Nick Page

‘He was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ When it comes to the resurrection accounts, there is a tendency to look down on the first Christians, to dismiss them as superstitious, credulous, simple folk who didn’t know any better. But they were far better acquainted with [...]

One of my favourite artists is Jordi Savall, the Catalan viol player, who compiles wonderful CDs around historic themes, and packages them with gorgeous, fascinating books. (I’ve just got his new one – The Forgotten Kingdom – about the Cathars in the south of France) His album Jerusalem is a wonderful evocation of the history [...]

Chagall: White Crucifixion. Chagall painted this astonishing picture in 1938. The Nazi pogroms had started, two years before Guernica had been bombed. Although he was Jewish, Chagall frequently painted the crucifixion. Indeed, the Jewishness is what is remarkable here: Christ is clad, not in a loincloth, but in a Jewish prayer shawl; surrounded by images [...]

The Grauniad has a photo gallery of Holy Week processions around the world, including a huge number of Spanish pentitents wearing large pointy hoods.(There’s an older set of pictures here.) There’s another fascinating gallery here. Some of the penitent/flagellant stuff is on the morbid side of extreme, but we do well to remind ourselves that [...]

I’m a big fan of maps. Maps don’t just tell you where places are, they tell you where it’s possible to go. They can give you the direction, in all sorts of ways. On the Thursday and Friday of the last week of his life, Jesus, according to the accounts in the gospels, made several [...]

Today I chipped a tooth on a hot cross bun. It was, admittedly, a bit old, a bit hard and stale, but even so, it’s not the kind of thing you expect to happen with a bun. Perhaps I should have gone for the creme egg option. Or one of the many other treats that [...]

There’s a good story here of the development of Haystacks, a piece of software which was used to smuggle information out of Iran, by hiding it in other processes. It’s info-smuggling if you like. I’m writing about the seventeenth-century version of info-smuggling at the moment. I’m working on a history of the Bible, and one [...]

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day – the day when the Irish celebrate their Irishness by drinking and… er… well, that’s about it really. The truth about Patrick is intriguing. He wasn’t Irish. Nor was he Catholic or Protestant. He was English. Or Welsh. Or, at least a Romano-Briton. The only real information we have about him [...]

You either love it or hate it, they say. But now even the bands of those who love it will be split into two, by the release of Marmite XO (it stands for eXtra Old). This is mature Marmite, aged Marmite, the Marmite equivalent of vielles vignes. But now which Marmite should we Marmite lovers [...]

History is always being rewritten. This is, I think, one of the things that always frustrates me when I listen to militant evolutionists or scientists talking about the big bang – they always talk as though the thing were set in stone, as though the timeline had all been sorted. Yet new discoveries keep punching [...]