Twenty years ago, no artist was interested in Jesus. Now his image is everywhere. A new collection of photographs helps Waldemar Janusczak understand what's changed

Aramaic is not a language I can utter a word of, even in restaurants. Latin is easier. I have the O-level. But, like everyone else, I am not looking forward to the task of sitting through Mel Gibson's new film about the passion of Jesus, which, notoriously, has been filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin, with no subtitles, and which apparently cost Mad Mel a Jerusalem-sized chunk of his Mad Max millions. I'll go and see it, of course. A folie de grandeur of this enormity should not remain unwitnessed. But as the yelp and howl of those tough Aramaic vowels drifts past my consciousness, I expect my thoughts to wander, and I have made it an ambition in those circumstances to consider the question of why Jesus is suddenly so popular.

I do not mean in religious or sect circles. That has been the case for 2,000 years. Mel has built himself a private church in Malibu in which the mass is said in Latin. You would expect such a type to proselytise on Jesus's behalf. Hollywood has reliably shown an appetite for the sheer bigness of Jesus's story. My surprise concerns neither sectarians nor movie moguls, but the Soho crowd, and particularly its visual artists. I do not recall an era when Jesus was as frequently imagined by poseurs and creatives as he is being imagined now.

The first film I ever made for television, more than 20 years ago, was for the old Omnibus on the BBC and it was called The Face of Christ. The film set out to discover how artists had come to decide what Christ looked like. The Bible has no descriptions of him. Not one word in Aramaic or Latin or Greek or Hebrew or any of the early languages of the Bible records Christ's appearance. For the first few hundred years of Christianity, Jesus was a blank space. Nobody made any attempt to imagine him because the second commandment expressly forbade the making of graven images, and artists, in those days, listened to their commandments.

When they finally began breaking them and imagining Jesus, their first attempts were young, unbearded, blond. It took the best part of a millennium for that gruesome image of a swarthy Christ on the cross with a beard and long hair to become the principal Christian icon. Anyway, dealing with all this in the film was easy. There was loads of material. Where it all got tricky was in the modern world, where images of Christ had dramatically dried up. When I was making my film, there were no notable attempts being made to picture Jesus. I could not find any modern artist of substance to talk about his image. The only activity was at the Cliff Richard end of the creative spectrum. As far as real art was concerned, Jesus was a no-go area.

Now, I see, he's everywhere. A hefty new tome has thumped onto my desk called Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, and the sheer number of illustrations in it is, indeed, revelatory. There are hundreds of them. Jesus on a cross. Jesus at the Last Supper. Jesus shot by muggers. Jesus having sex. Jesus as a Mexican woman holding a fish. An Israeli Jesus. Black ones. Grey ones. Hitler with Jesus. Jesus as a skeleton. It's extraordinary. If this book is to be believed, then as far as the fashionable photographers of the world are concerned, just now, all over the place, in studios around the globe, it's raining Christs.

And it isn't only photographers who are feeling this powerful new attraction. I see that that old Scottish bruiser Peter Howson, who used to paint Glaswegians beating themselves up, has forsworn drink and drugs and mounted a new show at the excellent Flowers East gallery featuring the stations of the cross. Admirers of Sam Taylor-Wood will remember that she, too, has recently been expressing a recurring interest in Christ's passion and persuaded the fashionably downtrodden Robert Downey Jr to pose in her arms in a vivid re-creation of Michelangelo's Piet‡. And I read that even Damien Hirst is now planning a Calvary series involving the crucifixion of three cows. Were I to be making my film today, I would have had some of the most famous artists on the planet to talk to. How come? Flicking through the rather creepy photography book -so much flesh, so little love -it's immediately obvious that one thing we are not talking about here is a renewed interest in ecclesiastical matters. The new Jesus, the one on all the covers and in all the photos, is not in any recognisable way a religious figure. Kurt Markus, an American born in 1947, has him as a handsome black hunk with glistening pecs whose halo turns out to be a backlit Frisbee. Clever. Pierre et Gilles, the French fashionistas, show him posing seductively behind bulletproof glass, surrounded by beer cans, or emerging from his sepulchre as seductively as Ursula Andress emerged from the sea in Dr No. These days, Christ, clearly, is an adorable gay icon. He's the new David Beckham.

Of course, there's nothing properly new about any of this. Jesus has been the only male nude, or half-nude, available to the creative imagination since the Renaissance, and his glistening torso pressed many an old master's buzzer. Caravaggio's Flagellation turned up a couple of years ago at the National Gallery, on loan from Rouen, and I cannot recall a more obviously tactile celebration of the male torso. You could actually feel Caravaggio running his hand across Christ's body, and loving it. Throw in some violence to go with this sweaty Semitic nudity and you have pretty much the perfect New York recipe for an extra-desirable modern hunk.

But not all the artists included in Revelation are gay. It's not only that. I think the real clue to Christ's newfound ubiquity is the preponderance of variations included in the book of Leonardo's Last Supper. Annie Leibovitz has the cast of The Sopranos taking up the famous pose. Sam Taylor-Wood shows a topless woman attempting it. An Israeli artist called Adi Nes re-creates the scene with a bunch of Israeli soldiers, their last meal perhaps before they enter Ramalla? All these images rely totally on the celebrity of the original they are quoting. In real life, Leonardo's Last Supper is a wreck, ruined by a desperate restoration. But this ruination has in no way impeded its fame. It remains one of the most recognisable images in art. And recognisable is surely what concerns us here.

Christ is everywhere in art these days, not because of his ideas or his revolution or anything he said or believed in, but because, of course, he is the ultimate celebrity. His face might not be his, but everyone knows it. A civilisation that has seen the collapse of its religious underpinning is now dancing around his image with the same manic insouciance that the Iraqis displayed last week when encountering pictures of Saddam. Christ is everywhere these days because, alas, he means nothing any more. He's a celebrity. Get me out of here.