Excitement over ‘Holy Grail’ may be misplaced

Date Published: 04-Jun-2010

ENOUGH of that depressing week. Haven't you heard the good news? To some perhaps, the greatest news of all. You know that Holy Grail thing all the legends are about – Knights of the Round Table, Jones of the Indiana, so on? The very cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper?

They found it.

All right, the archaeologists involved aren't saying they have the Holy Grail exactly – or indeed, at all. They merely claim to have found a chalice with perhaps the earliest known written reference to Christ on it. Even this relatively modest assertion is controversial though.

After all, most would assume that the New Testament contained the first written reference to Christ. A certain inexactitude in dating however (of about three hundred years) presents the possibility that this object is up to a century older than the Biblical account, which would overturn our entire understanding of. . . ooh, all sorts.

Considering that the sum total of the revolutionary evidence consists of a big cup with ‘Christ’ written on it though, I wouldn't start ripping up the history books just yet.

Actually, the inscription in full reads "DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS," which – according to a guy – means either "by Christ the magician" or "the magician by Christ". While the latter reading suggests merely that middle-eastern potters were inclined to profanity, the former introduces the disturbing image of Jesus wearing a little black cape and asking you to pick a card. Perhaps a better translation would be “miracle-worker”, though in our times even that sounds like something to clean ovens.

There are a few immediate objections. One of course is that Christ was not Jesus' surname. It's only the Greek for anointed, which you could also translate as blessed or sanctified. So this cup could easily be saying "Blessed by a magician", which may be something along the lines of a warranty. (The fact that it was found with one handle missing suggests that the purchasers should have gone for the extended blessing.)

With only four words to go on, it's frankly pushing it to say even what language the inscription is in, never mind what it might have meant in the context of its time and place. It's in Greek letters, but of course this alphabet was used to write other tongues too. Caesar himself states that Celts used the Greek alphabet. And in this period they did not separate words with spaces, so the inscription might equally be meant to read DI ACHR STOU O GOIST AIS, which begins to look intriguingly like Irish. (Not a lot like Irish, but intriguingly like it.)

Quite what an Irish mug was doing in the waters off Egypt remains a mystery, though even to this day many Irish mugs will be found in such cheap holiday destinations.

What I'm saying here is that really, the chances of this artefact having anything at all to do with Jesus Christ are tiny. Nevertheless I think scholars around the world, archae- and theo-logical, should gather together to declare that, at long last, the true Holy Grail has been found. Because then we could tell Dan Brown to shut the hell up.