It happens every Good Friday. The BBC choose the holiest day of the Christian year to vilify Jesus Christ. Their attack invariably takes the form of a documentary presented by an atheist/humanist/secular weirdo. This year's offering was no exception. Step forward Lord Braggart, aka Melvyn Bragg.
The Right Honourable The Lord Bragg, to give him his full splendid title, is perhaps best known for an amateurish novel about lust on the Yorkshire moors that earned him the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, so why not try his hand at a similarly crude exercise in amateur theology? In an hour-long BBC1 diatribe, the charmless churl tried to persuade us that Mary Magdalene was "the wife of Jesus", with the obligatory prurient sub-text. He based his argument on discredited Gnostic writings excluded from the New Testament centuries ago. If there was such a thing as the Bad Theology Award, his lordship's erudite-sounding but poisonous dross would surely win it.
The former Anglican bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, described the programme as "hugely offensive" and asked whether the BBC would treat other religious groups in the same way. "I am concerned about the misuse of very obscure Gnostic gospels to impugn the integrity of the Bible. This is going out at 12 o'clock on Good Friday, which is exactly the time that Christians are thinking about Christ on the Cross."
Precisely. Our so-called public service broadcaster's anti-Christian vendetta is well enough known to be almost boring. But here was a new twist, a tightening of the screw. Their electronic sacrilege did not simply materialise on our screens at the appointed time. It took months in preparation. The premeditation gives the game away -- date and time being deliberately calculated to inflict maximum pain and distress. They knew exactly what they were doing.
As the late Cardinal Basil Hume observed, the world is in the hands of fallen people. It seems there's no shortage of them at the BBC.
He is Risen! Hallelujah!
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