- [Narrator] The Bible, a book whose origins lie
thousands of years ago in the Middle East.
It still inspires billions today.
- Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
- [Narrator] Seven figures from different walks of life
offer their personal perspective
on the bestselling book of all time
and what it means to them.
- Even if you've never read a word of the Bible,
your life will have been shaped by it.
- [Narrator] In this program, Gerry Adams investigates
the life of Jesus.
(dramatic orchestral music)
(people chanting)
- My friends may describe me as a staunch Catholic
because when I was in prison I always went to Mass,
and I was one of the minority who went to Mass.
There's nothing nicer than church music
or the communal dimension of being in the church.
A lot of it's far from the very simple message
of a preacher on the side of a road
or on the side of a hill talking to people.
Jesus didn't have a church.
(gentle organ music)
For as long as I have a memory, Jesus has been in there,
as the Baby Jesus right through to the crucifixion,
to his execution.
His ministry was just for one year
and that one year has effected for 2,000 years
human beings everywhere.
So I'm interested in getting into the real Jesus,
the person, the human being.
And then just, you know, reflecting on my own life,
on all the twists and turns of it,
and of imprisonment, of lifelong activism.
Did the teachings of Jesus impact upon that
in a positive way or did I ignore them?
And just trying to examine its relevancy to me.
(wistful music)
Each one of us knows that for which they are responsible.
Each one of us at some period in time is going to meet God
and I am happy enough as of my contribution
that I have tried to live by my standards.
The absolute credo of my political being
is on the right of the people of deciding to be free
and to have an end to partition
and an end to British involvement in our affairs.
In my teens and early 20s,
I was radicalized by sectarian violence against Catholics
which drove many people I knew from their homes
and pushed many ordinary young men and women
to take up arms.
(guns firing)
(crowd cheers)
In my 50s, along with others,
I helped bring peace to Ireland.
(group applauding)
Looking back on two decades of war,
I want to explore the Jesus message of forgiveness
and how this has affected me
and victims of the conflict.
- I will never, to my dying day,
forgive anyone who was involved in Pat's murder.
- You don't win wars by just blowing people into oblivion.
(explosion booms)
- In face of the present campaigns of Republican violence,
the choice of all Catholics is clear.
It is a choice between good and evil.
- [Dan] Do you feel you have blood on your hands?
- No, I don't, I feel that I've done my best
by my own rights.
But you know, I don't for one second
step back from my responsibilities as a leader
of a struggle that has caused
both hurt and damage
to other human beings.
I don't walk away from that.
My search for the historical Jesus
will take me to Israel and Palestine,
but first I'm going to talk to the leading
emeritus theologian, Professor Vincent Twomey.
If I want to find out about Jesus,
what are the sources that I should go to?
- Well, the source of the four Gospels evidently.
The Gospels, you know, weren't written by the apostles
but they actually faithfully record their teaching
and that is what is important, yeah?
- Did any of the Gospel writers actually know Jesus?
- Mark could have, we don't know.
- Right.
- The four Gospels we have, of course,
emerged out of different communities
and different situations.
The roles in response to the dying out of the apostles,
so the communities throughout the world
founded by the apostles
had these oral memories of Jesus Christ, yeah?
These then were collected, written down.
- [Gerry] Given the complex origins of the Gospels,
I wonder how faithful today's Bible is
to what the Evangelists wrote.
The Chester Beatty museum in Dublin
houses some of the oldest Gospel manuscripts in the world.
- What we are looking at is the earliest physical copy
of St. Mark's Gospel.
You cannot go back any further.
The text actually relates to Jesus curing the blind man.
And when this manuscript was found,
scholars were very excited
and they went through it, letter by letter, line by line,
to make sure that the text that has come down to us,
in English translations that people would have
in pocketbooks like these, that there's no great variation.
And by and large, there isn't.
By and large, we're looking at an exact copy.
