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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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Column

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Politics

28 November 2024

4 min read

Here's why we need to keep democracy holy

It's much more than a utilitarian deal that benefits the most.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

One of the more ludicrous constitutional contributions of late has been the parliamentary petition, with well past two million signatures when I last looked, demanding another general election be called, because the Labour government, elected in July, has “gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has surprised precisely no one by saying that he won’t be calling one. And so we’ll move on. But, in passing, what is truly breathtaking is how little our democracy is understood and, apparently, how unseriously democracy in the west is now taken. If that sounds unduly censorious, I have a two-word response: Two million!

Little time need be spent on demolishing the premise of this spurious petition, other than to wonder how many of those signatories would have appeared on one calling for, say, a fresh mandate after the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (where is he now? Ah yes) performed a massive reverse-ferret on a manifesto pledge not to raise university tuition fees.

Or how many of these same fearless electors believe the result of the Brexit referendum should be voided because of the lies of the Leave campaign, most notable the one painted on the side of Boris Johnson’s battle bus. But no – two million residual, self-righteous righties can only be mobilised against a Labour government.

This event none the less raises valid questions about what our democracy is (and is not) and why we should want to protect or even cherish it. These questions become the more critical because there’s a tangible feeling of slippage in western democracy, as if we’re growing a bit tired and even contemptuous of it.

There’s the ominous re-growth of nationalism across Europe. And not a few bien pensants – me included, to my shame – might admit to a feeling after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Slightly more seriously, we need to ask ourselves what the qualities of democracy are that we should seek to defend. The first of these is, quite obviously, the rule of law. Should a political actor seek to overthrow a democratically established electoral process, then that is a crime within the rule of law. Witness the horrors on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on January 6 2021.

That’s the Feast of the Epiphany as it happens, but nothing to do with the coming of wise men. With Trump at the centre of it. Draw your own democratic conclusions – and weep for the rule of law.

Natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence.

Again, why does this matter and what is it about democracy that we hold sacred, even holy? It can’t simply be that we hold dear a kind of hard utilitarian ideal that what we elect to do is for the benefit of most of the people, for most of the time, as decided by popular mandate among the demos.

If we believe in democracy, as I believe most of us do, we’re presented with a choice: We can look to secularism as a solution, universal Enlightenment principles built on citizenship and equality before the law. Or we can look to a multiculturist model, keeping the peace between essentially separate communities and the state.

Or we can shape something on Augustinian Christianity, that recognises the limits of political democracy, which would eschew undemocratic theocracy, but which would hold that no political order other than the Body of Christ (the Church) can claim divine authority.

We’re in classic Rowan Williams theological territory here: “[T]he Body of Christ is not a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to a possible healed human world.”

Unsurprisingly, I buy that. Williams goes further to state this spiritual effect on the political environments in which we find ourselves is likely to be “sceptical and demystifying.” Which seems to be a reasonable manifesto in a democracy.

The principle of election can be a worrying one in theological terms. We don’t “elect” God, though some secularists would claim that the Godhead is our invention. Rather, it has sometimes been perceived to be the other way around historically.

Reformational Calvinism would hold, among many other things, the rather terrifying view that we’re elected by God. “The Elect” are those who will be saved, while the rest of us (I presume) can rot in hell. Little democracy there.

Less deterministically, a more modernist worldview would argue that the Christian faith, on which foundation western civilisation is built, offers a viable moral definition of the lawful state, with which politicians of all (democratic) persuasions can tackle issues of global justice.

One such issue of natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence. That’s an important aspect of Christian witness and will require true grit in in its application during the years ahead. That’s, if you will, our grit in the democratic oyster.