Culture Club

What do you mean "we" kemo sabe? 

Can you like Christian art without being a Christian?

It depends what you mean by "Christian Art".

You might like stories. You might think that the Christian stories are good stories even though they aren't true. You might think that Christian art is good art because of the way it tells those stories.

On the other hand, you might believe in art for arts sake. You might admire the formal beauty and technical skill in a painting, and not really care whether it depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus or a bowl of bananas.

So the question is "Can you enjoy the Christianity in Christian art without being a Christian?" Or, put another way, "Did you enjoy that painting of the Crucifixion because of the subject matter or in spite of it?"

I think that a Merchant of Venice is quite a good play and Siegfried is a very good opera. There is no doubt whatsoever that Shylock and Mime are appalling caricatures of Jewish people. [Note 1] But I don't think that liking them makes me a Cultural Anti-Semite. I like Talons of Weng-Chiang, but I am definitely not a Cultural Racist. [Note 2]

Some people think it is okay to like works which contain bad ideas. Others not so much. They say that if you like the work you are colluding with the ideas in it. Or else they say that the bad idea poisons whatever good qualities the work might have had. Or that any painting of a bad thing is a bad painting by definition.

Can you like Christian ethics and not be a Christian?

It depends what you mean by Christian ethics.

Do you mean specifically Christian ethics -- things which Christians approve of but which the rest of the world doesn't?

Or do you just mean ethics, the things which pretty much everyone in the human race would sign up to? Love and kindness and sunshine and fluffy animals?

Is there even such a thing as a specifically Christian virtue? I suppose you could say "forgiveness". Someone like, say, Lord Longford, who visited prisoners and made friends with even the very worst serial killers because he thought God loves everybody was practicing a very specifically Christian form of goodness. Not everyone thought it was admirable.  A lot of people thought that if he visited murderers in prison he must be in favour of murder. 

I don't think only Christians can forgive. I don't think only hippies can be peaceful and only punks can be anarchists and only Romans think that suicide can be honourable. But I'd get what you were saying if you said that someone had "hippy morals" or "punk politics". If I said that Richard Moore -- the Irish guy who reached out to the British soldier who blinded him with a rubber bullet -- was following "Christian principles" you'd know what I meant. (I have no idea if Moore is a Christian.)

Last Easter, the caretaker Prime Minister -- a practicing Hindu -- said that Jesus embodied "compassion, charity and selflessness" and that these values "are at the heart of British values" and that they inspire us to "build a society based on respect, tolerance and dignity for all."

Jesus was definitely compassionate and one definition of "charity" is "love in the Christian sense" -- "love for the unlovable".  Another definition of charity is "giving money to good causes" and not everyone in Sunak's party is in favour of that, particularly if the good cause involves, say, life-boats. In the past, Sunak's party has been less about selflessness and more about how greed is good. And some of his supporters might say that compassion was weak, soft, and indeed woke.

I personally don't have any objection to tolerance and dignity. Respect I'm a bit vaguer on: it depends on who you are respecting. But I don't think that they are particularly British values. I don't think that if you asked a French person or a Chinese person what they thought of when they thought of English people they would say "Well, they are very tolerant of gypsies and drag-queens and they are especially concerned about the dignity of refugees and homeless people, even smelly ones." They would be more likely to say that the English are particularly keen on good manners, apologising, queueing, and not cheating at cricket.

It could be that we British wait our turn and don't argue with umpires because King Charles is head of state and also head of the Church and because in the olden days most people went to Church on Sundays. I don't know if that's actually true, but it sounds like the sort of thing that might be.

Can you be a Christian and not believe in Christianity?

It depends what you mean by Christianity.

It also depends a good deal on what you mean by "believe". I think even that little word, "be" may give us some trouble.

Does Christianity mean "the kind of thing we find in the Gospels" -- the stories about Jesus being born in a stable and feeding the five thousand and walking on the water?

Or does Christianity mean "all of the many and various and very complicated doctrines and dogmas that the various Churches have wanted you to sign up to?"

Does saying "Yeah, that story, I like it, and I think some of it is true, probably" make you a Christian?

Does saying "I reject the idea that Jesus is coequal with the Father and assert that he is a subordinate divine being begotten in time?" make you not a Christian?

What do you call someone who thinks that Christianity is a lot of ethical platitudes but doesn't particularly think about miracles and theology and scripture? 

"A member of the Church of England".

What do you call someone who thinks about miracles and theology and scripture literally all the time, but doesn't believe in any of them? 

"A Church of England Bishop".

Okay, that's quite cynical. But the truth is that churches have always admitted people with quite a wide range and degree of beliefs. The Church of England is intensely relaxed about people who assert their belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of the Body in church on Sunday morning but say that it's a bit more complicated than that in a television studio on Monday afternoon.

There was a moment in the 1990s when all the evangelicals were going on and on about meta-narratives. It was just about the same moment when all the university English departments were giving up on structuralism. (I don't know if this is true but it sounds as if it ought to be.) The argument runs roughly like this:

"The Bible tells the story of the history of the world: Creation, Fall, Flood, Exodus, foundation of Israel, deportation to Babylon, building of the temple, coming of Jesus, foundation of the Church, destruction of the temple, large blank space, Second Coming. But the majority of people in the West -- including some who were Christian enough to put themselves in physical danger in order to tell other people about Jesus -- never truly thought of themselves as part of that story.  The story they thought they were a part of was the one that was told at English public schools: Cavemen, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Ancient Britons, Normans, Tudors, Reformation, Spanish Armada, Christopher Columbus, Glorious Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Queen Victoria, British Empire, Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill, VE Day, Winston Churchill, BBC. Christians ought to believe that the story of the West is a minor sub-plot in the story that runs from Eden to Armageddon; where in practice they believe that Christianity is a fairly significant sub-plot in the story of the British Empire and the United States."

Is there some way of saying "I think of myself as part of the Christian meta-narrative, but I don't think it's literally true?" Liberal Jews have a lot of practice in this kind of thing.

Can you be an atheist and a Christian? 

Should we be surprised that the World's Most Famous atheist is a Cultural Christian?

It depends what you mean by "culture".

I suppose that most of us would take "culture" to mean either "books and arts and literature" or else "the customs and traditions and manners that a particular group of people have in common". New plays are reviewed in the culture section of the newspaper. English culture expects you to use knives and forks rather than chopsticks, and says that black ties are appropriate at funerals. So being a Cultural Christian probably just means watching Carols From Kings and picking Bach's St Matthew Passion when you're on Desert Island Discs. Or else it means eating turkey on 25th December and giving the grandkids chocolate eggs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. "I'm not a Christian myself, but of course, my background and traditions are Christian" is an astonishingly uncontroversial thing to say.

