People say the stupidest things. We all have our favourite stupid thing that people say, don’t we? Mine is “Everything happens for a reason”. It’s all about context, you see. And the context which is pure nonsense is the one where people imply or even suggest things happen because of some divine intervention and that a supernatural creator has planned it all. It was meant to be and all that bollocks. But when in town today – that’s what we Bristolians refer to as the central of the city – I heard something even more stupid. “Jesus is the hardest man on Earth.”
I’d not heard that one before, but as I reached the pedestrian crossing at the foot of Union Street, a middle aged man was handing out leaflets. I shrugged and looked the other way. “No thanks,” I said. And then he said it: “Jesus is the hardest man on Earth!” He did not look like a regular street preacher, more the sort of bloke you’d find in the away end in a particularly edgy football ground. “No he isn’t,” I responded. “He doesn’t even exist.” In a surprisingly aggressive, raised tone of voice, the man dashed up alongside me and roared: “‘Ee does!” And he offered me a leaflet. “No thanks, I don’t read fiction,” and I moved away, wondering if he would follow me. He didn’t but it was a very strange experience.
It was unusual for me to engage with the nutters and chuggers you meet on Bristol’s tired old shopping centre. The route from the more modern and upmarket Cabot Circus was paved with people begging for money, smoking weed and trying to get you to sign up donate money to them as well as the charities they are chugging for. It’s more of a pain in the arse than anything and I have long concluded that it’s easier to have a blanket “you’re not having anything” policy than to have to decide who is worthy or not.
Later, I wondered what the man meant when he described Mr Christ as “the hardest man on Earth”. Although I am not overly familiar with the bible, it had not occurred to me that he might be a Hulk Hogan type character or even a Geoff Capes (ask your parents, kids). I knew he had shown he wasn’t a seven stone weakling when coming back to life on Easter Sunday, but then I can’t be sure of man’s fitness levels several thousand years ago. But it always comes back to one thing. At the time when the supposed Jesus of Nazareth was around, no one knew what was going on. Science was quite literally in the dark ages and it’s entirely possible that if Jesus was around, he was probably some kind of travelling Paul Daniels type magician, carrying out tricks to a baffled bunch of uneducated yokels. But given the levels of aggression emanating from the man with the leaflets, I left it at that.
“Jesus is the hardest man on Earth” was a new one on me. As an atheist, I suspect I saw him for a reason.
