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Belief

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10 June 2025

5 min read

Bear Grylls: Why I'm retelling the greatest story ever told

Why the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling

Bear Grylls

Bear is an adventurer, writer, and broadcaster.

Bear Grylls.

As a young teenager, whenever I came across stories about Jesus, he seemed to be about peace, kindness, sacrifice, freedom and affirmation. Everybody he encountered – rich, poor, sick, healthy – seemed to walk away with their life changed. It made me want to learn more about him.

It wasn’t religion I was after – as a teenager I wasn’t exactly hungry for more rules and restrictions – but I did like the sound of the freedom and empowerment that seemed to come from being around this guy. What I didn’t know was how it would truly change me from the inside out.

Having a Christian faith can be difficult to articulate, but I know I have the light of the Almighty within me. At times I have ignored it and tried to live without it. But my heart is restless when I try to live on my strength alone. I am not too proud to admit that I need my Saviour within me.

And it’s easy to be cynical about faith, but I have realised that doubts are ok. That’s part of it all. To seek truth and choose faith is courageous. Life and the wild have taught me that the tougher path often ends up being the most fulfilling one.

I’ve witnessed the gift God gives us change so many lives over the years. None of us deserves it. I certainly don’t. If anything, I am more aware than ever how often I have failed, yet still I am forgiven. That’s why Christ turned everything on its head. His forgiveness is free because he has paid the price. He took our place on the cross. He died to set us free. No wonder they call it the greatest story ever told.

The story I have written in my new book is His story, Jesus’ own story, told from the perspective of the first eyewitnesses. I deliberately stuck closely to the accounts recorded in the four gospels, though some dialogue and other details have been added for context and flow. But not a single word of Jesus has been changed from the original accounts in the New Testament. I have used different English translations to capture his words depending on the context.

In writing a book like this, I also wanted to be authentic to the original setting and to avoid anglicised names that are over-familiar to many of us. The region in which Yeshua (Jesus) lived was complicated and remains contested to this day. Greek and Latin were the dominant languages throughout the Roman Empire at that time. Yeshua himself was Jewish and would have read the Scriptures in Hebrew. However, as a Galilean, Yeshua’s everyday language would have been Aramaic. The Gospels beautifully preserve some of Jesus’ most intimate words in Aramaic.

So I’ve used a mixture of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic names for people and places to reflect the social context of Yeshua’s time.

As we have just passed Easter, here is a small section from the book when a small selection of Yeshua’s followers saw him ascend into heaven, ahead of that great Pentecost Sunday.

WHEN forty days had passed since he first appeared in the garden, Yeshua made his final appearance to us. One moment we were alone, then there he was among us, again. He said nothing about this being the last physical visitation that he would make. With hindsight, I should have known.

He led us out of the house, down through the city gates and along the valley, up beyond Gad Smane and into the hills towards Beth ’Anya. The journey we had done so many times together.

When we reached the top of this small hill, called Tura Zita, the Mount of Olives, Yeshua turned and stopped. He reached out his hands to us and held on tight to each of us in turn. Andreas asked him, ‘Master, are you going to restore your kingdom now? Is this the time?’

Yeshua told them that God’s own Spirit would come to them. ‘Dates and times. They are not for you to know. But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. You will be my witnesses. You will tell people everywhere about me – in Yerushalayim, in the rest of Yehuda, in Samaria, and in every part of the world.’

His arms were now raised above him, and his eyes closed. His head lifted up to the heavens. Suddenly, the light around him started to change. And a brightness began to shine out from him. A brightness that was almost impossible to look at. Then a cloud began to form around him. A cloud that circled him and slowly began to lift Yeshua off the ground.

We all stood there, holding each other, and we watched our friend – the Master, the Lord, the Messiah – slowly disappear among the cloud until he was gone. There was no fanfare. No grand goodbye. Just that swirling cloud around him as he was raised higher and higher.

And then, just like that, Yeshua was gone.

We were left staring up into the clouds above.

As we stood there, suddenly two angels appeared beside us.

‘You Galileans! Why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky?’

We all looked at each other in awed surprise. But with no paralysing fear anymore.

How strange, I thought, that this is no longer strange.

Then one of the angels spoke: ‘This very Yeshua who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.’

Join Bear for an exclusive event in London on the evening of 18 June where he’ll share more about his faith and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

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Review

Books

Culture

Freedom

Politics

11 December 2024

1 min read

All this can be yours: the momentum that drives mafia states

Once abhorred opinions gain traction among the distracted nursing grievances.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Preisdent Putin stands behind a lectern with a gold door and Russian flag behind him.

What is Putin thinking?

Is there a new Cold War today? This assumption, spurred by the war in Ukraine, is challenged by Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc. (Penguin Random House, 2024). Instead, she argues, there is a growing group of autocratic nations where ruling elites exercise staggering levels of corruption, accumulating wealth, eviscerating the common good and suppressing any meaningful dissent. There is rule by law rather than rule of law, where the courts become the means by which brutal, cynical state power is employed to destroy and imprison opponents.

The Cold War was underpinned by ideology, but autocratic states today support one another through logistics, resources and propaganda despite big differences in outlook. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, China, Russia and Zimbabwe, to name a handful of autocratic nations, share little by way of common ideology, except the desire of their dictators to stay in power, both to ensure their wealth and to protect themselves from legal action. The fig leaves of religious beliefs and nationalism are often used in different combinations but fool few.

If there is a common denominator for these autocracies, it is the wish to scrap the post-war settlements – the institutions and laws that have marked global affairs since. The body of existing international law is a particular target, as its dismantling immunises dictators against judgment.

Framing the present global picture in clear, criminal terms like this is helpful. Mafia states exist, and they are growing in influence. But it is too easy for others to place themselves on the side of the angels. These kleptocracies have been enabled by corporate bodies elsewhere. In the UK, London is host to lawyers, accountants, bankers and PR experts who have helped to launder money for corrupt elites. They argue their support is legal, but it is also amoral; such is the professional framework of some of the biggest names in law and finance. London’s property market, like several other global capitals, has been grossly distorted by the laundering of foreign money, to the detriment of working people trying to afford their own homes.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a widespread sense that liberal, democratic values had prevailed and it only remained for this dye to leak into the fabric of remaining nations. Not only is this not true today, if anything the momentum is with autocratic values infecting democracies with their ways. The global technology revolution has assisted this, as once abhorred opinions and positions gain traction in the minds of distracted people with grievances, real or imagined.

There is a special hypocrisy when criminals who have stolen billions and murdered thousands claim to speak for God.

The late Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, said the key question for the new century was: who speaks for God? If the suggestion was that this is a question different religious traditions need to answer in ways that support our common humanity, we now have no shortage of dictators who say they speak for God. Their claims that other regions of the world are godless and degenerate are made time and again. Like Goebbels, they know that the endless repetition eventually wears people down until phrases become believable. No-one who cares about God’s character would claim their society reflects his character well; there is injustice, hatred and violence everywhere. But there is a special hypocrisy when criminals who have stolen billions and murdered thousands claim to speak for God.

When Jesus faced his life-defining temptation in the wilderness, the devil showed him the kingdoms of the world and promised they would be his if he ‘turned’. He also tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread. Power and wealth, the very trappings coveted by the world’s dictators. And his final temptation: to throw himself from the roof of the Temple, only to be saved by the angels. To surround himself with a loyal cadre of officers sure to protect his interests at all times.

Instead of the highway to autocracy, Jesus took the uneven and winding path of service to others. One of self-denial, deprived of the material wealth made available by his elevated position. This is the human standard we have been set and it compels self-reflection, not boasting and threats.