Rachel Johnson (who has a brother called Boris) is a very much better interviewer than James O'Brien. O'Brien's technique is to repeatedly harangue his subjects, asking them the same question over and over again regardless of whether or not they've answered it, and to pretend to be cross regardless of what answer they try and give. Rachel Johnson's technique is to fein naivety (or possibly to be really genuinely naive) and ask the interrogatee politely to please explain what he means. Had O'Brien been set on Dawkins, YouTube would today be full of thirty second clips saying DAWKINS TOTALLY OWNED BY GENIUS DISC JOCKEY and WOKE CREEP CANCELS HEROIC SCIENTIST.  Which would have been more entertaining, I admit. As it was, we sat in on two people having a polite conversation. I don't think it will ever catch on.

And in fairness, real life Richard Dawkins seems a lot more pleasant, urbane, and willing to have a conversation than the Richard Dawkins who wrote the God Delusion or the Richard Dawkins who dog-whistles on Twitter.

So, what does this new, more pleasant Richard Dawkins mean when he says he is a Cultural Christian?

He means a cultural Christian as opposed to a believing Christian, or simply a 'believer'.

When Rachel Johnson says that her own non-belief sometimes wavers, Dawkins asks her directly if she believes that Jesus' mother was a virgin and if he rose from the dead, adding "I don't think you do". She says that the former is a biological impossibility but that she would like to believe in the latter. She thinks Jesus was real, felt The Force very strongly when she visited the holy sites in Jerusalem, and has heard, but misunderstood, the theory that the "Virgin birth"  was a mistranslation. Dawkins thinks that both the resurrection and the virgin birth are simply nonsense.

So: the thing which distinguishes Cultural Christians from Believing Christians is the miracles. But aren't some actual Christians also skeptical about those points? Didn't David Jenkins famously think that the virgin birth and the resurrection were not literally true? Was he a Cultural Christian? Does that mean the New Atheists and the Sea of Faith group are going to get together and split the difference? If I wanted to be very cynical indeed, could I say "There you are: Catholic Modernism and Liberal Anglicanism and the German Demythologisers were always just basically Atheists: Richard Dawkins says so"?

So: how do these Cultural Christians differ from common-or-garden atheists?

1: They like hymns

They also like Christmas Carols, parish churches and cathedrals. Dawkins says that he would be sad if we lost the old churches. It isn't exactly clear if he means "lost them as living places of worship" or "lost them as preserved relics of a by-gone age". I myself think it would be a shame if we bulldozed Stonehenge, but that doesn't make me a Cultural Druid.

Tim Minchin, in his very good song White Wine In the Sun says "I get freaked out by churches; some of the hymns they sing have nice chords, but the lyrics are dodgy". He also says that he has "all the usual objections" to Christian education but that he "quite likes the songs". 

I think that the Younger Richard Dawkins would have said that there were really no such thing as Christian songs. I think he would have said that Olden Days writers and musicians just happened to have been Christians -- or just happened to have had Christian patrons -- and just happened to put Christian words to their tunes. If atheists had been paying their wages they might equally have just happened to write atheist songs. I joked at the time that he seemed to think that you could take "Oh Sacred Head Sore Wounded, With Grief and Pain Weighed Down" and replace it with "Nucleotides Only Vary Slightly And Only In The Nitrogenous Base" and it wouldn't make that much difference. But the Older, Mellower Richard Dawkins seems to acknowledge that Christianity is a component of Christian culture. At any rate, he doesn't get freaked out by churches.

2: They feel comfortable with the Christian ethos.

"Ethos" is a bit of a slippery word. It is etymologically related to "ethics". When I Googled it I found a private school saying that it wanted all the kids to flourish and fulfil their potential; and a software company saying that it liked to solve clients' problems and allow employees to explore innovative approaches. Liking the Christian "ethos" might mean feeling at home with stained glass windows, crib-scenes and robed choirs, and feeling less at home with shrines to Ganesh or statues of the Buddha. Or it might mean that you are used to living in the kind of country where most people are, or used to be, Christians. A country where we still say "god bless you!" and "goodness gracious!" and have silly traditions connected with Patrick and Valentine. That's not the same as being a Christian, but it's quite a long distance from finding Christians creepy and dodgy (like Tim Minchin) or saying that they are poisonous, violent, irrational, ignorant and hostile to free enquiry (like Christopher Hitchens).

3: They see a sharp distinction between English Christianity and American Christianity.

I don't think that the Younger Richard Dawkins ever thought that the average Anglican Vicar, conscientiously dispensing moral guidance and spiritual comfort to his flock, was poisonous or violent or ignorant. But I think he would have said that this made it worse: the nice moderate Christians provide cover and credibility for the gun-touting child-beating abortion-banning evolution-denying Trump-voting hellfire-and-brimstone American preachers. But the Older Richard Dawkins sees them as two quite separate things. Sure, he thinks the Virgin Birth is a silly idea. But he thinks Creationism is pernicious nonsense. And he thinks that Creationism is a specifically American problem. 

It's almost like English Christianity doesn't quite count as a religion. It's almost as if what he wants is the Church of England, but without the God part.

"We are actually a Christian country", says the World's Leading Atheist.

"We are a Christian country in that sense...."

"It would matter if we lost our beautiful cathedrals or parish churches"

We. We. We.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to Believing Christian.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to American Fundamentalist Christian.

"Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to someone who is creeped out by Christianity and thinks religion fucks everything up.

But mostly, "Cultural Christian" means Cultural Christian as opposed to Muslim.

And that, of course, is the point.

Asked if he thinks that it is a bad thing that fewer and fewer people are going to church at Easter, Dawkins says that he is "horrified that Ramadan is being promoted instead."

"Being promoted." He's not horrified that Muslims celebrate Islamic festivals. He's not horrified that Christians are becoming less and less observant but Muslims are still showing up to Friday prayers. He's not even horrified that some Muslim Billy Graham is trying to persuade Christians to get up out of their seats and give their lives to Allah.

Do Muslims proselytise? I've been approached by Christians who think that the world is going to end almost immediately, Christians who think it's important to go to Church on a Saturday instead of a Sunday, smiley American Christians who think that Jesus was a Red Indian, but never by someone trying to persuade me that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger.

By whom is Ramadan being promoted so horrifyingly? 

Last month, on the date of Islamic Eid, someone put a quote from the Hadith on the departure board at Kings Cross Station. Not instead of the train times, you understand: in that little space where news headlines or messages of support for the King or the England Women's Football Team are sometimes displayed. This got conflated with Lee Anderson's nasty rhetoric about London's mayor being secretly controlled by sinister Islamist forces, and with wilder conspiracy theories about London being a no-go zone operating under sharia law.

Richard Dawkins doesn't say anything like that. But he does say that he prefers Christianity to Islam. 

