>did you try the access via

document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].innerHTML

or

document.getElementById("someID").innerHTML

(after assigning an ID to the body tag)?

Well, believe it or not but the logic was like this:

ASP page containing javascript was including a javascript function that was calling another javascript function (to get the innerHTML) where this function was made accessible by including a reference to an external javascript file. I just remove that external reference and plugged the function directly in the ASP page and it started to work as expected. Really weird!