Passions

The media’s usual Easter custom is to broadcast on television, with lavish pre-coverage in print and on Radio Four, some or other attempt to debunk the whole thing by pointing that, like, you know, there were lots of people called Jesus and Mary and John and stuff in first-century Palestine. You don’t say!

(Actually, a couple of generations ago, something rather like that really was used to “date” the Patriarchal Period, until the American Tommy Thompson came along showed that the names Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and so forth were common in the region from the earliest times to the present day, without a break. He worked for some years thereafter as a house painter because no university would employ him. But he was right.)

This year, however, a miracle as great as any seems to have occurred. The BBC is at last to broadcast the facts about the “dating” of the Holy Shroud of Turin, namely that carbon dating has moved on since 1988, and that in any case an item with such a history of travel, carrying, and exposure to the elements is practically impossible to carbon date accurately.

Now, that relic was only discovered in 1898, and it has never played any part in Protestantism or Eastern Orthodoxy. But even so, it corroborates the Gospels, it vindicates faith, and it is authenticated by the science that it surpasses.

For does anyone seriously believe that a Mediaeval forger was able to fake the anatomical accuracy, the perfect consistency with the effects of crucifixion on the body, the Jewish features of the face, and what are still the inexplicable three-dimensional properties of the image? If you do believe that, then you really will believe absolutely anything at all. Rather, as so often with accounts of the miraculous, acceptance of the miraculous is in fact the most or only reasonable response, with which the purely descriptive realm of science will just have to come to terms.

The theory of a Mediaeval forgery is obviously absurd. What we have in the Holy Shroud is the image of Our Lord’s face, left by Him miraculously as a relic for our veneration and as a stimulus to faith. It was providentially proposed after nineteen centuries to the age of an unbelief founded on an historically and philosophically erroneous appeal to the science that in fact could not have arisen, and cannot survive, apart from the principles unique to Christianity. Even the BBC seems to be getting the point.

Which makes it all the more regrettable that it is to broadcast The Passion. You either stick to the text (The Passion of The Christ, most recently), or else why bother at all? You might as well not bother as go through a re-writing exercise to conform to the liberal New York Jewish prejudices of HBO’s imagined core audience.

Or indeed to the liberal London Jewish prejudices of the BBC’s imagined core audience. The BBC openly admits to containing a disproportionate number of people from “ethnic minorities”. But apart from serving the food and drink or pushing a broom, there is only one “ethnic minority” with any significant presence inside the BBC.

And why not? But that is not an excuse to re-write the sacred texts of seventy-two per cent of Britons, which are among the core texts of Western and world civilisation. For, at Christmas, Polly Toynbee angrily denied that secularists were trying to abolish Christmas (as they certainly had been for many years up to that point, at least), and even bemoaned the fact that children were now as ignorant of the Bible as they have long been of Classics, closing off even to them more of Western literature, music and art.

Perhaps that is why there has been none of the customary clamour to replace Easter with some sort of fixed Spring Break (although there’s time yet). But this point, unlike the welcome but far less important point about the Holy Shroud of Turin, seems to have been lost on the BBC.

Ah, well, there’s always next year.