And it's not just a mild cultural preference, like preferring mince pies and Easter eggs to chumchums and globjamons because that's what he grew up with. Christianity, Christianity itself, is a Good Thing because it provides a "bulwark against Islam". Christianity is a "fundamentally decent" religion while Islam is not.

What's the difference? Islam, he says, is "fundamentally hostile to women and gays". But he has to go back and qualify this. Christians have also had problems with women ("female vicars and bishops"). But the misogyny and homophobia of Islam is written into its holy books. He has to go back and qualify this again: he's talking about the religion -- the Koran and the Hadith. He isn't talking about individual Muslims.

My understanding is that the Koran specifically states that the Sin of Sodom was homosexuality; where the Bible doesn't say what it was. On the other hand the Koran doesn't specify any punishment for homosexuals, but the Bible mandates the death penalty. True, the unequivocal Christian prohibitions form part of (what Christians call) the Old Testament. The Younger Richard Dawkins would not have thought this made much difference. The Younger Richard Dawkins used to cite nasty passages of Scripture -- a verse in Deuteronomy about executing insolent children -- as evidence that Christians in particular and religion in general, was horrid. 

Both sides of the argument are prone to cheat on this point. You don't have to be Christopher Hitchens to see a problem with Christians who assert that the Bible is the absolute and infallible word of God, and in the next breath saying that none of the problem passages apply any more. But it's not very helpful for a smart atheist to pull an obscure passage out of Deuteronomy and say "if you are a Christian, you must, by definition, agree with this verse, and if you don't agree with this verse you obviously aren't a Christian". A certain kind of annoying atheist likes to quote that scene in West Wing when the President challenges a Christian who hates gays "because the Bible tells him so". If you follow the Bible so closely, he asks, can you tell me what would be a good price for my daughter when I sell her as a slave? And should I personally execute the intern who came into work on a Sunday or merely report him to the religious police? It's quite funny, but it doesn't really prove very much. 

If you pointed out to the Younger Richard Dawkins that both Christians and Jews have a fairly complex and critical relationship with the text of their respective scriptures he would probably have accused you of obfuscation or blamed you for committing theology. It has even been suggested that his quip about not needing to know how St Paul interpreted the Old Testament to be certain that God doesn't exist implies that he read my book, although unlike Dave Sim, he never sent me a postcard.

But here is the older Richard Dawkins, looking at actual Christians and declaring them to be mostly harmless, despite what their holy books say; but looking at the holy books of Islam and declaring Islam to be malignant, despite the fact that most actual Muslims are perfectly innocuous. If we are allowed to draw a distinction between English Christianity (benign) and American Christianity (malevolent) why aren't we also allowed to distinguish between the good Muslims in this country and the bad ones in, say, Saudi Arabia?

There is a case to be made that Christianity has proved culturally more adaptable than Islam. Most Christians regard their texts as foundational documents, whereas many Muslims regard theirs as the irreducible truth. There is a case to be made that the literalist interpretations of Islam happen to be the ones currently making the biggest noise on the world stage. Not even the most conservative Christians advocate the imposition of Mosaic law in a modern judicial setting. (Nor, indeed, do the most conservative Jews.) But there definitely are powerful Muslim nations which operate a sharia code based directly on the Koran. Ergo, right here, right now, Islam is more scary than Christianity.

But if that's your case, you could have expressed it more straightforwardly: "Religion is harmless, although in my opinion silly. Fundamentalism is very dangerous." You could even say "Muslims are more inclined than Christians to be fundamentalists" or "Islam is prone to fundentalism because it believes it's scriptures were directly dictated by God." It's not that hard. 

Clever sixth formers, and, in fairness, stupid R.E teachers, used to say that Religion is bad because Religion causes wars. One of the wars they used to say that religion caused was the civil war in Northern Ireland.

The Younger Richard Dawkins made a very fair point about sectarianism. No, he said, the thugs in the IRA and the thugs in the UDA were not actually fighting about faith. No-one has ever put a bomb under a police car because of a difference of opinion about the immaculate conception or the ontological status of the Eucharist. The Irish were killing each other over nationhood and traditions and community and very possibly because Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. But (the Younger Dawkins said) religion was the vector along which that hatred was transmitted: it ensured that people went to different schools and different churches and had different holidays and ate different food and supported different football teams. There is a very old joke about an atheist Jew who visits Belfast, and is asked if he is a Catholic Jewish atheist or a Protestant Jewish atheist. [Note 3] I think the Younger Dawkins made a very valid point. But the Older Dawkins seems to think that it makes a big difference whether you are a Church of England Atheist or a Muslim Atheist.

The person who says that Christian values are values that "we" all share sounds more liberal than the one who says that his God is the best God and anyone with a different God is going to hell. But in fact, the English have generally been quite cool with religious pluralism. I am church and you are chapel and she is synagogue and they are something really quite peculiar -- but we're all British and can play in the park together.  Yes, the guy who thinks he's found the only true God, or the only true God has found him, may spend his spare time knocking on people's doors and standing on street corners and putting tracts through strangers' letterboxes, but he's still British, even if he is a bit annoying.

But once you start to talk about "our" Christian values, you imply that "they" have different, non-Christian values.  And it's only a hop, skip and jump from saying that Christian values are British values to talking about "true Britons" and "real Americans" and saying that the Other Lot don't count.

There was some enjoyable comedy on the Interwebs the other week because a right wing lunatic had asked an AI bot to sum up Britishness, and the AI bot had come up with a picture of Jesus in a nightshirt leading a cohort of crusader knights through a landscape with St Pauls Cathedral and the London Eye clearly visible, along with (for some reason) some muppets and some pterodactyls. For the headbanging right, Christianity is not so much a faith as an identity card. 

I wish Rishi Sunak had had the courage to say "I'm a Hindu and I don't have any idea what your lot are doing with the eggs and the bunnies and the dead guy and the cross -- but you probably don't have much idea what my lot do at Diwali.  And that's what's so great about this country! We're all perfectly free to do our own thing, or nothing at all. Happy whatever!"

"My religion" can be a very good thing. "Our religion" is very dangerous indeed. Cultural Christianity can easily become a badge which says "One of us: not one of them".

We love the merry organ and the bells across the snow

We love the Church of England, although we never go

And we love the dear old Bible, with "Jehovah" and "begat

It's not that we believe in it or anything like that.
          Sydney Carter

[1] I have recently learned that it is NOT anti-semitic to write stories featuring hook nosed goblins who love gold and control the banks, because in real life Jewish people are not in fact goblins and don't control the banks.

