Jesus Christ didn't like cricket – he loved it, an expert has said.
Despite cricket being invented during the Saxon or Norman times by children apparently living in the Weald in the South of England, a historian has claimed that it was actually made nearly 2,000 years prior.
And historians Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook and John Hotten claimed that the proof of this can be found in the previously unseen Gospel, The Mirror reports.
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The trio were discussing who the first ever cricket player was on the Rest is History podcast.
Tom Holland – not the Spiderman actor – said: “Do you know who it was? It's a big name. It's Jesus.
“Shall I tell you what Armenian professor Dr Abraham Terian thinks it came from?
“He found in the manuscript library of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem an eighth century copy of a much earlier gospel which described the infancy of Jesus.
“And in this gospel Jesus is described as playing something faintly similar to cricket, i.e people throwing balls and he's hitting it – and the catch is Jesus, when he chases the ball, can run onto the sea.”
According to a translation of the Gospel, Jesus took boys to the “seashore” along with a ball and a club – or bat – and walk across the waves to hit the ball.
Due to his ability to walk on water, a crowd would “gather” and watch it.
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“They would be amazed,” the Gospel claims.
There is, of course, no way to actually verify the claims in the Gospel or the unseen version, but the experts are pretty sure that it is accurate.
However, according to the International Cricket Council, it is not accurate.
They state: “The first reference to cricket being played as an adult sport was in 1611, and in the same year, a dictionary defined cricket as a boys' game.
“There is also the thought that cricket may have derived from bowls, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball from reaching its target by hitting it away.”
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