Did Jesus play cricket?

Melbourne: Cricket is not a game only for human beings, but even Gods played it.... Jesus played cricket when he was a nine year old during 6th century, says an Armenian manuscript. Dr Abraham Terian, a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, recently pointed to a rare manuscript as his source.

Terian explains that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century, a passage conveys of Jesus playing with a club and ball, what may well be the precursor of cricket. Quoting from his Armenian source, Terian says the doctrine 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," quoted Terian, as saying.

"The most amazing part of the story of the nine-year-old Jesus playing a form of cricket with the boys at the sea shore, is that he would go on playing the game on water, over the sea waves," he added.

He gives the following translation: "He (Jesus) would take the boys to the seashore and, carrying the playing ball and the club, he would go over the waves of the sea as though he was playing on a frozen surface, hitting the playing ball.

OneIndia News