Something Less Than Human

“Welcome to the human race.”

Doctor Who S5 E3, ‘Victory of the Daleks’ (2010)

A robot called Kismet, designed to simulate emotion-conveying facial expressions in order to test human responses to them. Thanks to Polimerek on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.

Well, it seems to have taken me ten years, but I’ve finally cracked why that scene in ‘Victory of the Daleks’ annoyed me so much. In case you haven’t got quite such an encyclopaedic memory of New Who as to be able to recall the particulars of the scene I’m talking about from that sliver of quotation I gave you above, allow me to recount it properly.¹

The Doctor and Amy are in World War II Britain, where the Daleks have been passing themselves off as weapons invented by a Scotsman called Edwin Bracewell for reasons I won’t go into here: suffice it to say that, as usual, their plans are dastardly and shall cause a great many deaths if they’re allowed to get away with them. In particular, poor Edwin is, as it turns out – unbeknownst to him – not a human being at all, but a robot created by the Daleks to give themselves a plausible backstory. Worse than that, actually, he’s a walking, talking bomb that will send the entire earth reeling into another dimension if it detonates – which, at the point we enter the scene, it’s going to do in less than thirty rels (about thirty-six seconds).²

The Doctor tries to deactivate the bomb by getting Bracewell to recall his (admittedly stolen and artificially implanted) human memories, in the hope, I suppose, that if he can demonstrate his humanity hard enough, his robotic body will be convinced of it, and leave off being a bomb instead of a person. Bracewell remembers how his family ran the Post Office by the ash trees. He remembers how his parents died of scarlet fever and the grief felt like a physical wound, worse than that even. He also remembers fighting in the trenches in the previous world war.

“Good,” says the Doctor, as the countdown continues to tick onwards. “Remember it now, Edwin. The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad, and losing them, and men in the trenches you saw die. Remember it. Feel it. You feel it because you’re human. You’re not like them. You’re not like the Daleks.”

“It hurts, Doctor,” sobs Bracewell. “It hurts so much.”

“Good. Good, good, brilliant. Embrace it. That means you’re alive. They cannot explode that bomb because you’re a human being. You are flesh and blood. They cannot explode that bomb. Believe it. You are Professor Edwin Bracewell, and you, my friend, are a human being.” But when he looks, the countdown is still going. The Doctor is at a loss: “It’s not working. I can’t stop it.”

Amy steps in and tries a different tack. “Hey, Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn’t?”

“What?” says Bracewell, perplexed.

“It hurts, doesn’t it?” continues Amy. “But kind of a good hurt.”

“I really shouldn’t talk about her,” Bracewell tells her.

“Oh. There’s a ‘her’,” infers Amy, her tone intrigued.

And it’s at this point that the countdown starts ticking back down the other way – a fact which is not in any way lost on the Doctor, who immediately lends his own efforts to Amy’s plan. “What was her name?”

“Dorabella,” Bracewell replies.

“Dorabella?” the Doctor echoes. “It’s a lovely name. It’s a beautiful name.”

“What was she like, Edwin?” Amy asks Bracewell.

“Oh, such a smile,” remembers Bracewell. “And her eyes – her eyes were so blue, almost violet, like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Dorabella.”

And with that the bomb is deactivated. No dimension-jumping for Planet Earth today, thanks to Amy’s line of questioning and Dorabella’s violet-blue eyes. And do you know what the Doctor says to Bracewell next? “Welcome to the human race.”

 

Like the last touch of sunset on the edge of the world. Poetic, huh.

Because apparently that’s what fundamentally distinguishes a human from a robot, or a Dalek, or a walking, talking bomb. Not, as it turns out, the capacity to feel nostalgic for the ash trees by the Post Office, or to love someone to the point where loss feels worse than a physical wound, or to inherently recognise the sanctity of human life that makes war so horrific. Nope, we’re obliged to conclude that what makes a human human is the capacity to fancy people. The capacity, furthermore, to fancy a reasonable number of different people, or the odds of one of them being off-limits would have been too low for Amy’s particular approach to be warranted. What if Bracewell hadn’t ever fancied someone he knew he shouldn’t? Whoops, well, looks as if he’s not quite human enough to stop the bomb going off after all. Sorry, Earth.