[2] "As a matter of fact, Andrew, the fact that you like Talons of Weng-Chiang means that you quite definitely are a cultural racist. And the fact that you have read Those Shitty Wizard books makes you a cultural TERF:"

[3] I am also fond of the one about the Englishman who, threatened by a paramilitary of uncertain denomination, decides it is safest to claim to be Jewish. "Gosh" says the man in the balaclava "I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast."

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MARK 16

there were also women looking on afar off:
among whom was Mary Magdalene,
and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome;
who also, when he was in Galilee,
followed him and ministered unto him
and many other women
which came up with him unto Jerusalem.

There is an epilogue.

It introduces four — arguably five — new characters. This is not a natural way of telling a story. But it’s the only way Mark can tell it. The hero is dead. The supporting cast have all run away.

Jesus screams. We cut to the temple. The holy curtain is hanging in shreds. We cut back to Golgotha. Jesus is dead. The Centurion sneers. And as the lights come back on, the camera slowly pans to three characters, in the background, who haven’t been mentioned before.

Of course, they are women.

There are always women in the background. Ministering; it says, like Peter’s mother-in-law. Serving. Doing the practical stuff. They had to eat didn’t they? And I suppose someone had to launder the clothes. And when the big guys with the famous names have run away, the women are still there. To clean up the mess.

Mary Magdalene we know nothing about. Her first name was Mary and her last name was Magdalene. Anyone who refers to her as “Mary the Magdalene" or "Mary of Magdala" is seeing stuff in the text which isn't actually there.

We know even less about the other Mary. She had two sons: James “the less” and Joses. Jesus definitely had two disciples called James: James the Son of Zebedee and James the Son of Alphaeus. Zebedee's son is one of the inner circle; so maybe Alphaeus's son was known as the Less Important James? But in that case why not call his mother “Mary the Wife of Alphaeus”? James the Less could just as well mean Little James or Young James. We don’t know.

It would be nice if one of the women in the epilogue turned out to be the most famous Mary of all. It would be nice to think that she had made up with her son since since she called him a crazy man back in Capernaum. Maybe a scribe wrote “Mary the Mother of Joses” when he meant to write “Mary the Mother of Jesus”? But Mark was written in Greek and Iostos / Iesous is a much less plausible typo.

Iostos is Joseph and Joseph was the name of Jesus’s earth-dad and Jesus definitely had a brother called James so maybe when Mark writes "Mary the Mother of Joseph and James…" he expects us to say "…And Jesus as well!"

Maybe he does. And maybe he doesn’t. We just don’t know.

Salome we don’t know one single thing about. Christians have decided she was the wife of Zebedee and therefore the mother of Big James. James and John’s Mum gets a walk-on in Matthew, but we don't know what she was called. Salome was an incredibly common name.

Three women. Two called Mary, one not. One identified by her children; one by her surname; one not identified at all. That’s all we have to go on.

The camera turns to them. And then it turns away again. We haven’t quite got to their part of the story yet.

and now when the even was come
because it was the preparation
that is the day before the sabbath,
Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counseller
which also waited for the kingdom of God
came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.
and Pilate marvelled if he were already dead
and calling unto him the centurion
he asked him whether he had been any while dead.
and when he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph.




Jesus has died quickly. Pilate is surprised. Enter Joseph of Arimathea.

And exit Joseph of Arimathea, almost immediately.

If you read a certain kind of literature you know all about Joseph. He collected the blood of Jesus at the crucifixion. He hosted the Last Supper. He brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury. He was Jesus’s Uncle and a tin-merchant and used to visit Priddy (where they hold the folk festival). His descendents were the Fisher Kings.

Mark tells us nothing about him. We don’t know where Arimathea was, or indeed if there ever was such a place.

Rich guy. Probably on the Sanhedrin. Secret follower of Jesus. Asks Pilate for the body. Pilate hands it over. Performs a hasty funeral and disappears from history.

Why does Pilate surrender the body of Jesus to Joseph? Because he doesn’t want to antagonize the people by leaving a dead body rotting on a pole during the festival? Or precisely in order to antagonize them. “I couldn’t stop you lot lynching him; but you can’t stop me giving him an honourable burial.” Or maybe Pilate was just a decent chap who thought that even criminals deserved a decent funeral. We are told that Albert Pierrepoint was rather fussy about how the authorities disposed of his clients after he had finished with them.

and he bought fine linen
and took him down
and wrapped him in the linen
and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock
and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre
and Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses
beheld where he was laid.

Joseph bought the linen-cloth specially. Mark thinks that is important: something we need to know. The fine linen is sidoni: the same word Mark used for the clothes that Naked Guy lost in the garden of Gethsemane.

Mark has abandoned any pretence that Jesus literally died on Passover: Joseph is concerned about the Sabbath, but goes out and buys a linen shroud on the holy day. The women have been to the spice-market, too.

Joseph wraps Jesus in the cloth.

He put him in a sepulchre. Most modern translations say “tomb”: if we wanted to be literal we should probably say “memorial”. He rolls a stone in front of the door. He must have been a big guy. He can move a stone by himself which three grown-up ladies couldn’t move together.

And that’s it: Joseph’s part of the story is over.

And we pull back again. The three mysterious ladies are still in the background. Watching.

and when the sabbath was past,
Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome,
had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.
and very early in the morning the first day of the week,
they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.
and they said among themselves,
“Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?”
and when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away
for it was very great
and entering into the sepulchre,
they saw a young man sitting on the right side,
clothed in a long white garment;
and they were affrighted.
and he saith unto them,
be not affrighted:
“ye seek Jesus of Nazareth,
which was crucified:
he is risen;
he is not here:
behold the place where they laid him.
but go your way,
tell his disciples 

and Peter
that he goeth before you into Galilee
there shall ye see him
as he said unto you”
And they went out quickly
and fled from the sepulchre
for they trembled and were amazed
neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid…

And this is where Mark's story ends.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

The disciples ran away. Some women stayed. So the women first heard the news.

Jesus had no truck with the prejudices of his day. Women were crucial to his ministry and it’s silly that some churches still have a problem with women taking on pastoral roles. Mary, Mary and Salome were in a very real sense Apostles to the Apostles. Mary Magdalene became the Holy Grail…

Yes. All that. Maybe.

But also, this:

The people who were, or should have, expected the Resurrection ran away. Jesus told the disciples that he was coming back. He told them five times, at least. But Judas defected. Peter recanted. Everyone else scattered.

What happened next — according to Mark?

Not according to Matthew or John or Luke. Not according to Robert Powell or the Ladybird Book of Jesus. Not according to the Easter Morning liturgy. According to Mark.

Imagine yourself reading this book, for the first time, on what would have been Jesus’ seventieth birthday.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

What happened next?

No-one knows.

