The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (38 page)

COUNSEL: The Accused frequently asserts in his writings, and he has repeated it often enough in this court, that he was not born and therefore will not die. Well, our next Witness is the Registrar of Births and Marriages and Deaths in the Urban District of Easterton. He has looked up in his records and brought along a copy of a certain registration of birth. I’m asking him to read out this document to the court.

WITNESS: I knew the Accused’s parents personally, and I made a point of registering the birth of their son myself. Here’s how the certificate reads:

COUNSEL: I understand you also hold in your office records of the birth of the Accused’s parents. And of their deaths - which, again, you registered personally.

WITNESS: That’s right. They died at a rather early age, within a few weeks of each other, in 1980.

COUNSEL: So it seems that the Accused was born all right, and born into a family subject to the normal hazards of human existence... When you told us his parents died prematurely, what had you in mind?

WITNESS: It was soon after the Accused had apostatized -

MYSELF, furiously: Your Honour! What possible motive can Counsel have for dragging in my parents other than the desire to prejudice the Jury against me by speculation and innuendo concerning our family relationships? I’m here to be tried on a specific charge, not to suffer needless character-assassination by him and this Witness. And not to have my feelings scarified at the Prosecution’s whim.

JUDGE: Is Counsel quite sure that further testimony from this Witness has a direct bearing on this case?

COUNSEL: I am, Your Honour.

JUDGE: You may proceed, then, but with a care not to give the Accused cause for further complaint.

COUNSEL: I’m obliged to Your Honour... Witness, please continue, bearing in mind the Judge’s proviso.

WITNESS: The Nokes family had for three generations been very pious people belonging to a particularly strict branch of the Primitive Methodists. They were somewhat notorious locally for their uncompromising religious views, but respected for their human qualities. I knew the Accused’s father well, because for many years he did maintenance work for me. He was a most skilled and hard-working craftsman, scrupulously honest and consistently cheerful. The greatest mistake he ever made in his life (he told me) was agreeing to his elder son going up to London University to study civil engineering. He blamed himself for what happened to Jack as a result (so he believed) of that move to a very different world.

At fourteen, Jack, to the great joy of his parents, had gone through the conversion process - the stages of conviction of sin, repentance, justification by faith, and the witness of the Spirit - much valued by the Primitive Methodists, and had promptly become a full church member. Which he continued to be, first in Easterton and then in London - till he reached the age of twenty-one, to the day. Then it was that the blow fell on the family, with absolutely no warning.

The blow had repercussions far beyond the family. Jack made a great stir among the members of the sect in London and Suffolk, and beyond, by formally challenging their most treasured beliefs. And, much worse, the beliefs of all Christian people. And then there was the provocative way he did it. He could have quietly ceased to attend church services and broken by degrees with his Methodist friends, thereby cushioning the shock to his parents. Instead, he chose to circulate among church members a thesis, setting forth views which outraged them so much that the word went round that this was the worst case of` apostasy that the sect had ever known. I came by a copy of the document and wasn’t at all surprised at the shock and the pain it gave to those for whom it was intended. Why (I asked myself) had he done this thing? He was too intelligent to imagine he would convert any of these people to his opinions. The most charitable explanation was that he acted out of a desire to show off and play the
enfant terrible,
no matter how devastated his parents were sure to be.

COUNSEL: Do you still have a copy of the Accused’s thesis?

WITNESS: I can’t find it. I may have thrown it away in disgust.

However, I recollect some of its contents.

COUNSEL: Briefly, what were the author’s main points - in so far as they have any bearing on his Trial here, some twenty-three years later, on a charge of blasphemy?

WITNESS: I distinctly remember his saying that it was an accident that he happened to be born to parents who held such views as his did. Indeed it was by the merest chance that he had turned up in twentieth-century Europe instead of, say, ancient India or China. How could he be sure which faith, if any - among all those that have arisen throughout the world’s history - was for him the true faith and revelation of God? How could he possibly know the answer till he had (these were his words) ‘shopped around a good deal to see what was on offer’? Already, at twenty-one, after a few weeks’ reading, he claimed to have detected in the great religions a common core... This brings me to the place where I find his views so repulsive that I don’t like to soil my lips by recounting them -

COUNSEL: What was this common core as he saw it? What did those religions have to say that so appealed to him and so appalled his people?

WITNESS: He claimed they assured him that he - yes,
he,
personally - had never been born and consequently would never die! How could he be sure of this? Because he was himself none other than - how can I say this without being sick? - none other than the Everlasting One.

Well, you can imagine the effect on his parents! The family had been held in high esteem among the members of the sect, and not just locally. ‘Oh, the disgrace, the disgrace!' was his mother’s reaction. I fear she had been inordinately proud of the early conversion and outstanding piety of her eldest, and some of her co-religionists lost no opportunity of reminding her of his sudden fall to unprecedented depths. But it was the effect on his father that was so pitiful. I remember the poor man, whom I’d got quite attached to, weeping copiously as he handed me a copy of that blasphemous document.

