Michael stared at the white-bearded man standing before him.  He couldn't believe what he had just heard the man say.

(Wait a minute... that's how the previous chapter started.  Let's try again...)

Michael stared at the white-bearded man sitting before him.  He couldn't believe what he had just heard the man say.

(Ah... that's better.)

"Ex... excuse me?" Michael said, still not sure if he had heard the man right.  "Did you say that... I... am the key?"

"Yes, Mr. Brooks," Driveling replied, sitting back in the couch and smiling that odd smile again, "you are the key to the cryptex."

Bev looked back and forth between Driveling and her husband.  Of all the unbelievable things she had heard over the past two days, this took the cake.

"My husband... is the key to all of this?" she said hesitantly, wanting to make sure she was understanding Driveling correctly.

"Oh, yes, Beverly," he said, a little too familiarly for her liking, "he is indeed."

"Well... I know that Michael has told me and the kids some pretty extraordinary things ever since we found the dummy on the stage the other night," Bev replied, "and I now know that there's far more to this People of the Southwind secret society than I had ever imagined, but after all that, Michael told us earlier today that he doesn't know the key to open the cryptex!  How can he himself be the key?"

"Ah, that's the final mystery!" Driveling replied, his voice rising with excitement.  "How your husband can be the key."

Bev, Driveling and Ms. Darwish all looked at Michael, who looked back and forth uncomfortably between them.  "Don't look at me," he finally said, shrugging his shoulders.  "I got us up to the Holy Fivefold String, but anything beyond that is a mystery to me."

"Then allow me to initiate you to the next level," Driveling said esoterically, rising from the couch.  "The level at which you will finally understand... everything.  Life... religion... the Grail..."  He turned to face his companion.  "Ms. Darwish," he said, "would you please start up my laptop?"

"Yes, Kern," she replied, unzipping the carrying case and removing the computer, which, for lack of any nearby surface, she placed on her lap and turned on.

It was a laptop, Michael thought to himself.  He looked closer.  A Dell.

After about a minute of everyone staring at the screen while Windows booted up (yes, staring at the screen always makes it boot faster), the computer finally brought up a desktop display full of icons.  Driveling held out his hand to the woman, who lifted the laptop up to him.  Cradling the machine in the crook of his left arm, Driveling turned to face Michael and Bev.

"Witness," he intoned with academic solemnity, "the greatest cover-up of all time!"

Michael and Bev both stared at him, she with a dubious expression on her face, and Michael with one eyebrow arched, his arms crossed in front of his chest.  "And that is...?" he said in reply.

Squaring his feet and pointing his right index finger emphatically toward the heavens (well, toward the ceiling, actually), Driveling proclaimed, "Everything you believe about Christianity is false!"

What does this have to do with...? Michael started to ask himself as Driveling took a deep breath and continued speaking.

"The Bible is a human book, written, copied and translated by men; the early church taught that Jesus was merely a man, not divine; Jesus and Mary Magdalene were secretly married and had a daughter together; Constantine was a pagan who imposed orthodox Christianity upon the Roman Empire as a matter of convenience and opportunism; he then chose the books of the New Testament at the Council of Nicea and forced the church to accept them; only at this time was Jesus declared to be the Son of God by a very close vote of the bishops at the Council; after Nicea the church excised all elements of the 'divine feminine' from Christianity; the books of the New Testament underwent wholesale rewriting to hide the truth about what they originally said about Jesus; all other Gospels and writings of the early church that taught that Jesus was just a man were summarily banned, burned and destroyed; the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts reveal the truth about both John the Baptist and the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene; the bloodline of Jesus and Mary runs through the royal French Merovingian line and survives to this day; the Priory of Sion guards and protects the secret of the Holy Grail, which, rather than being the cup of the Lord's Supper, is in reality the womb of Mary Magdalene herself; and the truth of all this is hidden in Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper," Driveling finally finished, gasping to draw his next breath.

Michael stared at the man, his eyebrow still arched.  "You're not used to going so long between breaths, are you?" he said.

"No, not really," Driveling panted, leaning against the mantel.

Bev looked back and forth at Michael and Driveling.  She had never heard such things before.  Fortunately, her husband had.

Michael suddenly found the stranger before him to seem far less impressive and imposing than he had before he had uttered his run-on sentence.  "I assume that I'm allowed the opportunity to respond to your... drivel," Michael finally responded.

Driveling eyed Michael.  How often has he heard that pun before? Michael wondered.  "Yes, yes," Driveling replied, finally catching his breath.