To be fair, it’s not exactly news that our culture is constantly telling us that being sexually active is a necessary component of being a normal, functioning, fulfilled human being. I think we see this most strikingly in the way that not being sexually active is put across as deeply weird, as pathetic or pitiful, as a fault to be determinedly corrected or ‘cured’. I’ll hand you over to Sam Allberry to illustrate the point:

Culture sees the kind of singleness we’re talking about as Christian believers as being laughable. So let me give you two examples of that. The first is the movie The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, and the title of it tells you, this is a comedy – because the idea of being forty years old and a virgin is comical. And I’m not wishing to spoil the movie, but it’s been out for, like, ages, so if you haven’t seen it by now … the ‘happy ending’ is when, thankfully, at last he loses his virginity and joins the rest of grown-up humanity. There’s another movie – I’ve not seen this one, but it’s called Forty Days and Forty Nights, and the tagline for the movie is: one man is about to do the unthinkable. What’s that going to be? No sex whatsoever for forty days and forty nights. Forty days and forty nights, that’s a month and a half, right? I’m forty-three years old, someone can tell me how many units of forty days and forty nights that is, and what on earth does that make me? If that’s ‘unthinkable’, to go for six weeks without sex, then we are some kind of – I don’t even know where we begin with how unthinkable we are.

That’s an extract of a talk from a Christian conference called Single Minded (which, though based in Australia, for some reason seems to book exclusively Brits as its keynote speakers). I’ve been listening to some Single Minded talks this week,³ and I thought Mr. Allberry did a really solid job of presenting a Biblical view of singleness and debunking some of the lies we often get in our heads about it. The point he made that I personally found most helpful was this: God gives people sexual desires not so that those desires might be completely satisfied through sex, but to make them aware of the greater, spiritual desire that is completely satisfied through union with Christ, for which sex is only a metaphor. In this way, not having sex is not a waste of your sexuality. On the contrary, what would be a waste of your sexuality is not realising, regardless of how much sex you’re getting, that your sexual desires are only a fragmentary picture of the great love between Christ and his bride. Not being stirred to worship by the reality behind the metaphor – that would be a waste of your sexuality.

A similar point was made by Ed Shaw in his keynote speech for a different installation of Single Minded. I say ‘similar’; it wasn’t the same. Now, I have massive respect for Mr. Shaw and his work – I seem to recall saying some rather nice things about his book in a previous blog post⁴ – but I massively disagreed with the direction in which he took this point. Let me quote him:

The power of our sexual feelings are [sic] needed by us, are essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us; to appreciate the passion of God’s love for us; to appreciate how hard it is when we walk out on him in response to his passionate love, when we reject that love and wander away. If you want to be convinced of this, spend some time in Ezekiel 16. Read it some time soon, and recognise that God is using sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people, really powerful sexual imagery to communicate his love for his people. And recognise as you read it that you can only feel the full power of that passage, the full passion of God’s love, because you are reading that passage as a sexual being, who gets these feelings, who gets what God is on about. If you didn’t have a sexuality, if you didn’t experience sexual desire yourself, you would read that passage and be slightly baffled by it. You wouldn’t get the enormity of God’s love for you. The gift of sexuality, the gift of sexual desires, helps us appreciate his love for us, in passages like Ezekiel 16. It’s not just a one-off part of the Bible: we see that in the Bible book of Hosea; we see that again and again in the Bible book of Song of Songs, where God’s love for his people is portrayed as a husband’s love for his wife, and where some of the most graphic sexual imagery I’ve read is there in the Bible – only to be understandable to me because I’m a sexual being, with sexual desires. We can feel, we can only feel the full power of God’s love because he has given us sexual desires. If we ever ask him, Take away these sexual desires, take away my sexuality – if we said that, if we felt that, we’d be asking him to take away, I would be asking him to take away one of the things he has most used to help me get, feel, how much he loves me, which would seem to be a stupid thing to do. So next time you just feel the power of your sexual desire – you know those times when sexual desire sort of takes your breath away and overwhelms you for a moment, and you’re sort of left reeling a bit, next time that happens, just reflect that God’s love for you is like that all the time.