So we still have the story of the miracle here
as you would have it in a more modern book.
This is 250 AD or thereabouts.
What this shows is that all the copies of the Bible
after this date reflect the same text.
- [Gerry] And this authenticates the Bible which I read,
which people read today.
- Exactly.
(gentle music)
- [Gerry] You really can't begin to understand
a person's story, or a nation's,
unless you see it in its proper context.
So I've come to the Holy Land to see some of the places
Jesus visited during his ministry.
The year of his adult life between his baptism
and his death on the cross.
(bells tolling)
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
built at the place
where Jesus is said to have been crucified.
(gentle music continues)
There's a shrine where you can touch
the very spot where the cross stood.
A few steps away within the church,
another richly decorated shrine.
The tomb of Jesus.
But with all the gilt and glitter,
it's difficult to picture what a 1st-century tomb
might really have looked like.
And the ancient burial ground outside the city walls.
British archeologist Shimon Gibson has offered to show me
a recently-excavated tomb from the time of Jesus.
- [Shimon] It's going to be quite cramped inside
but it'll be fun, I tell you,
to go into a tomb from the 1st century.
- Well, jumping used to be an underground movement.
- Ah, of course. (laughs)
The best thing is to go in feet first.
- [Gerry] Well, this is quite far down, isn't it?
- [Shimon] So you can see this burial chamber
has two benches so two people can be placed inside
and this is really the kind of bench
on which the body of Jesus would have been placed.
You see what you're leaning against
is a door of one of the locular.
Quite a hefty stone, isn't it?
- [Gerry] It is a hefty stone.
- You know that the stone which blocked the tomb of Jesus
is always thought to be a rolling stone, a round stone.
It looks like the stone was probably rectangular
which was very common in that period.
And in fact, you see the dead person
would have been slotted in.
They would have slotted him in head first.
- There might many people who wished that I was....
- [Shimon] Yes. (chuckles) Incarcerated.
- [Gerry] Well, I've been incarcerated.
- [Shimon] Yeah, but within a (indistinct).
So that's it.
You'll see it's just the length of an adult man.
- This is exactly what a long cage tunnel was like.
I've got a sense of the end of Jesus's life.
Now I want to go back and look at the historical context
of this young Jewish man's astonishing journey
from the cradle to the cross.
The little town of Bethlehem,
David's royal city of the Christmas carols,
is a Palestinian town
trapped inside a 25-foot separation wall,
part of a 400-mile barrier
designed to keep Palestinians out of Israel.
The wall cuts off the people of Bethlehem
from the land they own and the people they love.
George Ardrever is a Palestinian with an Israeli passport.
- My wife, she's Palestinian, she's from Bethlehem
and because she's getting Palestinian ID,
she cannot live with me in Israel.
That why I left Nazareth and I live in Bethlehem.
- [Gerry] So the separation wall, if you hadn't moved,
would actually separate you from your wife.
- Yes, yes, and a lot of families were destroyed
because of the separation wall.
(gentle music)
- [Gerry] Traveling with me is Helen Bond
from Edinburgh University,
an expert on the historical Jesus.
Two of the Gospels say Jesus was born here.
The other two don't mention a birthday at all.
So was Jesus really born in Bethlehem?
- Historically, I don't think it's likely at all.
The difficulty is that these traditions are only found
in Matthew and Luke's gospel,
nowhere else in the New Testament.
I think what's happening here
is that towards the late 1st century
Christians want to say now
that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of David,
and what better way to prove that
then to have him born here,
in the city of David, in Bethlehem?
(man chanting)
Matthew, for example, wants Jesus to be a second Moses
and so his birth story is very much modeled
on the birth of Moses,
so in exactly the same way that the Egyptian Pharaoh
killed all the boys under two at the birth of Moses,
so Herod the Great, the bad king,
kills all the boys under two at the birth of Jesus.
- Which means Joseph and Mary didn't come to Bethlehem.
