For Joyce, the story does not stop with the admittedly hearsay evidence supplied by an anonymous “professor” who disappears along with all of the evidence for his claims, never to be heard from again. After asking where the scroll could have disappeared, Joyce postulates that there is one country in the world which would especially like to discover its contents—Russia! When he arrived in Delhi, India he remembered that the “professor” had also said he was going to Delhi. Therefore, Joyce felt that he had verified his thesis when he spotted a Russian plane at the airport, although he apparently never questioned the presence of planes from various other countries at such an international airport. Russia had to have sent the plane to pick up the “professor” and his valuable scroll!^77
73 Joyce, The Jesus Scroll, p. 187; see also pp. 7–14.
74 Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, Holy Blood, p. 286.
75 Ibid., p. 372.
76 Peterson, “Legend,” p. 6A.
77 Joyce, The Jesus Scroll, pp. 158–159, 184.
To make matters worse, Joyce claims further evidence for his thesis in that a Russian official held a conference with the Vatican’s Pope Paul in 1967. Although there was never a hint of what transpired at this meeting, Joyce is sure that they were talking about the “professor’s” scroll! Russia was putting pressure on the Vatican, presumably with world revelation of the scroll hanging in the balances. And after all of this, Joyce states that the still unknown professor is probably a very respected scholar who is no longer free or perhaps even dead, thereby intimating that the Russians have him, so that his story will never be told!^78
Such illogic is also carried over into Joyce’s treatment of the life of Jesus. This happens often, but we will recount just one example here. In Luke 8:1–3, we are told that several women supported Jesus and his disciples financially. Joyce declares this to be “quite certain” evidence that Jesus was married.^79 Such a train of illogic hardly needs a comment, but it is certainly an example of how such hypotheses must really be strained to put together such a “case” for the life of Jesus. It is also typical of the assertions made in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from which many examples could also be adduced.
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