Popular and critical reception

The book was a bestseller in America.^[6] It regained popularity after the publication of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and sold more than six million copies.^[6]

Historian Marina Warner noted the book to have many lurid falsehoods and much distorted reasoning.^[7] Soon enough, the authors had a public dispute on a BBC broadcast with her and the Bishop of Birmingham.^[8] In a scathing review of the book for The Observer, critic Anthony Burgess wrote: "It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel."^[2] A Kirkus Review described the work as an intriguing phantasmagoria wherein the authors jumped "perilous heights to reach crazy conclusions".^[9] Colin Henderson Roberts, reviewing for London Review of Books, noted that the work advanced a preposterous hypothesis and made major blunders in its quest to get simple reductive answers from complex questions.^[10]

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Da Vinci Code, The New York Times Book Review deemed The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to be among the all-time great works of popular pseudo-history.^[11] John J. Doherty, literature librarian at Northern Arizona University, writing in King Arthur in Popular Culture, describes of the work as being "thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike".^[12] Arthurian scholar Richard Barber commented the work to be a "notorious pseudo-history", which advanced its arguments on innuendo and fertile speculations, and would take a book of equal length to dissect and refute it in entirety.^[13]

In 2005, a Channel 4 programme hosted by Tony Robinson interrogated the main arguments of Brown, Baigent and Leigh, and termed the entire episode to be a hoax. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of a 1,000-year-old Priory of Sion, and described the story as "piffle".^[14] With increasing proliferation and popularity of books, websites and movies concerning Baigent's works, many critics regard the work to have been influential in popularizing conspiracy theories and pseudohistory.^[6] Damian Thompson noted the book to "employ the rhetoric of authentic history, but not its method, to present myths as fact".^[6] Laura Miller writing for Salon (website) described the book to have advanced a preposterous idea in stages - first as a wild guess, then as a tentative hypothesis, and lastly as an undeniable fact - but entirely from within a miasma of bogus authenticity.^[6]

Dan Brown lawsuit

Some of the ideas presented in Baigent's book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were later incorporated in Dan Brown's bestselling American novel The Da Vinci Code.^[15]

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown named the primary antagonist, a British Royal Historian, Knight of the Realm and Grail scholar, Sir Leigh Teabing, KBE, also known as the Teacher, in homage to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The name combines Richard Leigh's surname with 'Teabing', an anagram of Baigent.^[16]

In March 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed a lawsuit in a United Kingdom court against Brown's publisher, Random House, claiming copyright infringement.^[17]

Concurrent with the plagiarism trial, Baigent released a new book, The Jesus Papers, amid criticism^{[by whom?]} that it was just a reworking of themes from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and timed to capitalize on the marketing hype concerning the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code, as well as the attention brought by the trial. In the postscript to the book (p. 355), Baigent asserts that the release date had been set by Harper Collins long before.

On 7 April 2006, High Court judge Peter Smith rejected the copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. On 28 March 2007, Baigent and Leigh lost their appeal against this decision and had legal bills of about £3 million.^[18]