In fact, could also mean that Jesus wasn't born
in a manger, he wasn't born in the stables?
- That's right, but you know,
those traditions are only found in Luke.
They're not in Matthew.
- Just ruined Christmas?
- (laughs) I don't think it means ruining Christmas.
I think for practicing Christians,
there's a lot in those traditions,
but if you're asking about the historical Jesus,
I don't think he was born here.
I think he was born in Nazareth.
(person singing in foreign language)
- [Gerry] The Gospels are not history in the modern sense.
For me, the important fact is not where Jesus was born.
It's the fact that he was born and lived
and died in the way he did.
(person singing in foreign language)
Whatever about our historical shortcomings,
the Gospels are our only major source
for the story of Jesus.
But there is another book which tells us a great deal
about the world he lived in.
- Just about everything we know of 1st century Judea
comes from the works of Josephus.
He's a 1st-century Jewish aristocrat
who's born in Judea just slightly after the time of Jesus
but he's really important.
- Well, I see here, just in his little bio.
He was a Jew, he fought against Rome,
then he defected to Rome, so...
- (laughs) So how trustworthy is he?
Basically, he's the only person we've got
and if it wasn't for Josephus,
we'd know virtually nothing,
so we have to use him with caution
but I think he's a very good witness.
- [Gerry] Jesus gets barely a mention in Josephus.
He has much more to say about a traveling preacher
who, according to the Gospels, prepared the way for Jesus.
I'm heading to the Jordan River
and the place where John the Baptist
is said to have baptized Jesus.
The baptismal site is now in the middle of a huge minefield
on the border between Israel and Jordan.
We need a military escort to get us through.
(gentle music)
John was in the tradition of radical preachers
who withdrew from society and took to the wilderness.
Josephus tells us that he was a spellbinding orator
and drew large crowds.
- [Helen] I mean, his message is that God
is about to intervene in human affairs and change things.
There's gonna be some great cataclysmic judgment
and people are gonna be sorted into those who are in
and those who are out.
Oh, it's horribly dirty.
- Tell you what, it's very cool on the feet
after playing about all day.
So the first mention of Jesus
in terms of a public ministry
comes with his baptism.
- [Helen] Yes, it's striking I think.
All the Gospels start, the public ministry, at any rate,
with John the Baptist and Jesus's baptism
which I think maybe suggests that there was something
about that baptism for Jesus that really started him off
on his independent mission.
- The dawning of the day in a green, fertile land
by the shores of a freshwater lake.
This is where Jesus was raised and where he returned
after his baptism by John.
Well, we're beside the Sea of Galilee.
It's very idyllic, I must say.
Good way to start your day.
This is where Jesus performed many miracles,
up along these shores,
this is where he calmed the waters,
it's where he recruited
the first of his apostles,
poor fishermen working along here.
(gentle music)
Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel
of the kingdom of God and saying,
"The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent ye and believe the Gospel."
Is there one part of the Gospel where this is crystallized,
if you were gonna say to somebody,
"Look, there's the core of it."
- Well, the Sermon on the Mount, of course,
comes to mind immediately, you know.
Sermon on the Mount, as you know,
is a compilation of sayings attributed to our Lord.
- Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers
for they shall be called the children of God.
- We're talking here about a radicalization
of the moral law which was expressed
by the Ten Commandments, yeah?
- You've heard that it was said by them of old time
thou shalt not kill, and whoever shall kill
shall be in danger of judgment,
but I say unto you,
that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause
shall be in danger of the judgment.
You've heard that it has been said,
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil
but whoever shall smite thee on the right cheek
turn to him the other also.
You have heard and have been said, I shall love thy neighbor
and kill thy enemy but I say unto you, love your enemies.
- You asked me what is the core of Jesus's message.
I think it's forgiveness.
That we ourselves recognize we need forgiveness.
We're none of us perfect.
We've all made mistakes.
We have to forgive each other.
