Greek court bans book portraying Jesus Christ as drug-abusing loser

An Athens court has banned a comic book portraying Jesus Christ as a drug-abusing loser whose miracles happen by luck rather than divine intervention and sentenced its author to six months in jail for insulting religion. The book's Austrian author Gerhard Haderer did not attend the trial and the court suspended the sentence, which he would have been able to pay off with a fine had he been in court. The book's Greek publishers and four local booksellers were acquitted but the court upheld a ban on "The Life of Jesus", which was removed by police from book shops in February 2003 on the orders of the prosecution. Another book, an erotic Greek novel, was provisionally seized in Greece in 2000 after pressure from the church which condemned it as "blasphemous". However anti-Semitic books banned in other European countries are freely available.