Easter week 2006, Australia woke to front page news that a new gospel written by Judas Iscariot had been discovered that would blow the Bible's version of Jesus' death out of the water.
The respected National Geographic no less would be releasing a cable TV documentary, a special magazine edition and a three-book deal unveiling the find.
Sunrise presenter David Koch took the news seriously enough to ask co-host Natalie Barr if this evidence would shake her faith.
Next Easter. Similar story.
Multimillionaire Titanic director James Cameron launches a Discovery Channel documentary and tie-in book which makes the sensational claim that his team of experts found Jesus' remains in the Talpiot Tomb in Jerusalem.
Now this news, if true, would destroy Christianity for good.
The Easter timing, of course, was no coincidence. The release of these products was coordinated perfectly to maximise exposure, and therefore profits, while the media focused on Christianity over the Holy Weekend.
But there was more going on here than clever marketing by National Geographic and Discovery Inc.
There is more than a whiff of greed.
And not far from the surface lies a real life crime thriller " of an antiquities industry corrupted by the financial costs of cutting deals with thieves.
Scale of public deception
Fast forward another year and we find the usually sedate scholarly community has suddenly awoken, alive to the scale of the public deception.
This January, 18 expert scholars from 14 top US and Israeli universities signed a protest letter after a Princeton academic symposium on the Talpiot Tomb.
They were outraged at the way their views on the so-called Jesus Tomb had been misrepresented to the media.
"We wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media," they said, "and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance " including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb - either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus' family or find this claim highly speculative".
The statement raised objections to the film's claims, particularly the likelihood that the excavated ossuary which bore the name "Mariamene' belonged to Mary Magdalene.
The bottom line?
The probability that the tomb belonged to Jesus' family is "virtually nil", say the scholars.
A few months earlier, Professor Eric Cline from George Washington University wrote a call to arms to archaeologists to win back their discipline from the charlatans.
The straw that broke the camel's back?
The hype around the Jesus Family Tomb.
In an interview with ABC's Religion Report in December, Professor Cline labelled James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici "irresponsible documentary film makers".
"To put out a film like that, and I don't even know what the ulterior motive is, whether it was financial, whether it was religious [to debunk Christianity]; you know, to interview archaeologists and then to have them say that their words were taken out of context…"
His exasperation was palpable. After all the tomb was discovered by archaeologists way back in 1980.
"Well if it were Jesus we would have known that, give us a little credit. You can poke holes in…Lost Tombs of Jesus wide enough to drive a truck through as they say."
Antiquities crime
The motives, as well as the real players, behind the National Geographic's Judas project are far murkier.
Terry Garcia, National Geographic's executive vice-president for mission programs, admitted at a news conference that the society had contributed "more than $1million" to the project.
But the heart of the scheme was a bizarre deal with the Switzerland-based Maecenas Foundation, who held the Judas manuscript which had originally been "lost' in Cairo. The deal to market the contents alone neatly sidestepped any laws against profiting from stolen treasures.
No doubt the scholars behind the National Geographic project had the noble motive of making a lost manuscript known. But alarm bells should have rung that this commercial transaction would legitimise illegal traffic in antiquities.
In his book The Secrets of Judas, Professor James Robinson, who edited the Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels, outlines connections between Mario Jean Roberty, the Swiss lawyer who founded the Maecenas Foundation, his client, Frieda Nussberger-Tchakos who bought the codex in 1999, and the most notorious antiquities thieves in the world.
The New York Times has reported that the codex owner, Ms Nussberger-Tchakos, was previously given a suspended sentence by Italian authorities for smuggling antiquities. However she told the newspaper that it was an "inconsequential' matter. The report added that she would make up to $2million in profit from the National Geographic deal.
Dr Karin Sowada, an archaeologist at Macquarie University, says Christians should note that this "gravy train" of spin-off products, varnishing a murky past, mirrors the case of the James ossuary.
As a Christian and scholar, she says she was very disappointed that some church leaders latched onto the supposed remains of Jesus' brother as evidence for the gospels. In the end Israeli scientists proved the ossuary had been tampered with, which led to the police busting an antiquities forging ring.
"The smuggling and faking of antiquities is so rife," she says, "that my advice is to always step back from the headlines and wait until the dust settles."
"We should neither grab onto archeology to prove our faith so readily, nor get carried away by the hype and lose confidence in the Scriptures."
Leaving aside the claims of antiquities crime which may have further distorted the price, even the known costs of the Judas project had to be recouped through merchandise sales.
For his part, Roberty said he put more than $1million into the initial restoration of the manuscript, piecing together more than 1,000 papyrus fragments before National Geographic got involved.
"I'm still on the nervous side economic-ally," Roberty said. "I have to take in another $2.3million before I break even."
The pressure was no doubt on National Geographic's marketing team. Their strategy? Embark on a concerted, but ultimately deceptive, PR effort to present this obscure second-century manuscript as the legitimate diary of Judas Iscariot.
As leading Jesus scholar NT Wright said at the time, "reading what some of its editors had written about it…there crept over me the horrible sense of a lie cheerfully told".
"This "Gospel of Judas' has no historical worth at all," Dr Wright said. "It's like finding a document purporting to be about Napoleon and his senior advisors, and discovering that they're talking about nuclear submarines and B52 bombers. It is that crass."
Is TV the problem?
Cable TV's appetite for content, and the huge project costs, largely explains the drift towards sensationalism in history documentaries.
Professor Eric Cline told the ABC that all the main TV documentary producers " including Discovery and even the BBC " "are all guilty to a certain extreme".
"I understand that it's not just education, it's more "edu-tainment' as they call it… It's driven by dollars, I mean there are all kinds of financial pressures."
Dr Karin Sowada says she is disturbed by the extent of "TV archaeology" which is sponsored by the major cable TV networks without appropriate peer review.
"Cable TV has such an appetite for content… With mobile phones streaming television I cannot see this voracious appetite for content abating. In the end it's about ratings and profit."
Dr John Dickson, author of The Christ Files, which aims to set the record straight on the life of Jesus (see box), agrees with the assessment of the two archaeologists.
"Edu-tainment is all the rage," he says. "Whatever is new is interesting, so there is constant pressure to find the latest theory even if it is nonsense. Conspiracy theories are incredibly interesting, especially when they are about Jesus."
So is the answer to eschew television?
The fact is that the book publishing industry is facing the same phenomenon. They have been similarly criticised for over-hyping speculative history theories: the book 1421 which made sensational claims that Chinese explorers discovered Australia and America is a notorious recent example.
Yet, there is no doubt TV is the most accessible and popular medium.
This has led both Cline and Dickson to conclude that TV history is not just the problem, but the solution.