(gentle curious music)
- I think the message of repentance,
the message of forgiveness,
are deeply personal concepts.
Bad things have been done to me.
I have forgiven those who did it.
I did it in the first instance for me.
I didn't do it for them, I did it for me
because I didn't want to become corroded.
(gentle music)
I've met some of the people who beat me senseless
one or two occasions
and I helped negotiate a good friendly agreement
and got the people who shot me out of prison.
I don't forgive, and I haven't come to terms,
and I still have a sense of outrage
about the conditions that were created
by those in powerful positions
who put one side against the other, who sectarianized it,
who exploited the differences,
who brought in all of their technology and so on,
much like those who actually
had to take a conscious decision to construct the cross.
(wistful music)
- [Dan] Statistics say the IRA was responsible
for more than 600 civilian deaths.
Do you repent of your support for those who shot
and bombed people during the conflict?
- Well I don't attempt to justify the actions.
In fact, I've been very critical of some of the actions
but I do believe that it was legitimate
to resort to armed actions
and that that was politically defensible.
And I haven't changed my mind in that
I would love that there had been another way,
but I don't live in that world.
I live in the practical world
and I was a part of that constituency
which put together another way.
According to the Gospels, large crowds flocked
to the shores of Galilee to hear Jesus preach.
Meanwhile, John the Baptist was about to pay a high price
for his popularity.
He'd been arrested on the orders of Herod Antipas,
the ruler of Galilee and a puppet of the Romans.
- Yes, well Josephus says quite clearly
that Herod Antipas put him in chains
and took him to the fortress of Machaerus
because he was attracting large crowds.
- And he was executed.
Jesus must have known that he was on the same path.
- I think you're right, and also, I mean,
it seems to be just a fact
that most of these holy men do end up being killed.
- Sometime after hearing about the execution
of John the Baptist, Jesus left Galilee and headed south
to the city at the heart of the Jewish world.
He knew there would be no return.
As we say in Irish, (speaks Irish).
The die was cast.
Jesus began to explain to his disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem
and suffer many things at the hands of the elders,
chief priests, and teachers of the law,
and that he must be killed
and on the third day, be raised to life.
(people singing faintly)
Tradition has it that Jesus arrived
in Jerusalem on a Sunday.
Less than a week later, his life would be over,
nailed to a cross and left to die in agony.
What did he do that led to him being executed
in this very, very brutal, public way
and who was it that murdered him?
The last week of the life of Jesus
played out during Passover,
the feast celebrating the liberation of the Jews
from enslavement in Egypt.
(gentle music)
The city was overrun with pilgrims
heading for the great temple of Jerusalem.
Daniel Schwartz is a historian at the Hebrew University.
Shalom.
- [Daniel] This was the core of Judaism in Jesus's time,
this was the house of God.
- This is the temple that Jesus came through?
- Yes, this is the temple now,
the temple isn't there anymore.
- What would Passover have been like here,
with every family or every Jewish person
coming to make sacrifice?
- Passover was typically the major pilgrimage festival
of the year and the population of Jerusalem
might be two or three time larger its usual size.
This would have been a market street in front of us
before you get to the temple now.
They would be full of people who are buying food
for their stay here,
who are buying sacrificial animals
to take with them to the temple,
who are changing money
because they came from wherever they came from
and they need to use the local currency.
- [Gerry] In Jesus's day, the Jews were desperately hoping
for a leader to free them from Roman occupation.
- The Roman soldiers would be there
because when you get thousands of Jews together on a holiday
which is in memory of the redemption
of the Jews from enslavement to the Egyptians,
it doesn't take very much imagination
to turn it into a holiday which is
giving room for hope
for redemption from enslavement to the Romans.
- Into this tense and threatening situation came Jesus.
Jesus entered the temple area
and drove out all those who were buying and selling there.
He overturned the tables of the money changers
and the benches of those selling dogs.