Or at any rate, Mark doesn’t know. Or if he did know, he didn’t want us to know. People who understand Greek tell us he broke off mid-sentence. Your Bible might have some verses after this: it may very well print them in [square brackets]. That’s because different manuscripts have different endings and the different endings are written in different styles and they are pretty much just summaries of John, Matthew and Luke. But the two oldest Bibles in existence break off at this point.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

It has to be girls who go to the tomb. The boy disciples, the eleven, were expecting to Jesus to come back to life. Because he told them that he would: over and over again. The three women are not expecting Jesus to wake up or stand up. They are expecting to embalm a dead body.

They are expecting to anoint him: which is probably a good thing to do with a horribly mutilated corpse, but also, ironically, the appropriate thing to do with a dead Messiah.

The people of this time practiced burial and reburial: after a year or so the bones of a dead person were exhumed and reinterred in ossuaries. We shouldn’t think of the tomb as a single cave with a single bier for a single body: it was more likely to a mausoleum or a morgue, with spaces for a number of burials and an entrance that could be sealed and unsealed. That is why the young man has to point out the place where Jesus was laid.

Yes; it is a young man.

Pretend you are reading this story for the first time.

Would you read this and say “Oh, when Marks says ‘they saw a young man in a white shirt’ he obviously means ‘two angels came down from heaven and caused an earthquake’”?

Or would you say “Oh. Some other disciple got here first.”?

Would you, perhaps, say “Oh, it’s naked guy from Gethsemane: I knew he was going to turn out to be of some importance later on?”

I think that if you were reading the story for the first time, you might say: someone got to the tomb first. And it must have been a guy, because he was strong enough to move Joseph’s stone. And that person found that Jesus’ body wasn’t there. So he waited for the other disciples to come. But they never did. Only some women.

So: Mysterious Young Guy says to Mysterious Women. “Of course his body isn’t here. Haven’t you been paying attention? He's going to meet you all back home Galilee. Go and remind the disciples. Go and remind Peter in particular. And do call him Peter. He can have his name back. That’s important.”

Dot. Dot. Dot.

The women panic. They run away. The don’t pass the message on. They vanish from the story.

They never tell no-one, so no-one never knowed.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

That is the story. That is not Matthew’s story or Luke’s story or John’s story, and it isn’t the church’s story. But it is Mark’s story.

The boys ran away. The girls heard that Jesus had come back to life. But they never passed on the message. The disciples were meant to meet Jesus back in the Galilee. But they never went. They missed the appointment.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

Matthew changes the story. The young man is now an angel who has come down from heaven and created an earthquake. He is waiting for the women outside the tomb. But there is still an odd emphasis on his clothing: white as snow. The women run out of the tomb to tell the disciples, but they bump into Jesus himself, who repeats the angels instructions: tell the disciples to meet me in Galilee. The disciples do indeed go back to Galilee; where they do indeed see Jesus: he tells them to pass his teachings on and then goes back to heaven.

Luke changes the story. The young man in a white robe is now two men in dazzlingly shiny garments. The women go and tell the disciples straight away. Peter checks out the tomb, and what do you think convinces him that the story is true? Linen cloth. Eventually, they all see Jesus: the meet him one last time in Bethany and he goes back to heaven. But they don’t return to Galilee. They stay in Jerusalem. Jesus specifically tells them to.

John changes the story. A group of women go to the tomb and encounter no young men and no angels: only — what do you think? — linen garments, folded up. They go and get John and Peter. John goes into the tomb but Peter doesn’t. John is convinced that Jesus has come back to life but Peter less so. Mary stays behind and sees the resurrected Jesus. Then all the disciples apart from Thomas see him. Then Thomas does. Everyone drifts back to Galilee and take up fishing again, where they see Jesus one last time.

But we are reading Mark’s version.

Dot. Dot. Dot.

“And that is what happened; forty years ago. And only now is the truth coming out. Jesus told Peter and Peter told me and I am telling you. He knew all this would happen. The thousands of bodies hung up on crosses. Pigs in the Holy of Holies. The temple reduced to a pile of rubble. Jesus warned us in advance. And he said that when that happened — that would be the proof that he had gone back to his Papa, and his Papa had put him in charge of the universe. And he’ll be back. Any day now. So hang in there. Don’t fumble the ball this time. Don’t fall asleep like you did in Gethsemane. Don’t say you never met Jesus. Don’t lose your shirt and run away naked. Don’t fail to pass on the message. We have another another chance. Don’t blow it….”

That, it seems to me, is Mark’s understanding of the Gospel. A secret that got out; a message that didn’t get passed on. It is how we would read Mark’s Gospel if we were truly reading it for the…

Mark 15

and straightway in the morning 

the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council 

and bound Jesus 

and carried him away 

and delivered him to Pilate 

and Pilate asked him, 

“art thou the King of the Jews?” 

and he answering said unto him, 

“thou sayest it” 

and the chief priests accused him of many things: 

but he answered nothing. 

and Pilate asked him again, saying, 

“answerest thou nothing? 

behold how many things they witness against thee” 

but Jesus yet answered nothing 

so that Pilate marvelled

now at that feast he released unto them one prisoner 

whomsoever they desired

and there was one named Barabbas 

which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him 

who had committed murder in the insurrection 

and the multitude crying aloud 

began to desire him to do as he had ever done unto them. 

but Pilate answered them, saying, 

"will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?" 

for he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy. 

but the chief priests moved the people 

that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. 

and Pilate answered and said again unto them, 

"what will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews?" 

and they cried out again, "crucify him" 

then Pilate said unto them, 

why, what evil hath he done? 

and they cried out the more exceedingly, "crucify him" 

and so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, 

and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified. 

I am trying to make sense of Mark as a storyteller. But this part of Mark’s story does not make sense to me. 

Mark has painted a picture of Jesus’s conflict with the Temple. Mark has shown Jesus blaspheming in front of the supreme court. I understand why Mark thinks the Priests wanted Jesus dead. 

But now a new character enters the story. You probably have a picture of him in your head. He’s dressed in a Roman toga with a wreath on his head; or perhaps dressed as a Roman legionnaire, with a face oddly reminiscent of Michael Palin. (Be honest.) A brooding figure; prone to symbolic gestures, who sings one enigmatic song in the first act. 

Mark doesn’t introduce Pilate. If we were really reading the story for the first time it wouldn’t be completely clear who he was: clearly a judge or figure of authority; someone whose power the Jews reluctantly acknowledge; with the power to have a man killed. 

Next comes someone called Bar-Abbas. We have seen that “Abba” is what little kids call their fathers, so he name means Son of His Papa. I guess that means he was a bastard. He’s some kind of revolutionary or terrorist; but here Mark is strangely evasive. He says that he has been imprisoned with some rebels; and that those rebels killed someone during an the uprising. He doesn’t say that Dad’s-Son himself is a revolutionary or a murderer. About the failed revolution he tells us nothing. 

