Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54310 in Books
• Published on: 1993-07-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

The Legend of the Holy Grail Continued
In THE WOMAN WITH THE ALABASTER JAR Margaret Starbird pursues further the topic made popular in HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL. Specifically she explores the possibility of a marriage between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene which produces a child after Mary Magdalene manages to escape to the southern coast of France. This legend leads in turn to the Grail heresy which suggests that certain families in southern France can trace their ancestry back to Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Starbird's book is a story about a heresy which keeps popping up throughout history in spite of the best efforts of the church to stamp it out - particularly during the inquisition. The author's reasoning is that if there is so much smoke then there must actually be a fire somewhere. Since the Grail heresy left an impressive legacy in art, music and folklore, Starbird is able to offer us numerous examples of the persistence of the heresy. She does this in great detail covering such subjects as the hidden meanings concealed in tarot cards and their connection to the Grail heresy.

Margaret Starbird is an enthusiastic writer who can tell a good story. She is not composing a work of scholarship but instead is investigating a mystery - the enigma of a legend which gets more intriguing with the passage of time and each new advance in the quest for the historical Jesus.

Good, but...
Having read the Da Vinci Code, and having been startled by the simplicity of the explanation, and delighted by the new sense of human wholesomeness that it gave to Christinity, I was led to read around the subject. This book seemed to be one of two that most people suggested.
There's a lot of good stuff in it, but it does get a little too emotional towards the end, for my taste anyway. Also, some of the explanations and conclusions struck me as being just a little too contrived.

Nevertheless, I'd recommend it as required reading for someone interested in the topic. I'd have liked to give it another half star.

Another View On Religion
This was a good book but not great. It offered some outstanding nuggets of information which presented me with much food for thought. The idea that Mary Magdalen was actually married to Jesus Christ and the Holy Grail is not a cup or chalice at all but Mary's womb as she carried the "bloodline" of Jesus to Egypt and then to Europe is very interesting. She backs up this thought by analyzing art of the dark ages and the "understood" meaning behind it.
There was obviously a lot of research that went into this book and I must admit that it was very intriguing. Yet I could not bring myself to believe most of it. There seemed to be a lot of leaps made between some of the information. But I do think there is enough here to warrant some more research on the subject. It would be tough to find out much of what happened because of the Inquisition and the fact that the Roman-Catholic Church purged most of the records of other religions as they stepped on them throughout time as being heresy.

In short the beginning of the book really pulled me in but from the mid point on I felt that it was a bit reaching in trying to defend the ideas it presented. But it certainly is a good book to read in combination with other books on the subject. Just don't make it your first and only one on Christianity.