"It is written," he said to them,
"My house will be called the house of prayer
but you are making it a den of robbers."
Jesus was defying the chief priests,
an elite group who collaborated with the Romans
to rule Judea.
But the chief priests, the teachers of the law,
and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him,
yet they could not find any way to do it
because all the people hung on his words.
With Roman soldiers on riot duty,
a preacher stirring up the Passover crowd
could trigger a blood bath.
The chief priests and their leader,
Caiaphas, decided to act.
- We actually have quite an interesting little detail
about Caiaphas in John's gospel.
He gives an account of a gathering of the Jewish council
and they say, "If we allow Jesus to carry on like this,
the Romans are gonna come
and they'll destroy our temple and our nation."
And Caiaphas apparently stands up and says,
"You don't realize that it's better
that one man die for the people
than that the whole nation should perish."
- The problem with that, Helen,
is elites never present their case
as anything other than being for the common good,
for the public interest.
- But he could he not genuinely
have wanted to safeguard Jewish life?
I mean, you only need look what happens 30, 40 years later
in the Jewish Revolt when people do revolt against Rome
and Rome sends in the legions sweeping through the country
and tens of thousands of people end up dying.
- [Gerry] The fact is,
Jesus was taking on the establishment.
The outcome was clear and he knew it.
Shimon Gibson, the archeologist,
has been looking for the place where Jesus was tried
by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.
- This is where I think the trial of Jesus took place.
Jesus would have walked down these steps.
John talks about the trial taking place at Gabbatha
which means little hillock or a rocky area.
Well, here you have that rocky area.
So we're here at the spot.
And of course, this was blocked up later.
- [Gerry] Pontius Pilate was the most
powerful man in the land.
He would decide whether Jesus would live or die.
- Behold, nothing deserving of death
has been done by this man.
- The Gospels of course suggest that he's a weakling
easily pushed over by the people
he's supposed to be governing.
The Pilate that you get in Josephus,
you can't really imagine him being so uncertain,
so lacking in any kind of judgment,
but there's an even better source on Pilate
from Philo of Alexandria.
He's actually a contemporary,
an exact contemporary of Jesus,
a Jew living in Alexandria in Egypt,
and he has a passage which actually describes
Pilate's character, his venality, his violence, his thefts,
his assaults, his abusive behavior,
his frequent executions of untried prisoners,
and his endless savage ferocity.
- [Gerry] But the Pilate of the Gospels
is anything but ferocious.
- You have a custom that I should release
for you one man at the Passover.
- A man called Barabbas was imprisoned
with the insurrectionists
who had committed murder in the uprising.
The crowd come up and ask Pilate to do for them
what he usually did.
- Give us Barabbas.
- Give us Barabbas!
- [Gerry] What does the historical record say
about the practice described in the Gospels
of releasing a prisoner at the feast of Passover?
- People actually have asked,
was there indeed such a practice?
Is there any evidence for such a practice?
And the answer is no, this is the only case.
- I don't think he would have been released
because in those days, insurgents,
those who were defying the authorities,
both the Jewish authorities
and the Roman authorities especially,
would not have been released.
- And Barabbas was an insurrectionist.
He wasn't a thief, he wasn't a common thief, he was a...
- Well, he would be what we describe today as a terrorist,
in modern terms.
And for the Roman authorities,
terrorists were to be stamped out.
- But from someone else's viewpoint,
he may well have been a freedom fighter.
- Yes, from somebody else's point of view.
- I am innocent of this man's blood.
- All the people answered that his blood be on us
and on our children.
So why do the Gospel writers whitewash Pilate
and free him the entire Jewish people instead?
- They have this huge problem on their hands
that they're wanting to say that Jesus, the Messiah,
was somebody who ended up on a Roman cross.
- The Gospel writers are trying to convert
as many Romans as possible
while also trying to avoid being thrown to the lions.