And then there is a crowd. Outside Pilate’s residence, early in the morning — after cock-crow but before 9AM — on (allegedly) Passover morning. Where did they come from? Where do they go? And why does Pilate involve then in events? 

Pilate calls Jesus “King of the Jews”. He uses the phrase four times, and puts a sign “King of the Jews” above the Cross. He has heard of Jesus; he knows that people are calling him Messiah; and he has a pretty shrewd idea about that word means. But he doesn’t think that letting people call you Anointed amounts to a capital offence. If he did the trial would have been very short. 

We know what happens. It is the maybe the most famous story in the world. Pilate asks Jesus if he is King. Niether Pilate nor the Priests take “You say so” to be an admission of guilt. If they did the trial would have been very short. The Priests run through their charge list; presumably the same accusations they made an hour ago in the High Priest’s house. Jesus doesn’t answer. Pilate repeats the question about whether or not Jesus is king: still no answer. 

And suddenly, from nowhere, there is a crowd. (An ochlos: a multitude; a rabble; a riot.) And they petition Pilate to grant an amnesty to a prisoner. Apparently this was a local custom. Pilate offers to release Jesus: the crowd ask him to release Daddy’s-Son. Pilate acquiesces; and hands Jesus over — that word again — to be executed. Without pronouncing him guilty of anything. 

What does Mark think just happened? 

There is no reason to assume that Barabas is a thug. He might be an heroic figure. He could also be a hard-luck case, on death row because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. People do get killed by despotic governments because they happened to be adjacent to the place where a bad thing happened. "Common purpose" they call it. "Let him have it, Chris".  

There must have been a plan for a mass crucifixion. There are other rebels in prison: at least two people go to their deaths at the same time as Jesus. No-one suggests that Pilate might release one of the “two bandits”; no-one suggests that he free the other rebels. Barabbas is a special case. 

Is the crowd a delegation of Barabbas’s friends and supporters? Perhaps they have come specifically to try to claim the amnesty on his behalf? In which case they wouldn’t know who Jesus was: it's a foregone conclusion they’ll ask Pilate to free the popular freedom fighter, not the religious nutter from up north.

So why does Pilate go through the motions of offering to release Jesus? He understands that the Priests have a grievance against Jesus. Perhaps he has a Machiavellian plan to put the priests in his debt by killing their enemy for them? But he doesn’t have a good legal basis to proceed. 

So perhaps he is being sneaky. Perhaps he is saying “Let’s put it to a vote. And let’s ask these good people who have specifically come to ask for the release of Bar-Abbas. We are going to commute one sentence today: shall it perchance be this popular and unfortunate local hero; or shall it be this Northern preacher who only arrived in town three days ago. Oh, really? Is that your final word? Then I am afraid there is nothing I can do about it. It’s out of my hands.” 

This makes some sense. But the story, as Mark tells it, is very obscure. 

and the soldiers led him away into the hall, 

called Praetorium 

and they call together the whole band. 

and they clothed him with purple 

and platted a crown of thorns 

and put it about his head, 

and began to salute him, Hail, King of the Jews! 

and they smote him on the head with a reed 

and did spit upon him 

and bowing their knees worshipped him. 

and when they had mocked him 

they took off the purple from him 

and put his own clothes on him 

and led him out to crucify him 

It sometimes happens in a fairy tale that the Prince disguises himself as a peasant or a servant. And if the tale is told in the form of a pantomime, there will likely be a scene in which the nagging old cook or the cruel school mistress says “Who do you think you are, the King of England?” or “Well, just sit down and eat your gruel, your Majesty”. (Cakes often get burned at the same time.) 

The terrible climax of Mark’s story is full of this kind of irony. Pilate has called Jesus “Jewish King” five times; the soldiers now take up the joke. Jew-King, Jew-King! They even dress him up as a carnival King and stage a mock coronation. Religious artwork usually depicts the crown of thorns as an instrument of torture; but I am not sure how you would go about plaiting a thorny branch. Maybe it just means “a silly fake crown like kids would wear if they were playing kings and queens”. 

We are not supposed to think “How ironic! They are calling him a King in jest, but if they but knew it, he really is secretly a king.” We are supposed to think: “This is King Jesus: this is what he looks like. The first are last and the last are first. He is the very last. Being hurt and spat on and laughed is the ultimate glorification.” 

and they compel one Simon, a Cyrenian 

who passed by 

coming out of the country 

the father of Alexander and Rufus 

to bear his cross 

Simon of Cyrene is another mysterious, random figure. Some people say that the sons of the man who carried the cross must have been afforded a special status in the ancient Church. There would be no point is calling Simon “the father of Alexander and Rufus” if Mark’s readers didn’t know who Alexander and Rufus were. That might be true: but it’s no help to us

Cyrene is in Libya. This shows that race is no barrier to love: Simon, an African, helped Jesus, a Jew, when no-one else would. 

Or else it proves that white people have always thought it is the job of black people to carry their stuff.

and they bring him unto the place Golgotha 

which is, being interpreted, the place of a skull. 

The Hebrew word gulgolet mostly means “head”: for example in the sense of a “head count”. But it sometimes means “skull”: when Samson crushes the skull of one of his enemies, he crushes their gulgolet. Mark says that the name Golgotha means Kraniou Topos: place of a skull. (Compare our word cranium.) The Latin translators left Golgotha as it was, but kraniou topos became calvariae locus, which is why you still get churches, hills and sentimental hymns locating Jesus death at a place called Calvary. 

Mark does not say that Kraniou Topos is a hill, green or otherwise. 

and they gave him to drink wine 

mingled with myrrh 

but he received it not 

We sometimes read that a condemned man is offered a blindfold but refuses to wear it: I am told that modern American prisons have the charming custom of offering inmates valium before killing them. Jesus told his disciples in the upper room that he would never drink wine again: Mark wants us to know that he kept his vow.

and when they had crucified him, 

they parted his garments, 

casting lots upon them, 

what every man should take

We don’t seem to be able to get away from clothes. Perhaps Mark wants to allude to; but not dwell on, a secondary but still unpleasant fact. Jesus is not merely bound to stake: he is on public display mother-naked. 

In her novel To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf famously relegates the First World War to a parenthesis. Mark puts the climax of his story in a subordinate clause: it is as if we look away from the stake and look at the soldiers instead. They take him to the killing ground. They offer him a sedative. And after they have executed him, they take his clothes. It’s as if you had said: They went for a nice walk in the park. The roses were pretty. He had a strawberry lolly, she had an ice-cream. After he had murdered her, he put the wrappers in the bin. 

