Shakespeare's Holy Grail:

The original meaning of sin: key to the Grail secret

Since the Grail, the blood of the new testament, is inextricably linked theologically with the remission of sin, let’s challenge our beliefs about what is and what is not a sin. The truth about sin could be the key to the secret of the Grail — and the key to why it has been missing presumed dead for over two thousand years.

 My friend and personal theological oracle, author David Elkington tells me that in the older faith of Israel, the Hebrew (as opposed to the later Jewish) faith, there was Noel one sin — ignorance — it was seen as a crime against Wisdom, the feminine presence of God.

As well we know, the current meaning of a word is oft not so much determined by its original, deep, semantic structure, but corrupted by common usage. So it is with sin.

One is pressed to find a definition of sin that varies from, say, dictionary.com:

•transgression of divine law: the sin of Adam.

•any act regarded as such a transgression, especially a wilful or deliberate violation of some religious or moral principle.

•any reprehensible or regrettable action, behaviour, lapse, etc.; great fault or offense:

However, I found this gem in my old and trusted Penguin Dictionary. In parenthesis, underneath the well-worn standard definition of sin, the editor adds:

Usually taken to refer to moral (and especially sexual) misconduct, the term ‘sin’ implies a state in which a person has chosen to separate themselves from God. Since breaking religious or moral rules is believed to be a sign of such separation, sin has come to refer more generally to the action rather than the spiritual state.

Dr. Mel Thompson, The Penguin English

Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 2003

What if to disobey God’s law is not a sin, per se? But feeling guilty about it is? What if the inner state of guilt is the sin, not the act itself. The something rotten in the state of mankind: does the Bard mean sin? In Measure for Measure,  Isabella (the soul archetype) tries to prevent Angelo (the Lucifer archetype) from raping her by threatening to expose his impending crime. Chillingly, he boasts, ‘Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true.’ Could the master be telling us that those in the Church that interpret what they believe to be God’s law have themselves been beguiled? That religious truths are false? That the true truth seems like lies? That what has been passed down through the generations as God’s truth was in fact corrupted at source? Perhaps through that misunderstood concept of original sin? That the meaning of sin desperately needs an upgrade and a reboot?

Traditionally, for religious deployment, ‘sin’ been weaponised to strike terror and guilt into men’s hearts. Could the irony be that to accuse someone of committing a sin, and causing them to feel guilty, thus becomes the true sin?

The big question now is: why would Jesus, the son of God, openly and repeatedly violate the laws of the land? Why would he repeatedly ‘sin’, commit blasphemy, and heresy — knowing he would be executed for his crimes?

Either he was not the son of God. Or the laws he broke were not God, his father’s!

And if not his father’s, then whose?