Judaea, AD 30 - There has been heated debate in Palestine this week following a front-page headline in the Moon tabloid on Wednesday: "Sups with scum - claims he is Messiah!"
The report, billed as an "exclusive", concerned an encounter between the preacher Jesus and a Samaritan woman at a drinking place known as "Jacob's Well." It is near Sychar on the border between Judaea and Samaria.
At about midday on Monday, Jesus stopped at the well. It is near a plot of ground local people say the Patriarch Jacob gave to his son Joseph.
A Samaritan woman came to get water. Jesus asked her for a drink. She was shocked. She knew Jews despised Samaritans and, besides, she was a woman. "You're a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink just like that?" she asked. He said that if she knew who he was, it was she who would be asking him for a drink instead.
"Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again," he said, pointing to the well, "but whoever drinks the water I give them will never be thirsty." She asked for some of that sort of water. He told her to get her husband and come back. "I have no husband," she said.
He said he knew. "The fact is you have had five husbands and the man you live with now is not your husband either," he said. She was astounded. How could he possibly know this?
"You are a prophet", she said, eventually and, as if to excuse herself and her people, added: "We worship on this mountain but you Jews say we should worship in the temple in Jerusalem." He reassured her. "Take no heed," he said. "The time is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. God is spirit and his worshippers will worship in spirit. Anywhere."
But the woman was confused. She was used to worshipping God in one place. "When the Messiah comes he will explain it to us, I suppose," she said. And Jesus said: "I am him."
At that point his friends returned from Sychar where they had gone for food. They saw the Samaritan woman but said nothing. She ran off, and in such a hurry she left her water jar behind.
The friends tried to get Jesus to eat but he wouldn't. They wondered whether he had eaten already. "No", he said. "I have food you know nothing about," he said, "my food is to do what I was sent to do, and to finish the job." And they hadn't a clue what he meant.
Just then the Samaritan woman arrived back with a crowd of people from Sychar. "He told me everything I ever did" she said, exaggerating in her excitement.
Some of the people spoke to Jesus and asked him to stay with them for a while. He stayed for two days. By then they were saying, as quoted in the Moon, "we believe he really is the Saviour. Not because of anything she said, but because we have heard him ourselves."
The Moon report described the woman as "a slut" and the people from Sychar as "stupid Samaritan peasants conned by a crazy Nazarene". In an editorial on Thursday, the Palestine Times described the Moon headline and report as "racist, an affront to human rights, and a new low in Palestinian journalism". It called on the authorities to take immediate action against the tabloid.
A spokesman for the Governor, Mr Pilate, said last night that the Moon report and headline "certainly were inflammatory", but that the matter seemed to have settled down. It was not proposed to take any action, he said.
A spokesman for the High Priest, Dr Caiaphas, said that while such news reports were "unacceptable" it was not surprising they should happen in a situation where sects were proliferating all over the country and Messiahs seemed to be "as plentiful as olives on a tree".
He condemned Jesus, and for associating with a Samaritan woman. It pained him to use the word "perverted", when talking about a Jew associating with Samaritans and treating them as equals before God. "But that is what it is," he said.
The editor of the Moon, James Iscariot jnr, dismissed the Times editorial as "predictable moralising from that quarter. They say their paper's motto is `treating everyone equally'," he said, "and they do. They look down on us all." He was happy his own newspaper had lived up to its motto: "Reflecting the truth as it is."