"Good," Michael replied, standing up and extending his hand toward the man, "but first allow me to properly introduce myself.  Michael Everett Brooks, Master of Divinity, 1989, Master of Theology, 1991, Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia."  Driveling took Michael's hand and shook it uncertainly.  "I didn't just have to take Church History in seminary," Michael added, "I had to pass it in order to graduate."  Driveling swallowed.

"Firstly," Michael began, crossing his arms before him, "we know that the Bible is a human book."

"You... you do?" Driveling said, seemingly taken aback.

"Yes," Michael replied, "people, men for sure (and perhaps the occasional woman) wrote the books, psalms, writings, prophecies, Gospels, Acts, epistles and apocalypses that make up the Bible."

"So," Driveling said, sounding not nearly as sure of himself as he had moments before, "you're not surprised or offended at my saying that the Bible didn't drop from heaven?"

"We believe in its divine inspiration," Michael continued, "that God in his grace and wisdom worked in and through the human authors who wrote the Bible, but we don't believe that God dictated it on a dictaphone or typed it up in heaven on a divine word processor and faxed it in.  After all," he added, "the Gospel of John says, 'In the beginning was the Word,' not, 'In the beginning was the Microsoft Word.'"  Driveling looked toward his companion, who merely shrugged her shoulders.

"Secondly," Michael went on, annoyed at Driveling's apparent lack of a grasp on church history, "while a few scattered Jewish-Christian groups in Egypt believed only in Jesus' humanity, the forebears of what became orthodoxy early on emphasized both his humanity and his divinity.  Rather than falling into separatism (the idea that Jesus had two separate natures, one human and one divine), docetism (the idea that Jesus only appeared to be human), or adoptionsim (the idea that Jesus was 'adopted' as the Son of God at his baptism), the early orthodox, or proto-orthodox, if you will, conceived and maintained the paradox of Jesus' full humanity and full divinity centuries before Nicea, at which time what was already believed and accepted by the majority of the church was affirmed."

"Well, yes, but..." Driveling replied, scratching his head.

"Thirdly, Constantine genuinely believed that he owed his military and political success to the God of the Christians," Michael continued.  "While he appears to have conflated some elements of his old pagan beliefs with his new Christian faith, he truly believed that Christianity was the one true religion and that it was only right that it be proclaimed as the official religion of the Roman Empire."

"Of course," Driveling said, clearing his throat, "but..."

"Fourthly," Michael added, "Constantine had nothing to do with the 'choosing' of the books of the New Testament.  Some years after he had proclaimed Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, he called a Council of bishops representing all the churches of the Empire to Nicea so that they could establish a consensus of faith and practice for the church as a whole.  He didn't tell them what to believe or not to believe.  In fact, the issue of the New Testament canon wasn't even addressed at Nicea.  It wasn't until the time of the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius some forty years after Nicea that the twenty-seven books of our New Testament were officially proclaimed as the canon.  Even then, this wasn't something new that a single bishop imposed upon the church; he simply affirmed what had come to be the church's usage and practice for quite some time.  In fact, the Muratorian Canon, an ancient canonical list dating to the latter half of the second century, already listed twenty-two of the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as being authoritative for the church, including the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... and this was more than a century before Constantine and Nicea."  Driveling coughed uncomfortably.

"Fifthly," Michael forged ahead, "as I said three paragraphs ago, the Council of Nicea didn't 'declare' Jesus to be divine for the first time in church history but rather affirmed what had already been believed and discussed about his nature for centuries.  The bishops did carry out a vote on the matter of his divinity, but it was to determine the nature of his divinity, not whether or not he was divine.  Incidentally," Michael chided, "what you called the bishops' 'very close vote' was actually by a margin of 316-2.  Calling that a 'very close vote' is like saying that Ronald Reagan won the 1984 presidential election by the 'very close' electoral vote of 525-13."  Driveling started examining the paint on the wall next to him.

"Sixthly," Michael continued, "there is no evidence whatsoever in any of our surviving sources, 'orthodox' or 'heretical,' that Christianity ever embraced the 'divine feminine.'  Christianity grew out of Judaism, which was unique among religions in the ancient Mediterranean world in that its God had no female consort.  Also, in the New Testament Gospels Jesus constantly refers to and addresses God as 'Father,' not 'Mother' or 'Sister'; the Gospel of Mark even preserves the Aramaic word 'Abba,' which means 'Father' in Jesus' own language, in the story of his prayer in Gethsemane before his arrest; the Pauline and general epistles regularly refer to God as 'the Father'; and the book of Revelation consistently depicts God as King and Judge.  The church did not remove elements of the 'divine feminine' from Christianity after Nicea because there was never any 'divine feminine' in Christianity in the first place."  Driveling stroked his beard.