- I'm standing on some soapbox in Rome
in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s of the 1st century,
preaching about Jesus of Nazareth was a wonderful guy,
he was the son of God,
and people say, "Oh wonderful, where is he?"
And we say, "He's dead."
"Oh, was he sick?"
"No, he was executed."
"Who executed him?"
"The Roman governor."
So the next sentence on the part of the preacher
is going to have to be, yes, but it was a mistake.
The only reason Pilate executed him
is because he was sort of spineless
and being pushed around by an Eastern mob
and seems like this Barabbas scene,
just like scenes, oh, I'm going to wash my hands,
function that way to allow for a group,
which any way is a suspect in the Roman Empire,
somehow to try and survive
by pushing off the guilt to other parties.
- As we say in Irish, (speaks Irish).
If you're not strong, you have to be clever.
So the blame goes onto the Jewish people
and the irony of that situation
is that's totally and utterly contrary
to the type of tolerance, love thy neighbor,
inclusivity that Jesus preached
right through all of his public ministry.
From the sixth hour onto the ninth hour,
darkness came over all the land.
About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice,
he gave up the spirit.
(soft dramatic music)
Some may quibble about the historical accuracy
of the Gospels.
That's not the issue for me.
The Gospels were about promoting
a new religion, Christianity.
But Jesus's core teachings, the words he spoke,
remain as powerful today as they were 2,000 years ago.
You have heard that it was said,
"Love your neighbor and hit your enemy,"
but I tell you, love your enemies,
bless those who curse you, do good to those who hit you,
and pray for those who persecute you
that you may be sons of your father in Heaven.
He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good
and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
Tough words to live up to
whether you're an Irish political activist
or a Palestinian follower of Jesus like Saleem Manaer,
who teaches at the Bible college in Bethlehem,
hemmed in by Israeli settlements.
- We deal, as Palestinian Christians,
with another spiritual dimension
that the people, that they're coming and settling there,
and the people that confiscating Palestinian land
are the people that brought us our spiritual heritage.
Jesus is a Jew.
- He was a Jew, absolutely.
What would Jesus say today?
- Jesus will speak the word of the prophets.
Jesus would say, "Remember your strength during Egypt.
You were powerless and now we are powerful.
You're misusing your power against the weak."
- And what would he say to people in the Palestinians side
who would resort to armed actions or to-
- Holding arm against the Israeli
like holding arms against the Romans,
you don't have a chance.
They will crush you, they're more powerful than you-
- Is that a tactical question?
- No, it's also moral, ethical questions,
because if you resist evil, you will have the tit and tat,
the cycle of revenge and retaliation.
- [Gerry] Saleem runs an organization
which promotes dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis.
Its name in Arabic means forgiveness.
(gentle music)
(explosion booms)
I'm not a pacifist.
I don't believe that nonviolent resistance
was an option for us 40 years ago.
The war is over,
but we're all still on a journey to freedom,
and after decades of violent conflict,
all of us got plenty to forgive and to be forgiven for.
(alarm blaring) (people yelling)
- [Dan] To those people who are watching this
who say, "Well, Gerry Adams, you defend the IRA."
In what way did you follow Jesus when defending the IRA?
- Well, by my own rights,
but let's not get carried away again
with any of this.
I'm a political activist.
My religious beliefs are private
and personal to me.
Obviously, my core values,
which are shaped by my religious beliefs,
have to percolate and influence my political thinking.
Sometimes, in tune with the Jesus message,
sometimes not.
- [Dan] But if you have this moral code
based on the teachings of Jesus,
surely you can't pick and choose
which bits that you observe when, I mean.
- Well, you can.
You mightn't be right to do it, but we all do it.
You know, we all do it in different aspects of our life
because we're human and because we're not perfect
and because we do our best in the situations.
The fact is, when people are treated badly
as people were treated here,
and remember, an English government
has no entitlement whatsoever to partake in Ireland
or be involved in Irish affairs.
