Gospel According to Max.

How old are Rupert Murdock and Max Clifford? 1,000 years, 2,000? Just watched a doc on the origins of Islam. Overlooking its producers spinning out a few sentences into an unknown historian’s 70 minutes of fame a possible truth emerges. That is if truth ever emerges. The Christian Gospels were written around a hundred years after Christ’s death and hammered into a form we know as the Bible by Eusebius for the Roman Emperor Constantine around 330AD. To prevent ‘splitters’ Eusebius discarded and largely destroyed several gospels from Mary and Thomas and others and created a single text to base a single religion on which conveniently also unified his kingdom. Now this Islam program also couldn’t find any written evidence from the time of Mohammed. When he lived the Arabs were busy taking over the Middle East and dispensing with the Christians and Jews. Under strangely similar circumstances the first mention of Mohamed and the Koran occurred some sixty years after his death on coins of the ruler of the time, I forget his name. Here again the ruler appears to have ‘found’ religion at a pretty useful time and possibly promoted Mohamed from an unknown mystic into its prophet. And like the Christian Bible the Koran was created. Questions emerge. Are religions the second hand creations of states to unify their population? Are these holy books the expedient creations of PR consultants like Max Clifford and moulded into Sun editorials by the likes of Rupert Murdock? That is a very shabby thought; I’m sure Jesus and Mohammed were great guys, but I can well imagine the current Max and Rupert of the day getting together, “Guys we can’t sell this as it stands. There has to be a unique selling point. Nobody knows this guy from Adam, we have to give him star billing.” And as there was no X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent at the time they plumped for the next best thing, a prophet, the Son of God or the actual son of Simon Cowell. And it worked. I mean Buddhism took a ‘think for yourself’ approach and look where Tibet is today. I’m sure with a little work the teachings of Mary Whitehouse could be massaged into a decent gospel by Max and extolled in the Sun. Yes, Saint Mary, it’s got a familiar ring to it. So Max and Rupert may not be that old but their profession is.