the treasures of the templar
The Knights Templar were a curious historical footnote for centuries. Warrior monks who helped the Crusaders hold the city of Jerusalem and guarded pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Richer than kings and an army in their own right, their powers came from a mysterious source, something they found under the ruins of the temple that was once the center of the Jewish faith. But what could they have found in the catacombs under the Temple Mount to give them so much sway and so much money?
Scholars have suggested everything from the Holy Grail to the severed head of John the Baptist, to a historical record of Jesus of Nazareth’s family. But there’s a big problem with almost every theory being posited today. Why would Jews rush to bury Christian relics along with scrolls and treasures of their own faith? Christianity became a major religion under the patronage of Emperor Constantine of the Byzantine Empire, about 300 years after the birth of the faith and over two centuries after the Romans sacked Jerusalem, burned down the temple and sent Jews into exile from the city.
The Jews have buried treasures and important documents under their temples in times of turmoil, but they buried what was important to them. In 70 AD, Christianity was a tiny sect competing with dozens of other small religions, seldom recognized by anyone other than a few small groups of converts scattered around the Fertile Crescent and in huge melting pots of trading cities. For the high priests of the Second Temple with precious little time to hide what they could from the Roman legions, gathering up what would one day be considered the relics of a new faith, just doesn’t make sense.
There’s also a problem with the whole concept of the Holy Grail. The first time the Grail appears in literature, it’s part of a Dark Age legend about King Arthur and his knights. For some reason, these tales have been taken at face value as historical accounts. We sometimes forget that our ancestors also wrote fictional tales with subtle metaphors and analyses of current events played out by mythical characters or personifications. And in Percival, that’s exactly what King Arthur and the Holy Grail were. They were metaphors for hope in a Europe slipping into chaos and plagues as the classical world’s great empires fell. But the catchy tales lived on and became a persistent part of modern mythology, the fiction fusing with historical hunches. How could the Templars discover something that wasn’t there in the first place?
So what could the warrior monks find that would give them so much power and money? Well, a simple explanation would be an ancient Jewish treasure. Gold coins from the first century are nothing to sneeze at and discovering a secret stash in the Temple Mount catacombs would’ve given the Templars immediate wealth. As they uses ancient gold to find churches and provide loans to nobles and royals, it would also give them the immense power that would one day lead to their undoing.
