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"Seen this yet?" was the subject line of an email from my friend John in London. It was a link to a story in the Guardian. John always sends me intriguing links (such as YouTube videos of robots dancing to James Brown songs), so I figured whatever it was had to be good. But I wasn't expecting this.

The headline of the Guardian article: "Beyond Belief."  According to the article, written by staff reporter Stuart Jeffries, archeologists were digging around the famed Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem, the spot where people believe Christ ascended into heaven, and found a white stone cross. And there they also made another discovery: the Holy Foreskin. In Jerusalem.

When I read this my jaw-dropped. I was halfway through writing An Irreverent Curiosity and had come to my own conclusions about what happened to the Holy Foreskin-and those conclusions were far, far away from Jerusalem. My first instinct, of course, was to start looking up airfares to Jerusalem and look at my calendar to see if I'm free to travel next week. I actually wasn't. I had to teach a class.

So, instead of packing my bags for Jerusalem, I started doing a little research. Who were these archeologists and who were Stuart Jeffries' sources? I was going to have to talk them. The reports on this Holy Foreskin discovery were reported in a publication called Judaistic Review which was picked up from one organization and one "journalist" in particular: Mitch Ugana from a publication called African New Dimension.

So, as all research seems to begin these days with Google, I searched for Judaistic Review on the internet. But the only hits I got were in connection to this story, which was not only picked up by the Guardian, but also a gazillion blogs. Then I tried searching for the name Mitch Ugana. But I got the same results. Hoping I could find out more about the Judaistic Review, I logged on to New York University's website (I happen to teach writing there) and scoured the libraries electronic databases. Nothing.

In the same article, Stuart Jeffries mentioned the news that broke earlier that week: that a James Cameron-led team had announced the finding of the Jesus family tomb (which apparently included the tomb of Jesus' "wife" and "son"). Thanks to all the hysteria caused by such a huge announcement (and, let's face it, a world under the influence of Dan Brown), someone under the guise of "Mitch Ugana" thought they could pull one over on some of us. A fairly clever rouse that worked thanks to perfect timing.

I did take one last attempt to find out the truth: I emailed Stuart Jeffries asking-from one journalist to another-if he could kindly tell me if he checked out his sources and if they seemed legitimate. He never wrote back.

David Farley, An Irreverent Curiosity, Religion, Italy, foreskin, Penguin Books, Gotham Books