It was soon after that -

COUNSEL, interrupting: Remember His Honour’s warning. Avoid giving unnecessary pain, and don’t stray into side-issues.

WITNESS: Well, it may be, of course, a chance coincidence that the parents of the Accused died, both of them, so soon after their son’s apostasy. Perhaps they didn’t die of a broken heart. But -

]UDGE, at the top of his voice: I’ll tolerate no more from this Witness. I instruct the jury to pay no attention to the last part of his evidence. Come to that, I await Counsel’s reasons for regarding
any
of his evidence as relevant to the case before the court. Is he thinking of the Accused’s apologia, which I thought was circulated only among members of the sect? Was it ever released for public consumption? Is it around now? If not, of what interest is it to this court?

COUNSEL: My information, Your Honour, is that it wasn’t released... Allow me to explain, however, the Prosecution’s aim in calling this Witness.

In fairness to the public, and indeed to the Accused himself, my purpose throughout this Trial is to present an overall picture of him, and his vocation in life as he understands it. If it turned out that his blasphemy is occasional or accidental or untypical of the man, that would count in his favour. But if it turned out to be consistent over the years, and thoroughly built-in and indeed quite central to his life, that would count in his disfavour. Obviously. Well, the evidence the court has just heard strongly confirms the latter picture.

JUDGE: The Blasphemy Act of 2002, as I read it, is not retrospective. Neither in law nor in common sense nor in common justice can a man be charged with an offence committed before it became an offence.

COUNSEL: Of course I respectfully concur, Your Honour. Nevertheless the Prosecution points out that, following the passing of the Act, the Accused has done nothing to tone down - much less withdraw - his teaching or his claims. On the contrary, he has been at pains publicly to endorse and extend his original views as outlined in that lost document. In short, it’s he who has brought forward his prior-to-the-Act blaspheming past into his post-Act blaspheming present, so that it is all of a piece. And is properly taken to be so by the Prosecution.

JUDGE: While I follow your reasoning, I direct the Jury to pay no attention to the Witness’s opinions about what young Nokes had to do to break free of that religious sect. And absolutely no attention whatever to his opinions about the effect of the breakaway on the young man’s parents.

The Witness stands down, shaking his head. Some boos and clapping in the public gallery...

Defence:
Time Out

MYSELF: Let me get two things, arising from the Witness’s testimony (if that’s the right word for it), out of the way and done with.

Alas, the Judge’s direction to the Jury can do nothing to expunge from their minds the idea that I’m responsible for my parents’ deaths before their time. What’s said can’t be unsaid.

Therefore, I can hardly pass over this insinuation without comment. It is indeed conceivable that my heresy did shorten my father’s life. Not my mother’s - she was already sick at the time.

Certainly it did much to spoil what remained of his life. He loved me so much, and had placed so much store on my following in his godly footsteps - moreover my heresy was (as he saw it) so devilish and so certain to send me to hell forever - that there’s no doubt the shock of it did make him ill. Increasingly I have felt a great sadness that I had to do this thing to him. But never guilt. He would have died in defence of his convictions and his right to proclaim them, and I’m sufficiently his son that I’m prepared, if necessary, to die in defence of my very different convictions. I like to think that on some plane he will not be ashamed of me in the end, whatever the verdict of this court and of posterity. Just let me add that I have always loved and respected him more than any man I have known, and trust that (as I say, in some dimension or on some plane or other) he’s aware of the fact. Perhaps this tribute to him will do something to counter the Witness’s atrocious insinuation that I’m not just a dyed-in-the-wool blasphemer, but a hideously callous one into the bargain.

The other comment I want to make on his testimony is even more important. Neither in that original paper of mine, resigning from the Primitive Methodists, nor at any time since have I made the ridiculous claim that John a-Nokes wasn’t born and won’t die. Still less have I identified him with the Eternal One. In fact, a large part of my mission in life is to combat all attempts (and how popular and many and varied and persistent they are!) to attribute immortality to men and women
as such.
All flesh is as grass. Humans happen, then unhappen. Like the goods in the shop run by a previous Witness, they have a limited shelf-life.

John a-Nokes qua John a-Nokes is biodegradable, and before long I shall be excused from being him, for ever. Enough is enough of Jack (say I), and the universe agrees.
There’s
an ephemeral creature for you! There’s a perisher all right!

But why should I worry?
Here’s
a very different story. Right here, a yard or two nearer to me than that almost-goner, shines the Eternal One. Here is His home for ever.

Your Honour, and members of the Jury, will you please turn to Diagram No. 25 in your booklet, and to yet another variation on the Defence’s schema. It will help you to follow what I’m about to get up to.