It is not at all unlikely that an execution party should be allowed to keep the condemned man’s possessions. We don’t need to imagine them shooting craps for Jesus’ robe: quite possibly they flipped a denarius or just did the Roman equivalent of chartam, forfex, lapis. But the casting of lots is a callback to the Old Testament: to another one of King David’s hymns. A man — we don’t know who — is going though his ultimate time of trouble; rejected by everyone for no reason: 

all my bones are on display 

people stare and gloat over me 

they divide my clothes among them 

and cast lots for my garment 

A majority of Christians would say that this is simply and straightforwardly an oracle; describing the exact circumstances of the death of Jesus a thousand years before it happened. David looked into a magic mirror, saw the death of his remote descendant, described it in a poem; and set it to a tune called the Doe of the Morning. The more militant kind of sceptic would say that the Psalm came first and the story came afterwards. There was no Jesus and no crucifixion: Mark’s Gospel is a patchwork of Old Testament quotes. 

The truth lies somewhere in between, as the truth usually does. Maybe the Romans really played a game of chance to see who took Jesus’ clothes and maybe they didn’t: it doesn’t matter either way. What does matter is that Mark made a conscious choice to write about the crucifixion of Jesus in the words of the old, old poem. It’s like a spiritual hyperlink. "When you read this story", says Mark, "I want you to think of the twenty second Psalm."  

Would Roman torturers really have nailed their victims to stakes? Or would they have just tied them up and left them to the weather and the insects? Certainly, Mark doesn’t mention nails. If they did use nails, they would have gone through ankles and wrists. But almost every Christian painting and almost every Christian play shows Jesus with nails in his hands and feet. That comes, not from Mark’s text, but from David’s poem: 

dogs surround me 

a pack of vultures encircles me 

they pierce my hands and my feet

and it was the third hour, and they crucified him. 

and the superscription of his accusation was written over 

THE KING OF THE JEWS. 

and with him they crucify two thieves; 

the one on his right hand, and the other on his left 

A week ago, James and John asked if they could be placed on Jesus left hand and right hand when he became King. And here he is hanging from a stake, half-dead, with a sign above his head saying "this is what happens to so-called Jew-Kings". 

And who are on his left and his right? Two other naked dying guys. 

People at the top are at the bottom. You want to be with me in my glory? You don’t what that means. But now you do. 

and they that passed by railed on him, 

wagging their heads, and saying, 

“Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, 

and buildest it in three days, 

save thyself, and come down from the cross.” 

likewise also the chief priests mocking 

said among themselves with the scribes, “He saved others; 

himself he cannot save. 

let Christ the King of Israel 

descend now from the cross, 

that we may see and believe.” 

and they that were crucified with him reviled him. 

The people who are mocking Jesus are the ones who happen to be passing by: the mob who were screaming for his blood outside Pilate’s palace have vanished from the story. Golgotha sounds as if it was by a public road: if you wanted to send a message about what happened to Jewish Kings, you probably wouldn’t put the stake at the top of a hill. Despite the sign, the passers-by seem to understand that Jesus is really being killed because he is the enemy of the temple. 

Mark is treating Psalm 22 pretty much as a shooting script. 

all they that see me laugh me to scorn: 

they shoot out the lip, 

they shake the head, saying, 

he trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him 

let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. 

and when the sixth hour was come 

there was darkness over the whole land 

until the ninth hour. 

English teachers talk about the Pathetic Fallacy: writers have a tendency to make the natural world reflect the emotional state of their main character. Thunderstorms when he is sad; warm spring sunshine when he is in a good mood. Thomas Hardy does it all the time. It is such a cliche that modern movies tend to go for the Antipathetic Fallacy: how many rainy weddings and sunny funerals have you seen? 

But when the hero is God it is not a fallacy. You’d expect his suffering to result in a supernatural darkness. 

Many people have spotted that the Jewish Passover runs on a lunar calendar: and Christians have decided that it is very important that Easter should be celebrated during a full moon. (The first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal equinox, since you asked.) Whatever happened on that Friday, it definitely was not an eclipse. 

and at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, 

“Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” 

which is, being interpreted, 

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” 

Anyone with a religious background knows that Jesus spoke five times from the cross. But those five “words” are a conflation of four different versions of the story. In Mark’s version, Jesus speaks only once. 

And we are still in the Psalms: “My god, my god why hast thou forsaken me” is the first line of Pslam 22. David’s poem ends with God coming to help the suffering man; or at least, with the hope that he will do so. So if Jesus died quoting the psalm, then he died crying out for God’s help — not despairing because God would not help him. 

But it is strange that he quotes it in Aramaic. If he had been quoting scripture, surely he would have quoted it either in Hebrew or in Greek? You would expect an Muslim to quote the Koran in Arabic or a Catholic to quote the Bible in Latin, not in a vernacular translation. So perhaps Jesus really did blurt out something desperate in his mother tongue? 

and some of them that stood by, 

when they heard it, said, 

“Behold, he calleth Elias” 

and one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar, 

and put it on a reed, 

and gave him to drink, 

saying, “Let alone; 

let us see whether Elias will come to take him down” 

Elijah, Elijah, Elijah. 

John the Baptist was kind of like Elijah; many people thought Jesus literally was Elijah. The inner circle of disciples saw Jesus talking with Elijah. And some of the witnesses to his death thought that Jesus called for Elijah at the end. 

Just suppose. 

Jesus is dying: he screams out something in his own language. And the people present — either the ones who were paid to hurt him, or the ones who had turned up because they liked seeing people being hurt — decide to offer him a drink to give him a few second’s relief. (We are told that hangmen used to use softer ropes for their favourite murders.) Vinegar is not our condiment, of course: it just means cheap wine, very probably what a Roman soldier might have in his provisions pouch. A reed is just a rod or a stick. No-one actually thinks that Elijah is going to come down from heaven in a chariot of fire and rescue Jesus. It must be a cruel joke. Let’s see if Elijah comes: and then we can wait for Santa and the Tooth Fairy as well. 

Just suppose. Jesus really did call for Elijah. There was a close connection between the Son of Man and Elijah. Suppose he hoped, even at that moment, that God’s top prophet was going to come and save him and they could inaugurate the Messianic age side by side. 

Suppose Jesus' last words were “Elijah… Elijah…” And suppose Mark, unable to make sense of them, after four decades of mediation, decided that he must have been quoting an Aramaic version of an old Hebrew Psalm. 

and Jesus cried with a loud voice 

and gave up the ghost

The word is exepneusen. We have seen that pneuma is both “breath” and “spirit”; and that what Mark calls the pneuma haggio our Bible renders as “holy ghost”. So perhaps’ Jesus spirit departed his body at this moment. It’s even possible that the pneuma haggio, God’s dove, left him and went back to heaven through the hole in the sky. 

