anti-heretic polemic Historia Albigensis, written between 1212 and 1218 by Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay, gives the most lurid description, attributing to Cathars the belief that Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus. These sources must be viewed with caution: the two known authors were not themselves Cathars and were writing of a heresy being actively and violently suppressed. There is no evidence that these beliefs derived from the much earlier Gnostic traditions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but the Cathar traditions did find their way into many of the 20th-century popular writings claiming the existence of a Jesus bloodline. Modern works The late 19th-century saw the first of several expansions on this theme of marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, providing the couple with a named child. The French socialist politician, Louis Martin (pseudonym of Léon Aubry, died 1900), in his 1886 book Les Evangiles sans Dieu (The Gospels without God), republished the next year in his Essai sur la vie de Jésus (Essay on the life of Jesus), described the historical Jesus as a socialist and atheist. He related that after his crucifixion, Mary Magdalene, along with the family of Lazarus of Bethany, brought the body of Jesus to Provence, and there Mary had a child, Maximin, the fruit of her love for Jesus. The scenario was dismissed as 'certainly strange' by a contemporary reviewer. The late 20th century saw the flourishing of a genre of popular books claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a family. Donovan Joyce's 1972 best-seller, The Jesus Scroll, presented an alternative timeline for Jesus that arose from a mysterious document. He claimed that, after being denied access to the Masada archaeological site, he was met at the Tel Aviv airport by an American University professor using the pseudonym "Max Grosset", who held a large scroll he claimed to have smuggled from the site. Relating its contents to Joyce, Grosset offered to pay him to smuggle it out of the country, but then became spooked when his flight was delayed and snuck away; he was never identified and the scroll was not seen again. According to Joyce, the 'Jesus Scroll' was a personal letter by 80-year-old Yeshua ben Ya’akob ben Gennesareth, heir of the Hasmonean dynasty and hence rightful King of Israel, written on the eve of the fall of the city to the Romans after a suicide