How the BBC ‘offended’ Christians

Yeah, but where’s the halo?

I’ve been watching The Nativity on BBC1. Not bad as these things go. I like TV drama, and I don’t really care – when a drama is based on myth – which myth the said drama is depicting.

Note the word “myth”. Were it about, say, the ancient Greek pantheon or the stories in the Bhagavad Gita I’d probably still enjoy it – if it were well enough written and performed. The Nativity is OK – not brilliant, but watchable. So I committed four half-hours to watching it.

Now it seems that some Christians don’t like it. That may surprise you, until you learn that it’s because the so-called Virgin Mary is “portrayed” as a whore.

I happened on a Christian website called The Way the other day, and on an undated page one Amanda Hopkins writes a short post beginning: “Christians have reacted angrily to a BBC production which portrayed the Virgin Mary as a prostitute.”

She cites the Daily Express. Whether that was her only source, I can’t say, but just hang onto the word “portrayed” for a moment.

Now see what the Daily Express said on 19 December: “The BBC has angered Christians with a TV drama in which the Virgin Mary is branded a prostitute and sex cheat” (emphasis mine).

I fly no flag for abominable rags such as the Express, but it got it right – in that regard anyway, since we’ll for the moment put aside the notion that the BBC angered Christians, when it was they who chose to be angered (and then it was only Stephen Green and his nutcase Christian Voice outfit).

So you see the sleight of phraseology here. The Way says the production “portrayed” Mary as a whore; the Express says that, within the drama, she was “branded” such. And that’s the way it was: characters branded her a whore and spat on her and threw stones at her.

But such is the myopia of so many Christians and others of the Bewildered Herd that they can’t separate the doings of characters from the intentions of a television network. I left a comment pointing out the misleading nature of the intro, but, predictably, up to the time of writing this it had not been used, yet some that came after had been used.

Chances are that, if there was such a girl who gave birth to the guy who was eventually portrayed as the Messiah, she’d have been bonked by a Roman soldier or passing goatherd. One pundit a few years ago put forward a similar theory, anyway, in a docudrama on TV about Mary.

But it does raise an interesting question: what if she had had a bit of nookie on the side and then found she had a bun in the oven? She would lie about it, probably say she was raped.

And then the entire Christian world would turn out to have been based on one teenage girl’s lame and pathetic excuse for not having kept her hand on her ha’penny when some hunk in a tunic happened by and gave her the wink.

“It was the Archangel Gabriel, Joe, honest. He says I’m carrying the Light of the World in my womb.”

“Oh, all right, then.”