The Distorting Mirror

This article crystallises certain thoughts I have expressed on other occasions in conversation. One of the great influences on the life of most of the population of this country, and of the world, is television. For this reason, television broadcasters have, potentially, a great deal of power. Television brings both reports of the factual (news and documentaries), and fictional drama, into the home.

As a 'factual' source, the spin that the broadcaster puts on the facts is all-important, and if only one side is shown, it appears to be the only side. Thus television's depiction of an issue is important for the formation of public opinion on it. It as said that the Vietnam war was lost, not in Vietnam, but in the living rooms of America, as the public at home saw a war that seems unwinnable (though arguably no more so that World War 1). It makes some of us wonder what would have happened had the Trenches of Flanders been shown on television in America? Would America ever have entered the First World War?

But this is just an example. More dangerous, in terms of opinion-forming, are dramas that are set in 'the real world'. I have always argued that Eastenders is far more dangerous than Harry Potter for children. Harru Potter, after all, lives in a fantasy world of magic, with dragons and other such magical creatures. Eastenders, on the other hand, is supposed to depict real life. But it cannot. After all, real life is not dramatic enough to hold an audience! The audience do not want their life to be depicted on TV (after all, they already live that!), but excitement, danger and adventure. Now, it is one thing for that excitement to be shown in a thriller, but the Soap Opera is supposed to be a realistic depiction of life. In fact the modern soap (with the possible exception of police soap The Bill) is a distorting mirror. The soaps have adopted ever more improbably storylines over recent years, in one case even bringing a character back from the dead! And so the depiction of a Christian pastor as a deranged killer is only to be expected - after all, the religious nutter is a common trope in sensational fiction (and let us be honest, that is what modern soaps are).

If this were an isolated incident, I would mutter something about a lack of imagination and go and do something else, but this is part of a pattern. The BBC has also been responsible for a number of dramas in which 'Christian' terrorist groups have appeared, despite the fact that no such group has ever existed. It is almost as if in the world these fictional characters inhabit it is Christians, not Muslims, who are making terrorist threats!

Despite the increasing Muslim population of many British cities, and the mosques rising among the chimneys and church towers in these cities, Islam still has the status of a "foreign" religion on TV, and therefore the BBC generally depict it favourably. All well and good. But it seems that there is an undue bias against Christianity, with Christian characters often being depicted in a negative way. What is the danger? It is that this distorting mirror will encourage people to think of Christians as "nutters", and all the while the protest is "we are just being true to life." Nonsense, TV is a distorting mirror. And if what people see on TV does not affect their behaviour, why does anyone buy advertising on commercial TV?

It has been said of the press that they possess power without responsibility. The BBC would do well to remember what Uncle Ben told Peter Parker: "With great power comes great responsibility," namely the responsibility to use that power wisely. As fr the viwers, we must recall that TV does not, and cannot, depict reality. Drama depicts the world the writer creates.

Incidentally, the murderous religious nut is a tired, hackneyed idea as well, and indicates a failure of imagination. Plus the writers of these negative potrayals (I myself saw the offending episode of the dire BBC series Bonekickers, which is second only to the BBC's Robin Hood in terms of direness) seem to have done minimal research on Christianity, leading to their characters acting like no real Christian on earth, mixing Protestant and Roman Catholic practice freely... and now I will be silent, before I burst a blood-vessel.

'Jesus the Jew' on Channel 4

Last night at 7.00 Channel 4 television aired the first in their series 'Christianity: A History'. Entitled 'Jesus the Jew', it was presented by the novelist Howard Jacobson, who describes himself as a "devout Jew". While it was an interesting film, it was deeply flawed. First of all, it displayed one of the biggest weaknesses of modern documentary television in that it was written as a 'personal journey' by a personality, rather than being presented by an expert in the subject. As a result this idiosyncratic film told us more about Jacobson than it did about the subject. Facts that are common knowledge were presented as startling, while archaeology that confirmed the Biblical accounts was presented as amazing because it disproved certain unsubstantiated theories of the 'History-of-religions' school who hypothesised that a large Gentile presence in Galilee led Jesus to combine elements of Greek philosophy with Judaism to create Christianity.

In fact the scholarship of this programme was definitely on the cutting edge of the 19th century. Central to the story was the 'Jesus und Paulus' theory. As the Times reviewer, Paul Hoggart, put it:

"The Apostle Paul was the main culprit, he argues, in stripping Jewish traditions out of Jesus' teaching and laying the foundations for generations of virulent anti-semitism." (The Knowledge, Saturday 10th January, P. 41

The trouble is, in Jacobson's film Paul is not discussed in context. We hear nothing about Paul the Jew, the Rabbi from Tarsus who always made the synagogue his first port of call when he came to a town where there was one, who always went to the Jews first. Jacobson's film also skims over the question of Paul's conversion. Here was a man who was the bitter enemy of Christianity, yet became one of its leaders How? Paul was not a man believing what he wanted to believe, but rather what he did not want to believe! There was no discussion of the conversion of Paul, but it was skimmed over lightly. And in the end that was the problem with this film. Jacobson edited the evidence to fit the story that he wanted to tell. You know that a film's going to be bad when James Tabor appears on screen, with the title of his work of sensational pseudo-scholarship The Jesus Dynasty on screen. And then when he announced that Christians would find the fact that Jesus and his followers were not baptised as Christians would be shocking, you switch off and stop listening when Tabor comes on screen. Remember Tabor's part in the 'Jesus tomb' business a couple of years back? Exactly.

But the single fact that was most skimmed over was the resurrection. Now Christianity is quite inexplicable without the resurrection. A Jesus who taught for three years, then died and remained in the tomb could not have founded Christianity. Nor could his followers have done so. The empty tomb is the fact that lies at the centre of the Christian truth claim. If Christ is not raised, then we are of all men most to be pitied, because we are still in our sins. Yet Jacobson ignored all this. There was no attempt to explain why, if Christ did not rise from the dead, the disciples, portrayed as broken men after Jesus' arrest, were suddenly bold as lions just a month or so afterwards. Every one of the New Testament writers assumes the resurrection. If you are going to say that Christ did not rise from the dead, you must explain Christianity without that fact. It has never been done successfully.

Of course, one expects a film about Christianity by a devout Jew to be in the nature of a Jewish apologetic, and that is what this programme really was. The level of scholarship was slight, and I cannot see how this can be seen as a serious contribution to scholarship. Anti-semitism is a wicked thing, and the abuse of Jewish documents like the New Testament to support it is absurd as well as wicked. Marcion, who edited the New Testament to remove as much 'Jewishness' as possible was at least more consistent than those who try to use the Jewish Gospel of John to give some shadow of credence to their hatred of Jews. A dislike of the unlike is sadly part of our fallen humanity.

One final thought. This film certainly demonstrates that it is more and more the case in this country that for the media the Roman Catholic Church is Christianity. It certainly felt like all the 'Christian' scholars interviewed were from the Church of Rome.