The Jenolan Caves Scrolls

A few friends have asked me to describe (in 25 words or less) what Barbara Thiering is on about with her interpretation of the New Testament and I am only too happy to oblige. It only took me three years to understand the instructions for using the automatic timer on our video cassette recorder so a pesher or two shouldn't be a big worry (a pesh-over, actually).

It's really quite simple. Apparently, the Bible is written in code and Barbara has managed to crack it and if you read her new book she will give you the good oil on what the New Testament is really all about. There are no surprises here. Just about all literature these days is full of words that nobody can understand without the help of a consultant to explain it.

Personally, I blame it the doctors for starting it all with the clever way they try to make prescriptions illegible, causing you to think they must be much brighter than the rest of us, when all they wrote down was ‘Bex’. The modern cult of the high priest was born and it soon spread to lawyers and then computer programmers and so on until you need a ‘guru’ in every field to explain the ‘real meaning’ to you. Next they'll be telling us that the Women's Weekly has six levels of encoded messages—which is a worry when Maggie Tabberer isn't around to unravel things.

Supposedly, God is no different. He may have been able to knock together a whole creation in seven days, but getting a book written that you and I can understand was quite beyond him. So once again, what should have been quite plain is no more than a religious version of the computer manual—totally incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't bright enough to write it themselves. Thank God we have high priests to explain it all to us. Mind you, this raises serious questions about the job description of the Holy Spirit, who I thought was responsible for teaching us what the Bible was all about. What's he been doing for the last couple of thousand years?

The worst thing that can happen now is for someone to dig up another pesher. What if some other high priest of the code book business decides that there are a few more levels of meaning? What is someone is ferreting around the Jenolan caves one weekend and discovers a pesher telling them that the teacher of righteousness is Derryn Hinch? What if we discover that Jesus was on the first fleet after a run in at the Old Bailey? Worst of all, what happens if there is more than one level of meaning in Barbara Thiering's book? Maybe she is really saying that Jesus was the Son of God who died for our sins and then came back to life. Anyone found the pesher?