JULY

Recently I have thrice visited the Temple Church. For my first two visits winter weather meant bare trees, leaves gusting about, and glowing windows lighting the Middle Temple Hall. Latterly, it was a sublime late spring day, the tranquil courtyards of the Inns of Court I passed through bathed in warmth.
It is atmospheric whatever the weather just to leave behind the rush of Chancery Lane and Fleet Street and go in through the narrow entry of Inner Temple Lane that takes you into the almost cloister-like quiet of the Inns’ environment, with their modest but elegant buildings, their paved walkways and tree-lined squares. If you were to go as far as you can down the sloping trajectory in front of you you’d exit on the Thames’ riverbank. As you walked you might reflect that this was once all gardens, orchards, stretches of pasture, groves of trees.
But the objective in my case was to visit the C12th century church that is the focus of so much history – and in recent decades, of controversy.
This meant a turn to the left through an arch to discover the building – which strikes one as an unusual shape on first approaching it, as the illustration above indicates.
Indeed, it is slightly disconcerting on entering to be confronted with the two geometric shapes of circle and rectangle abutted to each other.
As architects and building historians David Lewer and Robert Dark describe in The Temple Church in London (London, Historical Publications Ltd, 1997), by the late C12th the wealth of the ancient order of the Knights Templar (a company of between 300 and 600 knights which had been established earlier in the century to protect pigrims journeying to Jerusalem) had increased sufficently that they were able to build a new ‘Round Church’ on this site.
The  priest for the church, known as the Valiant Master of the Temple, would take over a fine town house from the Bishop of Ely for his quarters. The church building was to be round, modelled on the ancient church of the Holy Sepulchre on the mount in Jerusalem, in which the tomb of Christ is enclosed, the most sacred site in the Christian world.
As to the handsome oblong chancel, a building 60 feet wide and 90 feet long, which was added putatively in 1220,  Lewer and Dark reply ‘We do not know’ to the question ‘Who designed it?’
Aisled with the side aisles at the same height as the lofty central one, this chancel was an unusual example of the new Gothic style being built in Europe.
The book takes the reader on through the Temple Church’s history, including the 1215 drafting of the Magna Carta, and graphic reporting and images of  the significant damage inflicted by bombs in the heaviest night of the blitz, 10 May 1941, when Westminster Abbey and the House of Commons also burned. ‘Not a vestige of seating or organ survived,’ write  Lewer and Dark. It was to take ten years for the damage to be repaired.
In the early 2000s a different kind of glaring blaze fell on the Temple Church: that of phenonenal public awareness due to the publication of the Dan Brown best selling novel in which the author’s characters seek to unravel symbols and mysteries concealed there.
Temple Master Robin Griffith-Jones found himself tasked to dismantle and minutely examine the claims the book makes, with a view to calming an anxious public disturbed by the book’s claims. One question arising from Brown’s plot was about the role of Mary Magdalene and whether she was married to Jesus, about which there is another book (see ART OF THE MONTH and LITERATURE above.) Others were about the Holy Grail and the Catholic Churchs organisation, Opus Dei.
Griffith-Jones’ The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple (Norwich, Canterbury Press 2006) is a slim but lively volume in which the author patiently – and relentlessly – teases out whatever might be the ‘truths’ about the setting as asserted by Jones, who claimed to have based the ‘facts’ that fuelled the twists and turns of his novel on irrefutable research.
Be that as it may, Jones was repeatedly battered by scholar-critics such as Richard Abanes who wrote that The Da Vinci Code ‘is filled with more than fifty major historical inaccuracies,’ in his book, The Truth Behind The Da Vinci Code (Harvest House, 2004). Abanes provides an exhaustive list of misquotes, numerous factual errors, apparent falsification of quotes, and incomplete research.
As to relying on The Da Vinci Code as a guide of any reliable kind for a visit to the Temple Church there can only be one word, which is beware! given a second author’s viewpoint: Ben Witherington, who discounts this possibility with a dismissive shrug whilst writing in his work, The Gospel Code (Intervarsity Press, 2004),‘Our concern isn’t so much with Brown’s ability to describe art or architecture accurately . . . but rather with his handling of ancient documents and his treatment of early Christian history. In these realms he is . . . a purveyor of errors of both fact and interpretation, including some mistakes that even the amateur student of religious history should never make.’
With his book sales soaring into the hundreds of millions and a new novel out this year ‘The Secret of Secrets’ set in the ‘mysterious past of Prague’, it’s highly unlikely Jones allows himself a moment’s perturbation about these criticisms.
On his own website he emphasizes he is on a constant spiritual journey and sees his The Da Vinci Code as ‘an entertaining story promoting spiritual discussion and debate.’
Here the question any right-thinking person surely is left with must be whether while admitting to admiring the ingenuity of creativity, we can disregard the irresponsibility of the unreliable conclusions at which the questioner arrives?
Fortunately for all, in regard to visiting the Temple Church, to engaging with all the varied aspects of its venerable history and enjoying its artefacts and rarefied atmosphere, the Temple website www.templechurch.com provides an excellent factual introduction, also indicating the timetable for the regular free guided talks given within the Church by the Valiant Master, Robin Griffith-Jones.