should I come up with a list when other people have done it already? Here are some lists you can look at and argue about:

The St. John’s College reading list. This reading list was first put together in the 1930s. It changes a bit every so often, and it’s not always quite identical on the two campuses (one in Annapolis, the other in Santa Fe). But it’s been remarkably stable over the years. It’s actually hard to find another list of “great books” that isn’t at least influenced by this one.

The Britannica Great Books series. If it bears a strong resemblance to the St. John’s list, that’s no accident: the Britannica list was heavily influenced by the St. John’s list.

Thomas Aquinas College has a program modeled after the one at St. John’s, but leaning more toward Catholic Christian writers.

The three lists above all have common roots. Here are some lists that are more or less independent of that tradition:

The Harvard Classics. The famous “Five-Foot Shelf” was a serious attempt to gather every important work in one set and sell them all to the upwardly-mobile as decorative accessories for the well-furnished parlor. Even today it’s not hard to find old copies of the Harvard Classics that have obviously never been read. But it was a good list, and you can read them all on line. It also has the advantage of having been compiled before the St. John’s list, which makes it unusually independent.

The Western Canon, by Alan Bloom. Not really as independent as all that, since Bloom was good friends with some of the tutors at St. John’s and was well aware of the St. John’s list. But his list is interesting and long.

Malaspina Great Books is a very long table of books, each entry with information under five categories: birth, death, period, category, and woman. (The “woman” column contains either “yes” or “no,” as appropriate. Some stunning revelations here. Who knew that “George Eliot” was a woman? I had always assumed he was just a cross-dresser. And the implication of the table that a man is in some way a failed woman is a profounder bit of philosophy than the compilers perhaps intended.)

TheGreatBooks.com is a site presenting a curriculum designed to teach the Christian worldview through the great books.

The 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time, selected by a poll of famous authors in 2002. It leans more heavily toward more recent books, and I suspect some of those would have already dropped off the list if you took the same poll now. But you’ll still find a large overlap with all the other lists, proving that there really are some books you just can’t get away from.

A list of colleges offering great-books programs, from the National Association of Scholars. A very large number of them are modeled on the St. John’s program.

A huge list of lists of great books.

So the Templars–according to the new information that’s just come to light–were found not guilty of heresy, but guilty of parking in a loading zone or something. The Knights Templar, as everyone who has suffered through The Da Vinci Code knows, are often said to have been custodians of the Holy Grail. “Disentangling fact and fiction about them is difficult,” says the BBC, somehow failing to add that most of the difficulty comes from peddlers of fiction passing off their wares as fact.

But it will be a bit less difficult now that the Chinon Parchment is published. Granted, it’s in a limited-edition facsimile that’s worth more than my car, but it’s still out there now. This is exciting news for historians, but not necessarily for the peddlers of fiction. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re probably already writing new books about how the Chinon Parchemt proves everything they’ve ever said about Mary Magdalene and the little green men from the flying cigars.

Still, it’s always exciting when an important historical document comes to light. For centuries it was miscatalogued, lost in a box somewhere in the Vatican’s secret archive. I have the same problem with my books, so I sympathize with the archivists. It’s not easy keeping track of twenty years or so of accumulation. I can imagine what a mess it must be after you’ve been collecting books for twenty centuries.

Back to the Great Books shortly, but fist some other Arthurian business. “King Arthur’s Saints” is a fascinating roundup of all the Welsh holy women and men who had something to do with the historical Arthur, if there was a historical Arthur. Many thanks to “Suburban Banshee” for “Aliens in This World.” King Arthur without his halo of legendary saints would have been nonsense to the Welsh in the Dark Ages. “It’s very sad that it’s not part of popular consciousness, just because it wasn’t Malory’s big thing,” the Banshee says. It wasn’t Malory’s big thing, we might add, because–curiously enough–it wasn’t Walter Map’s big thing, either: he needed sinners, not saints, to build his grand allegory of sin and redemption. So here’s a side of dark-ages British folklore we don’t get to dip into very often, but I know I’ll be doing more dipping now that I’ve been pointed in that direction.