Conspiracies for the desperate

Well, yesterday The Age unearthed a religious conspiracy so titillating it's got to be the basis for the next Dan Brown novel.

This week's Saturday Age published a small article in the A2 liftout revealing the little-known fact (something the author said many "good Christian folk" would be fascinated to find out) that Jesus Christ was never actually called that in the original Bible.

No. Believe it or not, his name was actually Joshua. And the "Christ" bit was a transliteration of the Greek version of the Hebrew "Messiah", for "anointed one". Amazing, I know.

Of course, he makes it sound all very farcical, by detailing all the different stages of translation: how the name "Jesus" is an Anglicised version of the Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew, or something like that. And he uses words like "bumbling" to make the process sound ridiculous at best, evil at worst, and emphasises the fact that the Hebrew name "Joshua" has meaning that our version, Jesus, lacks. The name "Jesus", in short, is a meaningless result of too many translations.

Now, before you all start to lose faith over all this, it's probably worth noting that, like most religious conspiracies, this is not news to any particularly knowledgable Christian with an NIV Study Bible. When you look up the passages in the Gospels when Jesus' earthly parents are told to call him "Jesus" (sorry, "Joshua"- or, to be more accurate still, "Yeshua"), the NIV note will tell you what Joshua means - not our Anglo-estimate of the word, "Jesus". In other words, Bible translators are aware that what they're working with is...a translation - a notion that any group of schoolchildren from Italy, Germany and Australia could all come to grips with when they realise that they all learnt about the same fifteenth century Italian explorer (the one we call Christopher Colombus), just by moderately different names.

Some details are lost in translation. Most Bible scholars will acknowledge that, which is why we tend to expect that Bible teachers will have at least some knowledge of the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, or at least own reputable books designed to demistify it all for us. Contrary to this knowledge being locked away in the cell of some tyrannical monastic hell- (sorry, heaven-) bent on deceiving for his own bizarre, sadistic gain, these facts are out there in the open for anyone who wants to sit through Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ", or anyone who reads the liner notes in their widely accessible Bibles.

If the translation of "Yeshua" to Jesus, or "Messiah" to "Christ" somehow altered the meaning beyond comprehension; if the original words and their meanings were lost to all but the privileged elite, dressed in suitably Opus Dei-ish robes and flagellating for the camera, then we'd have reason to be concerned. But anyone - seriously, anyone - can access this information which, for the record, makes not a speck of difference to the essence of Christianity, or, if you will, Messianity.

There are other, more important issues of faith that we could be thinking about, I suspect. Like when Richard Dawkins is going to find the gene that predisposes people to become evil and Christian. That I'd really like to read an article about.

For now, I think I'll go on believing.