The Truth is Dead Read Free

lioness, hungry, wary, circled them. The parents prayed. The children hid their faces in the folds of their father’s garment. The lioness made her lunge, and carried away the small girl by the throat.
    “Let’s pause there, shall we? There’s lots more of that sort of thing – thousands of these guys getting chomped or speared or burnt. And I know exactly what you’re gonna say. This is the Romans’ doing. Can’t blame the victims, can you? But you see, the thing is, these people – the men, the women, the little ones – they’re only there because of good old Jesus H. Christ. Now, I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I’d like on my conscience. I mean, just how many kids being eaten like that would it take for this whole enterprise you’re planning to start looking, well, counter-productive, eh?
    “But let’s move on. Because, you see, it isn’t long before your guys start dishing it out as well as taking it. In fact, they pretty soon begin to dish out a lot more than they take. Dish it out in spades. I’m giving you one case here, to begin with. Check out this lady. Hypatia, they call her.”
    The screen showed a serene woman reading from a papyrus scroll.
    “This is one clever lady, the most important philosopher of her time. Lives in a town called Alexandria, just when the Christians – that’s what your followers start calling themselves – are taking over as top dog. But she still has a soft spot for the old ways: Zeus, Athena, Apollo, that crowd. So along come a rabble of monks and zealots and fanatics and they do this…”
    The image switched to show a mob attacking Hypatia, their faces contorted with rage and hatred. They tore her from her carriage, and as she pleaded for her life they sliced away her flesh with oyster shells, and then, her lips still moving, they burned what was left.
    “ Tut , and I say again, tut . And all because she liked to offer up a little incense to the wrong gods. But things really heat up from here. Let me zip through this.”
    And there were more scenes of horror and persecution and war, each more terrible than the last. Christian armies converted pagans by the sword. Crusaders in clanking armour pillaged, raped and torched their way through the Jerusalem they had come to redeem. The great cities of Muslim Spain were left desolate. Everywhere: blood, fire and the burnt-out death of fire, and the bodies of children, and the cries of carrion birds circling.
    “And the Jews, the Jews. You should see what they do to the Jews. Two thousand years of persecution. What kind of legacy is that for a nice Jewish boy like you?”
    Jesus bowed his head and mumbled a prayer.
    “But this is only the beginning. The really good stuff isn’t done by your guys to the other lot, pagans, unbelievers, whatever. No, the fun really gets going when the Christians start tearing each other apart. You know this as well as I do – real hatred is between brothers.”
    More pictures of war followed. Massacres of Catholics by Protestants; of Protestants by Catholics.
    The eyes of Jesus burned but he could not look away.
    “I reckon we’ve seen enough of that, don’t you? Now there’s just one last thing I want to show you.”
    The blank window filled with an image of the night, or so it first appeared. Millions of tiny lights glittered against a blue-black sky. And then the camera began to zoom in. The millions became thousands, and the thousands became hundreds. The dots of light took on a troubling complexity until just a few filled the screen. They were not stars, not these, and Jesus felt his stomach knot in revulsion.
    “We’ve got a smell function here, if I can find the right button.” The nail tapping at the remote was now oddly hooked and thick and grimy.
    A smell drifted through the desert. The smell of scorching fat and the acrid stink of burning hair.
    And now just one figure, wreathed in flames, was visible. The woman’s rags had burnt away, and her skin