John North: 'Forget the da Vinci Code, this is the real thing'

SO close to this office that it should provide waitress service and a 25 per cent staff discount, is a caf which by virtue of strong coffee and fabulous flapjacks gets pretty busy by 10am.

Most are discussing corns, or Cornwall, traffic calming or high blood pressure. Quaffing coffee with the column is a chap who's talking earnestly of "the biggest discovery in the history of western civilisation."

The discovery, says Glen Reynolds, is of the gospel according to Judas Iscariot. Its central theme, he believes, is that Judas and Jesus were in it together, in order that the scriptures might be fulfilled - that Iscariot, in other words, worked at God's behest.

"Forget the da Vinci Code, this is the real thing, the biggest conspiracy theory ever," says Dr Reynolds.

Betrayal? Certainly not. Honest? Gospel. "It doesn't get any bigger than this," he adds.

Glen Reynolds featured hereabouts exactly a year ago. He is a 46-year-old former libel and commercial lawyer with three degrees who worked for Private Eye and for the Daily Mirror and who first met the now notorious Robert Maxwell in the lift.

"You should join our pension fund," said Cap'n Bob, by way of introduction.

He is a Quaker who is exploring Roman Catholicism, a marathon runner with a personal best of three hours 20 minutes, an academic author with two theological works out later this year and an assiduous Darlington councillor.

Since his last appearance he has become chairman of the North-East branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England ("that ruffled a few feathers") and was Labour's parliamentary candidate in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Having upset the Duke of Northumberland, he then used the election platform to describe the royal family as a "throwback to a far distant age" and to suggest that the Prince of Wales should renounce the succession.

The party, said one of the papers, had distanced itself....

The gospel according to Dr Reynolds, at any rate, is that the existence of the Judas manuscript was acknowledged as early as 180AD, that the papyri upon which it was written disappeared for around 1,800 years, was lost again and eventually surfaced - this bit's true, as well - in a bank vault in Hicksville, USA.

An English translation will be published next year, rather appropriately at Easter. "It's not off the wall stuff, it really isn't," he insists. "It's going to be absolutely explosive."

Though much of a shadowy nature shrouds the world of art and antiquities, Dr Reynolds - who once acted for one of the hugger-muggers in a multi-million pound suit - is convinced that there is nothing of forgery, fraud or oh-my-gawd about the Judas file.

"I'm not saying it upsets the biblical canon, but historically there has never been a conspiracy theory like it.

"There will always be doubts about authenticity but it's been carbon dated and it's no Hitler diary. Personally, I don't think there's any doubt that it's genuine, and the ramifications are going to be momentous.

"In the same way that Mary Magdalene has been portrayed for centuries in a negative way until recently - she has had an appalling press - I think that the complete view of Judas will change."

But if it doesn't fundamentally change the Christian story - the perception of Judas, he concedes, but not of Jesus - why should it matter to the average coffee shopper in Caf Gulp?

"I think there's a very strong case that the whole history of anti-Semitism has come about because of the story of Judas. This could change the entire reasoning behind centuries of anti-Semitism. What fascinates me is that it challenges previously established perceptions. This isn't boring theology, this is real life."

Unless eavesdropping, Caf Gulp remains unaware of his ten o'clock testing. Until next Easter, when all will be revealed, those flapjacks may be quite enough to swallow.

STILL with the Quakers, and not in this case Darlington FC, a First Great Western train power car was named "Quaker Enterprise" last week in recognition of the Friends' contribution to the early development of the railways.

The news prompted Chris Gwilliam, from the Meeting House at Norton-on-Tees, to e-mail headquarters with the recollection that in 1818 the Quaker banker Jonathan Backhouse was appointed treasurer for subscriptions to raise capital for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, that much of the line's funding came from Quaker families and that Joseph Pease, another Quaker, was largely responsible for the extension to Middlesbrough, then little more than a large farm.

In 1825, a party of Quakers also booked an excursion on the newly opened S&DR. It was the world's first chartered train.

Who really invented the Nine Stone Toyboy

DELIGHTING in a morris major sort of an evening at the Cumberland Arms in Byker, last week's column said that the song Nine Stone Toyboy had been written by the admirable George Welch in memory of a friend.

We were mistaken, though George did - among much else - write a splendidly scatalogical song called Below.

Oh the paper in the sewers, you can tell where it has been,

The Sun it comes from Walker, The Times from Jesmond Dene....

"Toyboy" was written by the late Phil Ranson, who played the folk clubs with George as the Cheap Sunglasses Serenaders, after a lass at Ashington gave him the title and invited him to supply the words. He did it within a week.

Brenda Boyd, Phil's widow, wrote the last verse. The first is reproduced with her permission:

I've been walking these streets so long

Singing the same old song,

I know every pub between Bedlington Station and Byker;

Where doms is the name of the game

And the darts team's washed away

In the snow and the rain...

There's been a load of heavy spending,

And me dole will soon be ending,

But I'm gonna be where the drinks are never on me -

I'm a nine stone toyboy

Watching every night for a woman with a load of dough,

I'm a nine stone toyboy

Looking out for a woman with a nice little home of her own

And a car and a heart of gold.

AMONG the bashes which it proved impossible to attend was a do in Bishop last Saturday called the Noughties Party. Since most of them were local Methodists, best be careful with the spelling.

Eight, including Crook and Willington superintendent minister Tom Wilkinson and our old friend Susan Jaleel from Darlington, were marking birthdays with a zero at the end - donations for Christian Aid invited instead of presents.

The others were Joyce Platten, Sue Percival, Maureen Aspey (still just 49.8, she insists), Anne Sanderson, Helen Pryce and Alison Wigham, the bairn at 20.

The party, noughty but nice, raised £520 - "beyond our wildest imaginings," says Susan. Like she and Tom Wilkinson, Christian Aid will be 60 this year.

Talking on water at the Tall Ships

THE Tall Ships were a wonderful sight, the attendant food market on Gateshead quayside so overflowing with exotic delights that the Quinquiremes of Ninevah might have tied up beneath the Millennium Bridge, as well.

Some are taller than others, of course, though none so remotely downsized as to persuade a normal human being to climb the rigging unless all the hounds of hell were baying on the quarter-deck, and each hound brandishing a blow torch.

We breezed up on Tuesday evening, guests aboard the Queen Galadriel - something from Tolkien - of the Bishop of Durham and of the Cirdan Sailing Trust, whose mastermind (and Master Mariner) is the ebullient Canon Bill Broad, retired team rector of Newton Aycliffe.

Now in Weardale, landlocked and loving it, Bill no longer skippers the Trust's vessels. "To be in charge of one of these," he said cheerfully, "you need better knees than I have."

She was moored in front of the new Sage building, the suffragan Bishop of Jarrow - who lives a few minutes down the road - already having attended five events there. The Bishop of Durham, adrift in Auckland Castle, has yet to see Sage from the inside.

The senior bishop essayed a look which said job swap, or house swap, at any rate.

Scores of others were aboard, too, if not a slave galley then certainly a municipal chain gang - talking, not walking, on water. Handsome craft had sailed, it seemed, from each of the seven seas - and the Black Diamond, bless it, registered at Durham.

The Bishop of Durham's wife Maggie had an ancestor who'd been a Norwegian sea captain; the bishop himself had canoed up the Caledonian Canal as a 15-year-old, capsized twice, loved it.

Back ashore, dry land and real world, a once-black cab now painted to promote One NorthEast's latest campaign waited impatiently near Gateshead bus station. "If I see him again," said the driver to a colleague, "I'm going to run the **** over."

Passionate people, passionate places....