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"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," goes the popular Monty Python sketch. But everyone believes that the Inquisitions rate among the all-time worst sins of the Christian Church. An 800-page report issued by the Vatican in June 2004, however, suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong. "Recourse to torture and the death sentence were not as frequent as was long believed," said Agostino Borromeo, professor of church history at Sapienza University.

In fact, only about 1 percent of the 125,000 brought before the Spanish Inquisition were executed. But the unheard story, says St. Louis University's Thomas F. Madden, is that "the Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church." The Inquisition "saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule." As the Inquisition "slipped out of papal hands and into those of kings," practices varied by region. This, coupled with attempts to stifle Protestantism, gave rise to the more popular view of the Inquisition.

"There is no doubt," says the report, that Inquisition procedures "were applied with excessive vigor and in some cases degenerated into real abuse." The report arose from John Paul II's desire to apologize for the abuses. "Before seeking pardon," he said, "it is necessary to have a precise knowledge of the facts. The image of the Inquisition represents almost the symbol … of scandal."

Fans of Michelangelo's biblical sculptures had a good summer, especially if they were in Florence. First restoration work finished on David, which turns 500 this year. "David is still itself, only what has changed is his luminosity," said Cinzia Parnigoni, who oversaw the cleaning of the six-ton marble statue (applying distilled water and cellulose pulp wrapped in rice paper). Elsewhere in town, the Horne Museum displayed a small wooden carving of Jesus, the latest Michelangelo discovery. The artist reportedly carved the 41cm (16 in.) figure in 1495, when he was 20, using a fresh corpse from a monastery as a model. About one or two Michelangelo "finds" turn up each year, The Guardian reported, but this one appears to be authentic.

Since early Christian historians agree that Mark the Evangelist was burned after his martyrdom, who is buried in his Venice tomb? Historian Andrew Chugg has one theory that is gaining support: the remains at St. Mark's Basilica, he argues in the July 2004 issue of History Today, belong to Alexander the Great. He'll give greater detail in The Lost Tomb of Alexander the Great (Periplus, forthcoming), but the case goes like this: After the Macedonian conqueror died in his early 30s around 323 B.C., he was buried in Alexandria. But by the 4th century A.D., his remains were gone. Chugg says "somebody in the Church hierarchy, perhaps even the Patriarch himself, decided … to pretend the remains of Alexander were those of St. Mark" to protect them from being destroyed during an uprising. The Venetians who stole "Mark's" body in 828, then, were the victims of a ruse. "Both bodies were … mummified in linen, and one seems to disappear at the same time that the other appears—in almost exactly the same place, near the central crossroads of Alexandria."

According to some texts—including Albert Schweitzer's biography of J. S. Bach—this year marks the 300th anniversary of the composer's first cantata. But scholars now doubt that the German composer actually wrote the Easter Cantata based on the text "For Thou will not leave my Soul in Hell." Still, in 1704 Bach was the organist at Arnstadt, and some scholars believe that during this time he did write his first cantata: "Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich" (Psalm 25: "Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul"). In commemoration, the cantata will be performed at the Bach Festival in Leipzig, as well as by groups worldwide including the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra, the Calgary Bach Festival Society Choir, Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and Boston's Emmanuel Music.

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