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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
World
Milica Cosic

Jesus Christ was first person to play cricket and baseball, historians bizarrely claim

Jesus Christ was the first person to ever play cricket or baseball and he used his walking-on-water skills to chase the ball, historians have bizarrely claimed.

One said that the son of God wielded a bat nearly 2,000 years before the game was actually thought to have been invented.

No matter how strange these claims seem to be, details of the The Second Coming's cricket days as a child were apparently found in a previously unseen Gospel.

Historians Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook and John Hotten got together to speak about this on the 'Rest Is History' podcast, where they discussed who was the first recorded player of the game.

Holland went on to say: "Do you know who it was? It's a big name. It's Jesus.

Historians have claimed Jesus used his walking-on-water skills to chase the ball (Luca Giordano / Public domain SWNS)

"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."

He then continued to speak about how the game we know as cricket today more or less derived from the game Jesus played, saying: "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."

Historians Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook and John Hotten say Jesus took the bat nearly 2,000 years before the game even officially existed (Getty Images)

The Gospel itself - in which this claim originated from - apparently translates as: "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.

"And watching him, the boys would scream and say: 'Watch the child Jesus, what he does over the waves of the sea!'

"Many would gather there and, watching him, would be amazed."

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