The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasonry, and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus,[1] is a 1996 book by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas.
The authors claim that their work proves the following: Knight and Lomas begin by quoting Henry Ford, who was a Freemason,[2] as saying "all history is bunk".
The authors of The Hiram Key propose a possible sequence of events that led to modern Freemasonry, although much of their narrative has been debated by historians and other researchers.
A criticism of their approach by those unfamiliar with the science of "dialectical progression" is that the authors have gathered irrelevant and often unevidenced 'facts' to arrive at an equally unproven theory.
Knight and Lomas are not professional historians nor have they any qualifications in history or research, and their case is open to the criticism that they accept references that fit their theory and reject those that conflict with it.
Nonetheless they argue in the book that the foundations of the Christian religion are a distortion by the early Roman Catholic Church of the teachings of the real Jesus and his followers.
Knight and Lomas state that one of the main motivations in writing the book stemmed from a desire to ascertain the origins of Freemasonry, following their own experiences of being initiated into it.
Traditional Masonic ritual claims that one of the first Freemasons was Hiram Abiff, a widow's son from the tribe of Naphtali, who was the Architect of King Solomon's Temple.
The authors concluded that Freemasonry was actually as old as it claimed in its traditional ritual, dating back to the building of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
The authors believe that Jesus did not claim to be divine, but was instead a messiah in the Jewish sense of the term, a good man and a freedom fighter, trying to liberate the Jews from Roman occupation.