Margaret's Story
A scholar who set out to refute a heresy — and found its evidence instead.
Margaret Starbird's theological beliefs were shaken when she first encountered the claim that Jesus was married and that his bloodline survived in Europe. A Roman Catholic and scholar of comparative literature and European history, she set out to disprove it.
What she found instead was a coherent body of evidence for the forgotten Bride of Jesus — and the survival of that belief in medieval Europe.
Her research traces the heresy of the Holy Grail, whose adherents held that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were wed, and that his wife and child fled to Gaul during persecutions of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem.
Suppressed by the Inquisition from the mid-thirteenth century, the tradition survived in an underground stream of esoteric wisdom — guarded and passed down by artists, artisans, poets, alchemists, and the Knights Templar.
