The Mercy Seat

"If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses." – Lenny Bruce

Last week Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal for a man facing execution in Texas on November 5. 32-year-old Khristian Oliver was sentenced to death 10 years ago for a murder committed during a burglary. Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen has called for The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to instruct the state governor to commute Oliver’s death sentence. The organisation’s website reports that, “While deciding whether he should live or die, jurors at his trial consulted copies of the Bible, including text supporting the death penalty, calling into serious question their impartiality. In a post-trial hearing four jurors acknowledged to the judge that several Bibles had been present in the jury room, that highlighted passages were passed between jurors, and that one juror read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage: ‘And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death’. However, the trial judge ruled the jury had not acted improperly, a view upheld by a Texas appeals court.”
I guess they skipped the bit that says let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Or thou shalt not kill.
Your correspondent is no basher of the Bible. As a work of literature and source of inspiration, the Good Book is a bottomless well. Like any anthology, it’s also a wildly inconsistent work that contains great beauty and profundity, but also accounts of murder, genocide, rape, incest and torture. The thought of an individual’s life – even that of a convicted murderer – placed in the hands of 12 men and women cherry-picking scripture for guidance might chill the heart of anyone who’s served a day of jury duty.
In his introduction to Canongate’s Revelations collection of writings about the Bible, published in 2005, former Bishop of Edinburgh and Gresham Professor of Divinity Richard Holloway asserts that all the holy books of religion, including the Bible, belong in the category of muthos (myth) rather than of logos (fact).
“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “many religious leaders ignore or misunderstand that distinction today. They want their scripture to have the status not of myth or poetry, but of science. Anyone who has tried to analyse the tedious genius of the bore will discover that their reverse-charisma has a great deal to do with their endless rehearsal of facts. The speech of the true bore lacks tragic depth and comic width, precisely because, like the speaking clock, bores are locked into the numbing repetition of facts. In short, they lack mythic resonance, they do not realise that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. (The Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians.)”
In this case, adherence to the letter killeth in the most literal sense.