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But Joe Zias, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, thought the combination of names “impressive.”"Do you realise this could be evidence challenging the very basis of a religion which transformed the spiritual life of Western civilisation?”And what you shouldn’t”So long as we still get the Bank Holiday.”"I always thought it was a pile of codswallop.”. Spring is here: lambs are gambolling, bunnies are hopping, fluffy chicks are hatching, buds are burgeoning, and Radio 4 is experiencing its annual burst of theology. It could, of course, be argued that the tradition has passed to the cinema. But the interweaving of speech and music in a mechanically reproduced medium like film is hardly the same as the impact of live music upon live action in the real theatre.Has something substantive been lost? The theatrical career of Sibelius is suggestive.

Could it be, Joan Bakewell will ask on Sunday, that an find of staggering significance has been overlooked? If so, what of the Resurrection?Mann likened discovering what might be the burial caskets of Jesus and his family to “the balls of the National Lottery coming up one by one”, but experts insisted it couldn’t be Him. Professor Geza Vermes, a leading authority on first century Judaism, called it “an April Fool one day too early”, claiming it was easy to miss the caskets’ significance “because they have none”. In Jerusalem to film an Easter special, Mann discovered five caskets in a museum warehouse, bearing the names Jesus, son of Joseph; Mary; Joseph; Mary (possibly Magdelene); Matthew; and Juda, son of Jesus An apartment block now stands over the tomb. “TV team’s discovery of Jesus’ tomb dismissed by scholars”, retorted the Independent the next day.Chris Mann, producer of the BBC’s Heart of the Matter, and his team. the plot

At the weekend, a casket thought to have once contained the bones of a “Jesus, son of Joseph” was reported to have been found in Jerusalem by a BBC TV crew.
“Mystery tomb may reveal the secrets of the death of Jesus”, the Sunday Times solemnly declared, breaking the story.

The theatre may not have engaged the depths of Sibelius’s art, but it surely, and vitally, broadened his scope.. One thinks of Sibelius as a Pantheistic rather than Christian artist, yet the “old Slavonic”- style chantings and chimings of this final tableau strikingly anticipate the kind of sacred manner that Janacek, Szymanowski and Stravinsky were to approach only over the ensuing decade. Thence, by way of a more baroque-style church scene and a sequence of anguished chromatic spasms for the confounding of the Devil, the music evolves into a hieratic “Gloria in excelsis” as Everyman’s soul is saved. For the scene in which the dying Everyman parleys with the allegorical figure of Good Deeds, Sibelius spins a strange, near-atonal web of drifting polyphony for strings, pre-echoing nothing so much as the finale of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony some 30 years in the future. Unlike the exotic music for Hjalmar Procope’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1906) which fills out the disc, Sibelius never extracted an Everyman suite, believing the music to be too intricately subservient to the text.