News

A centuries' old manuscript is found. But instead of attracting just antiquarians, it grabs the media around the world.

All the media, too - newspapers, radio, TV, Internet, blogs.

And grabs them all so tight that there can't be a news junkie anywhere in the world who hasn't heard about a new gospel claiming Judas wasn't Jesus's enemy but his best friend.

According to this version of the gospel story, Jesus really wanted to be a martyr -- and wanted it so much that he talked Judas into handing him to the priests who governed Judaism at the time. Judas's role as informer then was not so much a betrayal, as a service.

More than this being a novel version of "with friends like that ...," what should intrigue us about this latest revisionist account of Jesus is why people around the world should now care about an event that may have happened, or not occurred at all, nearly 2,000 years ago. And if it did occur, took place in a tiny, obscure province of an empire that collapsed in the 6th century.

But people do care. In fact, they care so much that a novel twist to the Jesus story, presenting him as Mary Magdalene's secret husband, could become the world's all-time bestseller.

Nor is this fascination to know Jesus as he really was a new phenomenon. For close to 250 years, scholars have probed all the material they could find to describe "the Jesus of history" in contrast to "the Christ of faith." Or to picture him as a diminutive Palestinian peasant, rather than a handsome, vigorous, spiritual poster boy. Or instead, to question that he ever really existed at all, but was the creation of a self-serving priestly cult in Christianity's early centuries.

This has produced an impressive literary portrait gallery in which Jesus has been pictured as a prophet who predicted his own return to Earth as a messianic king before his first disciples were even gone. He has also been presented as a humanitarian moral teacher whose message spelled out a short course in how to live well. Jesus has been described as a social revolutionary, something along the style of a religious Che Guevara, and as the model of what we should be if we wanted to succeed in life -- North American-style.

In short, there has been no boundary line where interpretations of Jesus have been attempted. Nor any limit on the public's fascination with him, either. More than any person in history, Jesus has grabbed and held the interest of humanity. And as this new century and millennium begin, he holds that interest more than he did a hundred or a thousand years ago.

He and his faith can be put down as psychological autosuggestion, granting wish-fulfilment to anyone willing to substitute hope for reality. They can be persecuted by rival creeds and totalitarian quasi-religions as pernicious fallacies that must be denied free speech.

Yet, they go on. In fact, thrive and grow -- sometimes where there seems no explanation able to convince us. Such as, why China should become the world's fastest-growth area for Christianity after half a century of Marxist repression.

As it was in the first century, here is a wonder of our time. The gospel can be rephrased, reinterpreted, debunked, diluted - but no matter. The appeal of Jesus himself does not wane.

If we ask "Why?", we can say no more than Albert Schweitzer did at the end of his own classic attempt to show Jesus as he was: "He comes to us, as of old by the lakeside, and speaks the same word, 'Follow me.' To those who obey it, he shows - as in an ineffable mystery -- who he is."

The wonder is not that a startlingly new manuscript about Jesus has been discovered. It is that, like an eternal magnet, he draws men and women of every tongue and nation. And not only still. But more than ever.

Reginald Stackhouse, an Anglican priest, is principal emeritus and research professor at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. He is author of The Coming Age Revolution.