Not before or since has there ever been a musical group — rock and roll or otherwise — that the world's media has followed with the same determination that it once did with the Beatles. And while all of the fab four provided journalists, both legitimate and otherwise, with more than enough ammunition to feed their reporting, none of them gave them more salacious material than John Lennon.

Just this week, more than forty years after the fact, Lennon continued to make news as the Catholic Church apparently offered the former Beatle an absolution of sorts for the sin of publicly proclaiming, way back in 1966, that the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus Christ."

In an article for the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published this week, the church has apparently forgiven Lennon, while praising the Beatles music on the 40th anniversary of the release of their White Album. The article called the offending remark the product of "showing off, bragging by a young English working-class musician who had grown up in the age of Elvis Presley and rock and roll and had enjoyed unexpected success".

In his new 800-plus page biography, John Lennon: The Life, the author of what many call the definitive Beatles biography, Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation, retells the story of the "Jesus remark," along with many others. In the book, Lennon's life is retraced from his roots in a broken working class family in England, to his worldwide fame in the Beatles, to his eventual borderline sainthood status as a martyr and an icon of the peace movement.

Many of these stories have been told numerous times before of course, and there really aren't any new earth-shattering revelations. In addition to the firestorm that came in the wake of the Jesus incident — which was a key factor why the 1966 American tour which followed was the Beatles' last — Philip Norman recounts most of the well-tread chapters of Lennon's story.