“You know those times…” he says. No, I reply to the screen. Literally cannot relate to that at all. And heck, I’m only, like, further towards the ‘asexual’ end of the spectrum than most people seem to be; there are some human beings out there who legit do not experience any sexual feelings, not even heavily abstracted, depersonalised ones like mine.⁵ If you don’t believe me, try talking to someone who identifies as asexual and see how she likes it when you tell her you know what she’s capable of feeling better than she does. But according to Mr. Shaw, experiencing sexual desire is something which is needed by us, essential for us, all human beings, to appreciate the power of God’s love for us. So what about those of us who are less sexual by nature than he seems to think is necessary, then? I suppose we’re doomed to never truly be able to understand God’s love for us. I suppose if we’d been in Bracewell’s position, the Daleks would have succeeded in propelling the earth into another dimension. I suppose we must be something less than human.

 

Apparently this Dalek is just on permanent display at a bookshop in Charing Cross. Amazing. Thanks to the anonymous photographer on Wikimedia Commons; licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en.

In other words, while Mr. Shaw’s position avoids the Forty-Year-Old Virgin error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity, it falls instead into the Victory of the Daleks error of suggesting that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper member of grown-up humanity.

You’ll have already gathered that I don’t in any way dispute that God does use sexual imagery to communicate his love, and indeed invented sex for that very purpose; nor that it’s good to use whatever we experience in the way of sexual desire to reflect on God’s love. What I dispute is that it’s impossible to grasp God’s love to the extent that he would have us grasp it if we don’t relate to what it is to desire someone sexually. I argued last week that the number-one-priority thing to pray for fellow-believers revealed in the Pauline epistles is increased knowledge of God’s love. That’s basically our first and highest aim for Christian living, because everything else springs out of it. Are people who lack the requisite amount and form of sexual desires in some way excluded from pursuit of that goal by the God who has called them to know him? Now that’s what I’d call unthinkable.

Of course, that wasn’t what Mr. Shaw was arguing. He was arguing based on the premise that all adult human beings, by virtue of being adult human beings, know what it’s like to be overwhelmed by sexual desire for someone, and I would hope that, with that assumption disproved, he would adjust the rest of his argument accordingly. What, then, about passages like Ezekiel 16? Well, I’ve read Ezekiel 16,⁶ and frankly, I feel a bit insulted at the idea that, just because I don’t personally really know what it feels like to sexually desire another person, I ought to be ‘baffled’ by the imagery in play. I have such a thing as an imagination, after all. I have learned to empathise with all sorts of feelings that I don’t experience personally, by extrapolating out from feelings I do experience personally. That’s something we all, as adult human beings, learn to do. In fact, isn’t that a better criterion for what it is to be human, in emotional terms, than experiencing sexual desire – the will to understand the feelings of others? Doubtless each of us will find that particular bits of scripture make particularly vivid sense to us because of our personal experiences, but that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed to never truly understand the other bits, especially if we’re well situated in a community of believers with varied experiences who can help us to understand better. In sum, the fact that God uses sexual imagery to describe his love does not automatically mean that it is a requirement to directly relate to those feelings in order to comprehend what he’s on about. After all, he also uses the image of being a Father to us his children: are people who don’t have children excluded from the opportunity truly understand God’s love because they haven’t for themselves experienced that sort of love? Unthinkable.

So Mr. Shaw is wrong that sexual desires are a necessity to help human beings appreciate God’s love. But he’s not wrong that they’re a gift to help human beings appreciate God’s love. Indeed, are they not all the more precious a gift because they are not a necessity? In giving people sexual desires, God is not merely granting them the bare minimum of what they need to know and understand his love; he is showing additional generosity on top of that. I don’t imagine it feels much like an extra-especially-generous gift in those breathless and overwhelmed moments – y’all actually get those? Wow – but that part of Mr. Shaw’s argument stands, and indeed, stands all the firmer.