If there's no one out there pushing for
a peaceful democratic way to resolve those injustices,
then as night follows day,
you will resort to armed actions.
- [Newscaster] Belfast, Shankill Road was devastated
just after one o'clock this afternoon.
The IRA used the simplest of tactics,
hand-delivering a bomb across the counter
at a fish and chips shop.
Among the dead, the chip shop owner and his daughter.
- My wife was murdered by the IRA
on the 23rd of October 1993.
It was a Saturday, and she was killed
along with her father and eight other people,
including one of the bombers was killed as well.
- That Saturday morning, two young IRA volunteers,
Thomas Begley and Sean Kelly,
carried a bomb into a fish shop on the Shankill Road,
a unionist area of my constituency in Belfast.
Their target was a meeting of unionist paramilitary leaders
in an office in the first floor.
The bomb went off prematurely.
Sean Kelly survived. Thomas Begley was killed.
It was a stupid operation.
It didn't take into account
the safety of the civilians,
and, of course, Thomas gets the blame for this,
and clearly,
the blame is one which has to be shared.
And it was an operation which was just
fundamentally flawed and fundamentally wrong.
- Gerry Adams carried the coffin of Thomas Begley
and I think at that time, I felt that particularly tough.
So for many, many years I would have blamed Gerry Adams
not, as I said, for the bomb,
but certainly for being part of an organization
which felt that they could go ahead and do that, you know?
- [Gerry] It's the measure of how far we've all come
in the last 16 years than Alan McBride
now feels able to sit down with me and talk.
- Three and a half thousand people murdered
and 40,000 people injured,
and all those young people that were incarcerated, you know?
I don't think it was worth one of their lives,
I'll be honest with you, Ger.
You don't win wars by just bombing people into oblivion.
- [Newscaster] Gerry Adam himself later said his sympathy
was with all victims and under the government ban,
we can't broadcast his voice.
- Are we gonna blame the young man, a 23 year old
from a poor working-class background in Belfast
for the conflict in this country?
My sympathy is with everyone who was killed.
- Not everybody was innocent
and not everybody's guilty, you know?
We weren't on the same page.
To suggest that my wife and Thomas Begley or Sean Kelly
were on the same page in terms of their guilt
or their innocence or their victimhood is nonsense,
absolute nonsense to me.
- Obviously, Thomas Begley has to be responsible
for his action and all of us have to be responsible
individually for our action,
but this was a corporate IRA responsibility.
It wasn't just these two relatively young volunteers
who had been sent out obviously to do what they did.
His family, you know, the family didn't do it.
- This is where people make the mistake.
I don't think we should be looking at it
in terms of what happened,
we should be looking at it in terms of what's left behind
and what the needs are.
I know from my perspective, that Mrs. Begley lost her son
that day on the Shankill Road.
Not only did she lose her son,
but she has to live the rest of her days
with the knowledge that her son killed nine other people
and I think that must be, if it was me,
it would be unbearable to even think about that.
So society needs to give Mrs. Begley
whatever help that we can give her
to help her come to terms with her own hurt and her pain.
- Sean Kelly was released with other political prisoners
under the Good Friday Agreement.
- I don't know that I've ever said
that I've forgiven Sean Kelly for what happened.
He's somebody that I don't really care much about,
to be honest with you,
and also as well, the people I do care about,
you know, my family, my mother-in-law,
I mean, they would never forgive me if I forgive him.
I'm not hellbent on revenge.
I don't think I have one bone in my body
which is about taking revenge.
I think we need to be more like Jesus
and be not so religious.
That sounds like a contradiction in terms.
I think the religious aspect sometimes can keep us apart.
- Those who can find it within themselves
to do what you're doing,
I think are probably more true
to what is a Jesus message
than others, including myself.
- I know that where we are today is hell of a lot better
than where we were 16 years ago
when I started this particular journey,
and I think you've played your part in that,
so fair play.
