The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Day sermon yesterday was unusual in character. Added to the appropriate, if conventional, themes that he raised was an explicit plea for Christianity to be kept free of the conspiracy theorists.

Although there are obvious books and manuscripts to which he referred — The Da Vinci Code and the recent supposed Gospel of Judas — it is less particular works than a broader attitude that Dr Williams has identified. A spirit of the age exists in which it is automatically assumed that those in authority are invariably “hiding something” — whether their own misdeeds or something outlandish, such as the existence of the Roswell aliens — from the public-at-large.

Dr Williams is, alas, right to be concerned about this trend. The distinction between fiction, fact and “fiction based on fact” has become increasingly murky. Not only is it sometimes claimed that Jesus did not die on the Cross but lived on, either with Mary Magdalene or in some other circumstance, it is seriously asserted that senior figures in the churches have known about this for centuries and deliberately sought to conceal it from the faithful. That such notions were at times popular in the Middle Ages is not surprising. That they have enjoyed a second wind in an information age when it is surely evident that such vast plots or schemes would be impossible is astonishing. The cynicism that is applied to politicians should not be exported to organised religion.

The fragile nature of our knowledge of the historical Jesus will always allow for competing interpretations of His life, death and life again, and no amount of biblical scholarship will settle every question. Indeed, if such matters could be concluded, then faith itself would be irrelevant.

It is not as if Christianity requires complex and conspiratorial elaboration to acquire a deeper meaning. It is more than enough by itself. There is, after all, an existing conspiracy at the heart of the Easter story. One in which established religious leaders who felt threatened by the arrival of a new and radical teacher, a Roman governor concerned with maintaining his authority in a difficult and distant province, and an errant disciple easily lured by material reward, combine to press false charges against an innocent man and put Him to death, confident that by His Crucifixion the awkward individual and His challenge would disappear.

That it did not is, as Pope Benedict XVI observed in his first and well- received Easter Day sermon, the “central mystery” of Christianity. Something so profound and spectacular occurred during the time between the witnessed death of Jesus and His equally witnessed return that the conspiracy against Him and what He advanced not merely failed but was swept away.

It is what has inspired so many to celebrate the risen Christ in so many ways over this weekend: whether in the shape of traditional services, in places such as Canterbury Cathedral or St Peter’s Square, or in newer forms such as the Manchester Passion, a display of extraordinary energy, imagination and innovation.

There is enough in the code of orthodox Christianity for men and women to continue to contemplate until the end of time. It is more compelling than the material in any contemporary yet ultimately trivial bestseller.