What I’m urging, then, is that we shouldn’t correct one error only to fall straight into another. Our culture is wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually active in order to be a proper adult human being, and it’s also wrong that it’s necessary to be sexually desirous in order to be a proper adult human being. The manner in which sexual desires manifest themselves in you, and/or the manner in which they don’t, is irrevelant to your ability to know and love God. If he has called you to himself, then he has placed no limit on your capacity to know him better. If he has called you to himself, then he has called you to devote your whole self, including your sexuality, whatever it looks like, to loving and serving him. And that, in the end, is how we access the greatest, fullest version of what it is to be human: by becoming more like our Lord.

Footnotes

¹ And if you want to start work on said encyclopaedic memory, all episodes are currently available on iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006q2x0/doctor-who.

² I love little world-creation details like different units of time: https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Rel.

³ Here they are, should you feel inclined to do the same: https://www.singlemindedconference.com/past-events.

⁴ His book is called The Plausibility Problem and I think it’s well worth a read: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/18437/the-plausibility-problem. The previous post I mentioned it in was ‘The Trouble With Romance’s Monopoly on the Vocabulary of Affection’, back in April 2017.

⁵ I’m not going to make this post even longer by doing the bit where I explain my sexuality, but long story short, I’m what the world calls ‘demisexual’, and even though I’m none to keen on labels in this sphere, I have to say it’s been quite a relief to know that there’s a word for my weirdness.

⁶ So can you; here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ezekiel+16&version=ESVUK.

I Must Face Him Alone: More on the Chosen-One Story

“Trust me, I’ve seen it a million times before: in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone.”

Bolt (2008)

So my housemates and I have been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. I know, I know, we’re over a decade late to the party, but that’s not stopping us from enjoying the ride one bit.¹ It’s a fantastic series of exactly the genre of wholesome fantasy cartoons – funny but more than funny, with a proper compelling plot and genuine drama and moving character development together with the witty scripting – whose increasing dearth in recent years I have been known to lament on this very blog.² My favourite character so far is Uncle Iroh, because even though he’s this famous and decorated Fire Nation general with phenomenal fighting skills, all he really wants to do is hang out drinking tea and playing board games. What a legend.

I say my favourite character so far because as I write this, we’ve only just reached the beginning of the third series, so there are probably plenty more characters to meet. In the first episode of the third series (spoilers, needless to say, ahead), protagonist Aang – the Avatar, the Chosen One, the one person able and destined to bring the four elements back into balance and peace to a war-torn world – wakes up from a coma, still severely injured from the epic showdown at the end of the previous series, and has a bit of a crisis to the effect that he can’t bear standing by while other people put life and limb on the line when the burden for saving the world is rightfully his and his alone. “I don’t want you or anyone else risking your lives to fix my mistakes,” he snaps at his friend Katara as she tries to comfort him. “I’ve always known that I would have to face the Fire Lord, but now, I know I need to do it alone.”

 

Here Aang is looking suitably Chosen-One-ish in the Avatar state, courtesy of the prodigious talents of ekajpalm at newgrounds.com, to whom go my thanks.

It’s a very recognisble traditional Chosen-One thought process, a trope surely almost as old as the Chosen-One narrative itself. I think my favourite articulation of the trope comes in Disney’s Bolt. Mittens the cat is trying to come up with a way of explaining to Rhino the hamster why their mutual friend, our eponymous canine hero, has left the group before they reached their intended destination. The trouble is, Rhino still thinks that Bolt really is the character he plays in a television programme all about him and his owner Penny working to combat the schemes of the villanous Dr. Calico – or as Bolt knows him, the Green-Eyed Man – using Bolt’s various superpowers. The real reason Bolt left is because he and Mittens had a fight over whether Penny actually cared about him or was just acting, but because Mittens has thus far been unable to make Rhino understand enough of the truth to explain that, she’s going to have to work within the lie instead. So, to Rhino’s rather forlorn, “Bolt left?”, she replies, “Yeah … but he, uh, instructed me to tell you that, um – he had to face the Green-Eyed Man alone.”