But the most probable explanation is the simplest one. Jesus expired. He breathed his last. He quit breathing. 

and the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom 

Mark is quite clear that this is the veil of the temple; not merely “one of the temple curtains”. He must surely mean the curtain that separated the innermost temple, where God lived, from the rest of the place. 

This is as close as Mark comes to providing a theology of the Crucifixion. He doesn’t say why or how. He just says that Jesus died: and the boundary between the sacred and the secular — or at any rate between the Holy and the Even More Holy — fell away. 

Evangelicals will tell us that this means that Jesus has torn down the barrier — sin — which separates Man from God. But in the light of everything else which Mark has said, I wonder if the primary meaning is simpler. The temple is over; the special office of the priests is ended. In a sense, Jesus did what he was accused of. He has destroyed the Temple. 

and when the centurion, 

which stood over against him, 

saw that he so cried out, 

and gave up the ghost, 

he said, 

"truly this man was the Son of God" 

“That he so cried out” seems to be a translator’s gloss. The Greek appears to say that Centurion said what he said “having see that thus he breathed his last”. He sees Jesus stop breathing: and he says that Jesus alethos — surely or certainly — was the Son of God. It’s the same word the serving woman used to Peter. Surely you were with him. You were with him, weren’t you? 

This is often taken as an upbeat ending: a ray of light in the desolation. But I am afraid it is one last twist of the knife. Everything in this chapter has been bitter and ironic. There is a sign over the cross. JEWISH KING. Pilate put it there, not because he thinks Jesus is king, but because he doesn’t. The Priests have asked him to prophesy to them, not because they think he is a prophet, but because they think he isn’t. The passers-by have challenged him to come down from the cross, not because they think he can, but because they think the can’t. And finally, his executioner says that he was the son of God: not because he thinks he is, but because he thinks he isn’t. 

A few hours ago, Jesus was praying: “Daddy: please get me out of this. But no, Daddy: please don’t answer that prayer.” Now he says "Jehovah! Why did you desert me?” screams, and dies. 

And in one way, that is the end of the story. It has to end like that; in complete desolation and despair; because that is the whole of the message. The high is the low. The big is the small. I can only be the highest by becoming the lowest. You will know that I am the ultimate king when I become the ultimate pariah. 

So naturally, that has to be the final line. 

“Yeah. Right. This you call the Son of God?” 

But that isn’t quite the end of the story. There is an epilogue. And the epilogue is the strangest thing in this very strange book. 

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When I Survey....

“I suppose you think I can’t do the electrocution” wrote E.L Doctorow in his novel about Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, written in the persona of their son. “I will show you that I can do the electrocution.” 

Syliva Plath, also writing about the Rosenburgs, remarks “I am silly about executions”, as if there was a way of being sensible about human beings gurgling in electric chairs. The United States has mostly hidden judicial killings away inside big impersonal institutions; and England stopped killing prisoners more than half a century ago. There are some sadists and tabloid leader-writers out there: but most of us see capital punishment as a weird anachronism. We can’t quite believe it used to happen. 

There is a clip somewhere of the great Jake Thackray introducing his translation of the great George Brassens’ song The Gorilla which is, rather indirectly, a satirical attack on capital punishment. (A judge who has just sentenced a man to death gets raped by a gorilla. It’s a very funny song: you should probably stop reading this essay and listen to it.) He sits there, in his painfully 1970s sweater, on colour TV — very possibly the comic relief on that week’s Esther Rantzan show — and remarks “This week, in Le Sante Prison, Paris, two fellas got their heads chopped off…” 

And I’m like…that was still happening? In the era of colour TV? Not in Saudi Arabia, but twenty miles over the channel in France? Actual decapitation? Polite men in suits and uniforms taking a man to the guillotine and then going and having a coffee and croque monsieur afterwards? It so obscene that we can only talk about it frivolously. They had their heads chopped off. They were strung up. They went to the chair. 

They were very bad men. Terrorists, I think. 

What if—as some people wanted—P.G Wodehouse had been convicted of high treason? What if the main thing which loomed over those funny cocktail party farces was “the man who wrote these stories ended up standing on a trap door with a rope round his neck”. What if Winston Churchill had been allowed to go through with his sordid little fantasy of electrocuting Adolf Hitler in Trafalgar Square? Would we remember anything about Hitler apart from the gruesome newsreels of his death? Or the little Swedish-American union leader who put clever, cheeky, funny words to hymn tunes was shot on a trumped up charge, and his death utterly overshadows his songs. I suppose Socrates is mostly a philosopher and only secondarily a man forced to drink poison. 

There is a pat children’s hymn which I assume no-one sings any more. It goes: 

I sometimes think about the Cross 

and shut my eyes and try to see 

the cruel nails and crown of thorns 

and Jesus crucified for me. 

But it clearly isn’t the kind of thing we can think about. We either think of flesh and blood and piercing wounds and feel sick; or else we resort to gallows humour and treat it as if it was slightly, grotesquely funny. Monty Python at one extreme and Mel Gibson at the other. I think Python is better. The rack and the iron maiden mainly exist in newspaper cartoons or Heavy Metal imagery. 

Mostly, it flips and becomes a Religious Image. Jesus-movies have established their own iconography of the crucifixion. We ought to feel that Robert Powell or Willem Dafoe is being horribly and cruelly brutalised: but in fact, the minute the camera arrives at Golgotha, they cease to be characters and become icons; live action representations of the kind of Crucifix you see outside every Catholic Church and round every priestly neck. 

Some atheists think it is ever so clever to point out that the cross is not, in fact, a religious symbol but is, in fact, an instrument of torture, and how very strange it is to use execution hardware as a symbol of your faith. There would be nothing remotely odd about using the symbol of a noose to represent a political martyr or the victim of a miscarriage of justice. But it is quite true that the crucifix is intended to be a shocking image; like a momento mori, and that it has lost its power due to overfamiliarity. Mel Gibson to some extent did us a favour by reminding us that crucifying someone would have made a terrible mess. The Romans did lots of horrible things to criminals, feeding them to wild animals and tying them in sacks of poisonous snakes. But they treated crucifixion as being almost too disgusting to even mention. 

Jesus was crucified. 

Not some allegorical religious figure. The person we’ve been reading about. The person who gives his followers nick-names and deliberately presents his teaching in such a way that no-one will understand it. The one who always answers a different question to the one you asked. The one who wouldn’t go out and talk to his mum. The one who hugged the kids. The one with the bread and the boat. That Jesus. 

The Greek word for cross is stauros which arguably means a stick or a stake. You could take the word Cross-ified to mean bound to a stake. Mark doesn’t mention nails: he just says that Jesus was Stake-ified. Maybe if we tried to say Impaled rather than Crucified some of the shock and horror and incongruity would find it’s way back into the story. 

Let’s see if Mark can do the Crucifixion.

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