- Well thanks to you,
for the example you're giving people like me.
- [Alan] Okay, indeed.
- Okay.
Five years before Alan lost his wife to an IRA bomb,
my good friend and solicitor Pat Finucane
was murdered by a UDA death squad.
I carried his coffin also.
Pat was at home with his three young children
and his wife Geraldine.
- We were having dinner, Sunday dinner,
just Pat and myself and the three children,
and there was a bang,
and Pat and I jumped up,
and the next thing, there was just gunfire everywhere.
And Pat was dead on the kitchen floor.
- [Gerry] Geraldine, who was also wounded in the attack,
is certain that the British authorities
colluded in her husband's murder.
- I will never, to my dying day,
forgive anyone who was involved in Pat's murder.
From the gunmen right to the people,
perhaps at cabinet level, who orchestrated this.
I will never forgive them.
They changed my life forever,
but that doesn't mean to say
that I want revenge.
I don't want to harm them,
but I do want to make them accountable
for what they did, for their actions.
Their actions have given me a life that I didn't want.
- [Gerry] Do you have any sort of affinity with Jesus,
with the Gospel stories, with any of that?
- I would follow Christian principles
but I couldn't go so far as to say I'm a Christian.
- And one of the big challenges in those teachings
is the little one which says, "Love thy enemy."
You know, it's easy to love your friends
but what's your take on that?
- I might not be able to love my enemy,
but I can learn to live with them.
- (indistinct) the grim truths of war,
loving your enemy is a lot to ask.
Alan and Geraldine may never forgive
the men who murdered their partners,
but they don't want revenge.
(choir singing in foreign language)
I remember a poem of W.B. Yeats and a line in it,
"Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart."
You know, war is so cruel,
something I've said many times,
of why there aren't many brave people in war,
we should not glamorize it.
It's a horrible business.
You have to harden yourself
because it isn't a natural thing to go out
and do harm to other human beings.
It isn't a natural thing to engage in planned violence.
There were times when I was afraid my heart would break.
And I can be as angry and as ruthless and as focused
and as deliberate in terms of what I have to do
as anyone else, but I have a fairly logical mind,
so even though I could be angry at something that was done,
through the stupidity of the side that I supported,
or by those who were opposing us,
I never felt entirely brutalized by what was going on.
My service to my country, to the peace process,
is in the ability of people like me
to bring other people with us.
And that's the core of it,
that there was at least an Irish Republican leadership
which was prepared when they got an alternative.
That they went for peace.
They could have went for continued war
but they went for peace.
And this was put very well to me by an associate
I was trying to help with some other peace processes
in other parts of the world,
and someone said to me,
"It needs generals to make peace, okay?"
- [Dan] Do you feel generally that you would
be more at peace if people forgave you for what you think?
- I am perfectly at peace, Dan. (chuckles) Absolutely.
I believe
and I've made mistakes and done things wrong,
and not for a second do I
stand over everything that I ever did or said,
because, you know, everything's always right at the time.
I regret very much that anyone
was ever hurt in the situation.
I don't believe that I'm accountable for all of that
but I do understand my responsibilities.
But the one thing that I have always liked
about Jesus is his lack of condemnation,
his lack of denunciation,
the way he mixes with all the wrong people,
the way, even though he sets out rules for life,
he knows that we're imperfect
and we're not going to fulfill it
so he gives us another chance
and another chance and another chance.
(soft music)
You know, you can go into a Cathedral, into a church
which is a nice thing to do, and pray and reflect,
but here is a big Cathedral, here.
And I certainly feel closer to God here
than perhaps in many other places.
If you see something of great beauty,
the light in the sky and just a particular moment
where it cheers you up,
where you're struck by the beauty of it
and there's no explanation for it.
Just catch a wonderful moment in nature,
and if you savor that,
that's as much of a prayer as it is
to kneel down than to go through a long litany
of the trimmings on the rosary.
(dramatic orchestral music)