Mittens expects that to be the end of the matter, but Rhino surprises her by setting off to find Bolt. “But he doesn’t need us any more,” she objects. Rhino isn’t moved by that line of argument for a moment. “Trust me, I’ve seen it a million times before,” he tells her, and continues with all the dramatic excess of vocabulary and tone that makes him such a hilarious and likeable character. “In the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone. But if Bolt’s taught me anything, it’s that you never abandon a friend in a time of need. When your teammate’s in trouble, you go. Whether they ask or not, you go. Not knowing if you’re coming back dead or alive … you go! Knowing how deep the shrapnel’s going to pierce your hide, you go.”³

And that’s often the conclusion of the I-Must-Face-Him-Alone crisis, isn’t it? The hero’s friends rush to his aid, ready, despite everything he’s said, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him against the enemy. That’s certainly what happens to Aang after he sets off secretly to face the Fire Lord alone in that first episode of Series Three. He decided it was a good idea to ride off on his air glider through a furious storm even though his injuries still hadn’t fully healed, and it was really no wonder that he had to be rescued by his friends after washing upon some random shoreline, and realised maybe he needed them after all.

Well, for the moment, anyway. Because I don’t know how The Last Airbender is going to end, but the fact remains that Aang is the Avatar. He’s the Chosen One. He has qualities that nobody else has, which make him equal to tasks nobody else is. There are some burdens his friends cannot bear for or even with him. Inevitably, there are going to be some things he must face alone.

And that’s a state of affairs that I think is particularly well articulated by the Doctor in the antepenultimate episode of the most recent series, when she’s trying to explain to Ryan and the rest of Team TARDIS what’s at stake if she lets Percy Shelley die in order to avoid giving an incredibly powerful information source to a Cyberman who will probably use it to wipe out humanity altogether at some future date: “One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink. The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won’t exist, so neither will you. It’s not just his life at stake. It’s yours. You want to sacrifice yourself for this? You want me to sacrifice you? You want to call it? Do it now. All of you.” She’s met with silence – and here’s the crucial bit: “Yeah. ’Cause sometimes this team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere, alone, left to choose.”⁴

The Doctor is the only one who’s able to make that call. Nobody else can see time like she can; nobody else can decide what ought to be sacrificed. And so she’s the one who has to decide, and bear the burden of her decision. Sometimes the team structure isn’t flat. Sometimes the matter at hand is simply too far out of the sidekicks’ league. Sometimes the Chosen One is confronted with the very thing she was chosen for, and nobody can share that destiny with her. Sometimes, in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone.

You can probably see roughly where I’m going with this.

It’s a bit out-there, but sometimes I think that if I were to write a Bible translation (not that I ever would; like, bro, just learn the languages), I’d translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (māshīach, comes out in English as Messiah) and Greek Χριστός (Khristós, comes out in English as Christ) as ‘Chosen One’. Because that’s a term we understand. As I don’t doubt you know, both of these words literally mean ‘anointed one’, and in the Biblical context, anointing someone – slopping some oil over him, basically – signified setting him apart for a special duty: the main people who get anointed in the Bible are priests and kings. A special duty; a task that one who hasn’t been anointed has no right to perform; a unique burden and destiny. Sounds like a Chosen One, right?

Indeed, I suspect the whole reason we as humans are so keen on Chosen-One stories in the first place is because it’s written somewhere in our subconscious souls that we need a Chosen One. We can’t save the world; we can’t fix its problems; we’ve been trying for millennia and it hasn’t worked yet. We need somebody to show up who can – someone set apart and endowed with the necessary qualities to make him equal to the task that nobody else is equal to. We need someone who’s able to bring peace to this fallen world. We need someone who’s equipped to stand at the summit, in the stratosphere, and make the decision, and bear the burden it entails.

 

The summit. Not quite the stratosphere.

We need a Chosen One, and that means we need someone who goes, in that darkest night of the story, to face the enemy we could never conquer, and who goes to face him alone.

