"Here's where Lincoln and company shifted into conspiratorial overdrive. Borrowing the thesis of Hugh J. Schonfield's book, The Passover Plot, and grafting it onto the enigmatic Plantard clues, Lincoln and his co-authors fashioned a, well, daring theory. Stripped of syllogistic elegance, it goes something like this: Christ survived the crucifixion by "faking" his death or otherwise being "fruitful" before Good Friday, either way leaving behind the wife and kids. The "Christs" subsequently legged it to the south of France where they intermarried with the royal Franks to found what eventually became the mystical Merovingian Dynasty. Ergo, the real mission of the Templars and Priory of Zion: to safeguard not just the treasure of the Crusades, but to preserve the Grail, which appeared in medieval texts as "Sangraal" or "Sangreal," and which Lincoln et al. translated to mean sang real, or "royal blood." In other words: the dynastic legacy of Christ, literally."