In Competition No. 2535 you were invited to submit a version of a Bible story recast for the atheist/agnostic market. This assignment, inspired by initiatives such as the Manga comic Bible and the Australian Bible Society’s text-message version of the Good Book, takes efforts to improve the accessibility of the Christian message to an absurd extreme in the interests of testing your powers of wit and ingenuity.
It was a strong field and difficult to whittle down to six. Alanna Blake, Gerard Benson, Josh Ekroy, Virginia Price-Evans and Mrs E. Emerk were pipped at the post by the winners, printed below, who each get £25. The bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty’s rationalist Job.
In the land of Ur dwelt Job, a perfectly rational man, who ate healthily, lived sensibly and invested wisely. But there came a time when his investments crashed, his flocks had murrains and his body was covered in boils. ‘You’ve evidently done something terrible,’ said Eliphaz. Bildad turned up. ‘It was fated,’ he said. Zophar had a different line. ‘I’ll lend you my rabbit’s foot if you like.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Job, ‘one person in 100 gets the boils, and it’s the same odds for the other two. So one in a million gets all three, and it happens to be me. I’ll just go on being sensible and wait for the laws of probability to run my way.’ And lo, the boils and the murrain disappeared and the investments recovered. And Job knew that it might easily have gone the other way, but he’d still have been right.
Noel Petty
And Moses said unto Pharaoh, the Sea is Red, as blood is.
And Pharaoh said, the blue-violet spectrum is suppressed, red clouds are in the east, it is reflection.
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