"Seventhly," Michael pushed on, "while the papyrus and manuscript evidence does show that both accidental and deliberate changes were made to the books of the New Testament over the centuries as they were copied and translated by hand, there is no evidence of wholesale rewriting of the books to make them say something other than what they already said to begin with about Jesus' divinity and humanity.  In order for that to have happened, someone would have needed to find and rewrite every single papyrus and manuscript copy of the books of the New Testament in existence across the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Europe, destroy all the evidence of what the manuscripts had originally said, and have absolutely no one else say anything about or against what they were doing."  Driveling looked at his watch.

"Eighthly," Michael moved ahead, "while other Gospels and writings that were deemed heretical were indeed rejected and banned, most of those other writings make Jesus look not like an ordinary man but rather like an ascended Jedi Master out of Star Wars.  For example, the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter has Christ separating from Jesus at the crucifixion and laughing at the proceedings, Basilides taught that when Simon of Cyrene was carrying Jesus' cross Jesus pulled a supernatural switcheroo and made Simon look like himself and himself look like Simon so that poor Simon ended up being crucified instead (all of which Basilides' 'Jesus' found to be immensely amusing), and the Acts of John says that Jesus' body was sometimes soft to the touch, sometimes as hard as stone and often immaterial, that Jesus' feet lit up the ground when he walked but that he never left footprints, and that Jesus never blinked his eyes.  Does this sound like 'an ordinary man' to you?  Compared to this stuff, the Jesus of the New Testament Gospels, who was born, grew up, ate, slept, drank, hungered, thirsted, became angry, wept, suffered, bled and died, is boringly human... as well as being the Son of God."  Driveling examined his fingernails.

"Ninthly," Michael pressed on, "the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing about John the Baptist, Jesus or Mary Magdalene.  Period.  Now, the Nag Hammadi Gnostic writings do speak of John the Baptist, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but they speak of them in Gnostic terms as revelators of 'hidden truths,' not as ordinary people who might marry and have children.  To the Gnostics, procreation and childbirth were works of the 'ignorant' creator god that served only to entrap more 'divine sparks' in the 'poverty' of human flesh; the idea of Jesus and Mary Magdalene marrying and having children would have been anathema to them.  In fact, in the Gospel of the Egyptians Jesus is actually represented as saying that he came to 'destroy the works of the female,' i.e., to put an end to procreation and childbirth.  True, the Gospel of Philip does say that the 'consort' of Christ is Mary Magdalene and that he would often 'kiss her on the...' but here there's a hole in the text.  Kiss her on the what?  The mouth?  The cheek?  The forehead?  The dock of the bay?  So what?  Besides, elsewhere in Philip it's made clear that 'kissing' is symbolic of imparting spiritual truths, not romance.  On top of that, this Gospel wasn't even written until the third century; why should it be considered more believable than the canonical Gospels, all of which were written in the mid- to late first century and none of which even suggest that Jesus and Mary were married?"  Driveling nervously jingled his keys in his pocket and looked back at his companion.

"Tenthly," Michael continued, "mitochondrial DNA analysis of the foot bone of a known Merovingian queen from the seventh century A.D. found no Middle Eastern genetic markers in her DNA, only European ones, indicating that there was no Middle Eastern blood in her ancestry.  No Middle Eastern blood, no alleged bloodline of Jesus."  Driveling took a breath and drummed his fingers on the mantel.

"Eleventhly," Michael persisted, "the 'ancient' Priory of Sion didn't even exist until 1956 when Pierre Plantard, long known to French authorities as a charlatan and con artist with delusions of grandeur, invented the organization out of whole cloth and back-filled its roster of alleged 'grand masters' with famous personages from history.  He went so far as to proclaim himself the true king of France (of Merovingian ancestry and therefore of Jesus' alleged bloodline, of course).  He finally admitted under oath in 1993 that the whole thing was a hoax and he died in obscurity in Paris in 2000."  Driveling coughed.

"Twelfthly," Michael kept up, "no one ever imagined that Mary Magdalene's womb was the Holy Grail until Dan Brown popularlized the notion in his novel The Da Vinci Code, which, for all the reasons I've already outlined, required Brown to rewrite the history of Christianity to make it fit his plot line.  You would have already known all this if you had read the facts page at the beginning of this story."  Driveling shuffled his feet.

"And thirteenthly, 'Reverend' Driveling," Michael concluded, "show me how all this is supposed to fit into Da Vinci's The Last Supper."