MESSIAH CAUGHT ON A WET WICKET?
Arthur Hagopian
The Age
Aug 9 2008
Australia
It is possible that cricket, a game venerated all over the
Commonwealth, is older than currently thought. In fact, Jesus may have
played the game (or a similar bat-and-ball combination) as a child,
according to an ancient Armenian manuscript.
Long before the English launched cricket some 300 years ago,
similar games were being played as early as the 8th century in the
Punjab region, Derek Birley writes in his Social History of English
Cricket. But an Armenian scholar says there is good reason to believe
that similar games were played in the Middle East long before that
time.
Dr Abraham Terian, recently a visiting professor at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the
Humanities, points to a rare manuscript as his source.
He notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into
Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original,
a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of
cricket, with a club and ball.
Dr Terian discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the
Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem.
His English translation of the book has been published by Oxford
University Press.
He says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other
manuscripts of the same gospel, of which some 40 copies exist in
various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East.
Dr Terian says the gospel relates how Jesus, at the age of nine,
had been apprenticed to a master dyer named Israel in Tiberias,
on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
"Jesus is instructed to watch Israel’s house and not leave the
place while the master goes away on a tour to collect clothes to be
dyed. But no sooner has Israel left the house, than Jesus runs out
with the boys," Dr Terian says.
"The most amazing part of the story of the nine-year-old Jesus playing
a form of cricket with the boys at the seashore, is that he would go
on playing the game on water, over the sea waves," which Dr Terian
says echoes allusions to Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee, as told
in the gospels.
"But the apocryphal story shows that for a ball game even Jesus would
forget work and would go to have fun with the boys!" he says.