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The Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages. The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed. The document is a record of the heresy hearings of the Templars before Pope Clement V in the 14th Century. The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely. Prof Barbara Frale, who stumbled across the parchment by mistake, says that it lays bare the rituals andceremonies over which the Templars were accused of heresy.
In the hearings before Clement V, the knights reportedly admitted spitting on the cross, denying Jesus and kissing the lower back of the man proposing them during initiation ceremonies. However, many of the confessions were obtained under torture and knights later recanted or tried to claim that their initiation ceremony merely mimicked the humiliation the knights would suffer if they fell into the hands of the Muslim leader Saladin. The leader of the order, Jacques de Molay, was one of those who confessed to heresy, but later recanted. He was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, the same year that the Pope dissolved theorder. However, according to Prof Frale, study of the document shows that the knights were not heretics as had been believed for 700 years. In fact she says "the Pope was obliged to ask for pardons from the knights... the document we have found absolves them". Details of the parchment will be published as part of Processus contra Templarios, a book that will be released by the Vatican's Secret Archive on 25 October.To view the rest of this article, please visit the source
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Patrick Barkham: The accountancy firm that looks after children's entertainers the Wiggles is not an obvious place to search for the Holy Grail, but that's where the trail led last night. It started with a simple quest - what on earth is a large advertisment headlined "The Ancient and Noble Order of The Knights Templar" doing in the Daily Telegraph? - and it led your intrepid investigator to the wilds of west London and then all the way back to the 12th century.It was around 1118 when the order of the Knights Templar was founded in the Holy Land by Hughes de Payens and eight other French knights to protect pilgrims and defend Jerusalem, which hadbeen captured by the Crusaders in 1099. 
Officials have closed the Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian for a week to allow filming of the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The medieval building has found new popularity because of its association with the best-selling novel. But concern has been expressed that the unprecedented interest in the chapel will be damaging unless it is strictly controlled. The chapel's trustees said protection of the site was always under review. Agreement for the use of the location has been agreed between the trustees and Rose Line Productions. Thefilm will star Tom Hanks as Professor Robert Langdon. 
Some might say it is a court case worthy of its subject matter: impenetrable, verging on the farcical and wrapped up in the minutiae of Christian theology. Amid the appropriately neo-gothic setting of the High Court in London, two British-based writers yesterday claimed that The Da Vinci Code, the loosely historical murder mystery, plagiarises a book they published more than 20 years earlier.The two, who specialise in historical conjecture, claim that its author, Dan Brown, cannibalised their text, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, to give his book plausibility and to save himself "time and effort" in independent research.Michael Baigent, 52,and Richard Leigh, 62, also said that it was not just random facts that were "lifted" but the whole "architecture" and "theme" of their book.At the heart of the case is their theory that Christ did not die on the cross but married Mary Magdalene and had a child, starting a bloodline that was protected by the Knights Templar and hushed up by the Catholic Church.Brown's thriller is also based on the notion that Jesus married Mary, starting a family in France where their descendants continue to live.While the arguments in the case will hardly trouble historians, millions of pounds of publishing profits are at stake, as is the proposed release of the film version of The Da Vinci Code.With sales of 40 million and counting since it waspublished in 2003, the book has become an international phenomenon, generating millions of pounds of publishing and tourism spin-offs.The film, starring Tom Hanks, Sir Ian McKellen and Audrey Tautou, is due to be released in May.Brown, a devout Christian who attended the case, emphatically denies stealing from Baigent and Leigh's work and is particularly adamant that he would never suggest that Jesus was not crucified on the cross.
