(UPDATE: For everyone who’s speculated that the real reason for the Da Vinci Code lawsuit is to drum up publicity for the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors, here’s more fuel for the fire: A publicist pitched me this morning on Michael Baigent’s The Jesus Papers, which promises “explosive new evidence that will challenge everything we know about the life and death of Jesus and the very foundations of Western thought.” And it comes out just three weeks from today…based on how Baigent did on the stand, that could turn out pretty awkward.)
As Lawrence Van Gelder summarizes in the NYT arts section, the Da Vinci Code copyright infringement trial appears to have gotten a lot simpler, as Holy Blood, Holy Grail co-author Michael Baigent, who’s accusing Dan Brown of lifting more than a dozen points from the first book’s “Jesus and Magdalene, sittin’ in a tree” thesis, acknowledged, after Random House’s attorney pointed out nearly half of Baigent’s enumerated ideas don’t even appear in Brown’s novel, “I think my language was infelicitous.” Oops. As The Times of London notes, his day went downhill from there: Confronted with the inaccuracies in the witness statement filed as evidence, Baigent replied, “I believed it to be true, but I am prepared to state now that I was not right.”
Too bad Linda Tsaing of The Times didn’t get a chance to ask Baigent’s legal counsel, Andrew Norris, about that in her otherwise engaging Q&A. Well, some folks will surely see this as payback for representing that Baroque music scholar who beat up classical-music label Hyperion over royalties for a recorded performance of transcriptions of pieces by a 17th-century French composer. The Sunday Times also discusses how Holy Blood is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to far-out conspiracy theories; at the Observer, David Smith finds earlier speculation about Jesus’s marriage.