Jim Marrs - Rule by Secrecy - The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freema

found refuge in the south of France, and in a Jewish community there preserved theit lineage. During the 5th century this lineage appears to have intermarried with the royal line of the Pranks, thus engendering the Merovingian dynasty. In 496 A.D. the church made a pact with this dynasty, pledging itself in perpetuity of the Merovingian bloodline— presumably in the full knowledge of that bloodline's true identity. . . .

When the Church colluded in . .. the subsequent betrayal of the Merovingian bloodline, it rendered itself guilty of a crime that could neithet be rationalized nor expunged, it could only be suppressed. . . ."

Author Laurence Gardner, as an internationally recognized expert on sovereign and chivalric genealogy, was permitted to study the private records of thirty-three European royal families. He confirmed that the Merovingians were related to Jesus, but through his brother James, who Gardner claimed was the same person as Joseph of Arimathea.

Gardner also made a persuasive argument for Mary Magdalene as the spouse of Jesus in his 1996 book Bloodline of the Holy Grail.

"It was never any secret... for the majority of these people [European royalty], that Jesus was married and that Jesus had heirs, because it is written as such in very many family archives. . . . The published papers of Mary, Queen of Scots talk about it at length. The papers of James II of England, who wasn't deposed until 1688, talk of it at length... I was actually in a position where I was presented with . . . some very, very old documentation, not only last opened in seventeen-whatever, but actually documented and written down hundreds of years before that," he explained, adding, "I also had access to Templar documents, to the very documents that the Knights Templar brought out in Europe in 1128 and confronted the Church establishment with, and frightened the life out of them with, because these were documents that talked about bloodline and genealogy. . . . The early Christian Church leaders adopted scriptures and teachings that would obscure the truth about the royal bloodline of Jesus."

The early church was fearful not only of Jesus' descendants but of women in general. Women were prohibited from teaching or becoming priests—a prohibition only now being relaxed. Clergymen were required to be celibate and never marry, despite the clear admonition by Paul in I Timothy 3:2 that a bishop or church leader should have a wife.

According to Gardner and other recent authors, women were denigrated by the early church in order to preserve the power and authority