I say ‘him’ – I’m kind of still in the metaphor there. What Jesus faced on our behalf was the just and due penalty for human sin, the full cup of the wrath of God against all the horrible things people do. He faced death for us, and as darkness covered the land at what should have been midday, he faced it alone. I mean, yeah, on the one level, all his closest friends, despite the fact that they’d all previously expressed firm intentions to rush to his aid and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the fight, even if they didn’t know whether they were coming back dead or alive⁵ – the way that, as we’ve seen, the Chosen One’s friends often tend to – all his closest friends actually abandoned him. But even if they hadn’t, there was never going to be a flat team structure when it came to the cross. Nobody could share that burden with Jesus: that was the whole point. He bore it because we couldn’t. He’s the Chosen One, and this is what he was chosen for.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

A spot of Hebrews 9 for you there.⁶ The point here is the contrast between normal high priests and Christ; bog-standard anointed ones and the Anointed One. They offered sacrifices of animals to deal with human impurity on a fleshly level, but only he was able to offer the sacrifice of himself to deal with human impurity on a spiritual level. Only he had the qualities required for that: only he was without blemish, and so sufficient as a sacrifice on behalf of the blemished, and so able to open the way into the heavenly Holy of Holies.

The place I want to land with this won’t be anywhere you haven’t been before, but I for one know I need constant reminders of it. If it was fundamentally necessary for Jesus to face the cross alone, then it is an act of madness, of gross self-aggrandisement, and of disdain for his sufferings, if we try to bear any of that burden for ourselves. And we sometimes try to do that in pretty subtle ways. For example, you ever approach God in prayer and think you have to spend a while at a distance berating yourself for your failures and feeling sufficiently sorry before you’re allowed to talk to him properly? Yeah, me too. But what that is, is behaving as if there’s something that me berating myself can do to secure God’s favour towards me, that Christ’s death and resurrection can’t. It’s trying to bear part of a Chosen-One burden that doesn’t belong to me, for the reason that I could never bear it. It’s elevating my own deeds at the expense of my Lord’s. As if he weren’t really the Chosen One, unique in his destiny, after all.

So think on that, brother or sister of mine: you’re not the Chosen One. You can’t do the Chosen-One things. You don’t have the necessary qualities for them; you’re not without blemish. But Jesus is, and does, and can, and has. He had to face the cup of God’s wrath alone, and he did. There is none left for you. It is not yours to share that burden. He bore it because you couldn’t. You can’t do anything he hasn’t already done to propitiate for your sins. I repeat: there is no wrath left for you.

We’ve all seen it a million times before: in the cold, dark night before the battle, when the steely fangs of evil are sharpened and poised to strike, the hero must go and face his greatest challenge alone. And so it was too for our Lord Jesus Christ. He faced God’s wrath alone, so that none of us who believe in him will ever have to face it at all. Don’t try to share that burden. It was, staggeringly enough, what he was chosen for.⁷

Footnotes

¹ If, by any chance, you too are a decade and a half late to the party, or are just fancy a recap, the programme’s whole run is available on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70142405.

² I think the last time I mentioned it was in ‘Oaths’, under December 2019 in my blog archive.

³ Here’s the clip, plus extra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwgZ5SSlgOg&list=PL4tadHw-sbDseHkk-2iEmzAEANu2ZdJqY&index=22&t=0s. Bolt is a superb film, so underrated.

⁴ You can’t have that clip, but here’s one from earlier in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWZwCzeVLfc. Definitely a highlight of the series.

⁵ Look again at Matthew 26:35 and Mark 14:31; it wasn’t just Simon Peter who said that.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=heb+9&version=ESVUK. I just gave you the ESV today because it’s late and I’m tired.

⁷ Oh, and before I go – thanks to Chrissie’s Transcripts Site, Drew’s Script-o-Rama, and Avatar Spirit for their helpful transcripts, much appreciated. And one final note regarding my title: I said, more on the chosen-one story, because I wrote about the chosen-one story before in ‘Porcupines, Sheep, and the Chosen-One Story’, under July 2017 in my blog archive.