Relics are nothing new to
religion, whose legitimacy used to be synonymous with being ancient, which is
one reason why the ancient Romans did not consider the nascent Jesus Movement
to be a religion. The cup that Jesus uses in the Last Supper in Gospels is
right up there with pieces of the wood cross of the Crucifixion as the most holy
of relics in Christianity. “In Europe alone, there are said to be around 200
cups, each thought to be the Holy Grail—the cup used by Jesus Christ at the
Last Supper.”[1]
They can’t all be THE cup, but I bet if you visited each place, the partisans
would insist that their cup is genuine. For example, the website of the
cathedral at Valencia, in eastern Spain, proclaims regarding the cup there, “Tradition
reveals that it is the same cup that the Lord used at the Last Supper for the
Institution of the Eucharist.”[2]
Never mind that medieval legend had it that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the
Holy Grail near Glastonbury Tor in southern England shortly after Jesus’ death.
That would be quite a distance to travel back them to deliver a cup. These two
cannot both be right, yet Christians have prayed in both places as if the cup in each place were genuine. That people have gotten carried away with the super relic through
history seems clear from “the fact that, over the centuries, legends have
arisen of ‘grails’ producing miracles.”[3]
That miracles have been said to arise from more than one of the cups ought to
be a red flag that something is amiss, for only one cup could possibly be
genuine and so miracles could not have come by means of proximity to the other
cups. I submit that basic category mistakes regarding genres of meaning (and
writing) are a big part of the problem as to why a presumed historical artifact
has given rise to puerile superstition in the name of religious truth.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
