Swanson presents a Jesus who was the son of an English- or Irish-born Mary, and who visited England to study Druidism before wedding Mary Magdalene. After Jesus' death, Swanson portrays his widow as taking her children by Jesus, whom he refers to as the 'Shiloh Dynasty', to England, and that one of these became a direct male-line ancestor of Joseph Smith, to whom the author also attributes a matrilineal derivation from the same Shiloh Dynasty. He claims that in uniting patrilineal and matrilineal descents from the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a marriage that itself, according to Swanson, healed a longstanding breach between the houses of Judah and Ephraim, Joseph Smith was not only a prophet but the 'Davidic king of all Israel', and that all of the Mormon presidents and high leaders were members of this lineage either by birth or ritual adoption. Reviewers found aspects of his argument problematic, particularly his utter rejection of the work of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln as authentic history, while at the same time using their work as a basis for the 'Holy Grail' portion of his own reconstruction.
