Palin nee Pauline

AMONG my collection of antiquities are fragile fragments of papyrus that look every bit as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But they’re as hard to date as they are to translate, given their strange mixture of ancient Aramaic and Pitman shorthand. I’ve managed to make some sense of the text, though, during my many insomnial nights.

A few years back I seemed to have come upon early writings on the “Pauline heresies” (St Paul’s version of Christ’s life as it differs from early Christian teachings) that caused centuries of bitter theological debate within the Catholic Church. But no! They were prophetic warnings about the Pauline heresies, as in Pauline Hanson! “Verily I say unto you, beware the temptress from the North! Her ideas, like her fish, are on the nose.”

So do the papyri have anything to say about more recent events? Yes! There are clear warnings about the “Palin heresies” – denouncing another false prophet from even further north. “Verily, she is a daughter of Eve who drove us from Eden. She is a Jezebel. Cursed is she among women.” I’ve passed this papyrus on to both John McCain and Barack Obama.

Even more remarkable revelations and prophecies come on a larger fragment helpfully headed “Revelations and Prophecies”. They may well relate to the bad news in the business pages of this very newspaper. “Verily I say unto you, your day of judgment will fall in September of the year of our Lord 2008. Sinners who walked tall in Wall Street instead of humbly along the Road to Damascus will be detoured through the Valley of Death and into the deserts of financial despair. Accursed will be the brothers of Lehman. Their once-proud profits will be without honour in their own country and through the global economy.”

Then follows some specific prophecies about Macquarie Bank that I’m reluctant to disclose in these apocalyptic times. Nonetheless, I’ve acted upon them and dumped stock. I pray that neither the regulatory authorities nor God punish me for insider trading.

“Those who thought greed good and who worshipped the golden calf rather than goodness and God, who showed no mercy to those in need, who held their cards of gold higher than they held Jehovah, will be toppled from their pedestals and cast into the fiery pit of failed fiscal policies.

“Verily, they will be as accursed as the money-lenders Christ drove from the temples they had fouled with their sub-prime mortgages. They shall be placed into junk bondage and forced to wander the deserts of devalued derivatives and fiscal re-regulation. Like their bonuses, their plump Porsches will pucker and their Ferraris rust. Oh ye despoilers of the dolorous dollar, thou shalt crawl on thy bellies like snakes, or use public transport.”

I can’t make out the next few pieces of papyrus because the handwriting gets increasingly incoherent and angry and the author seems to have been tearing at the text with his teeth. But then I can pick it up again: “…and as in the time of Noah, Jehovah will send the mighty waters rising and drown thy harbourside real estate.” There’s something about herding creatures two-by-two on to a very big boat, but apparently this will have to be purpose-built and pretty basic, not some existing luxury yacht. “Thou shalt not pack them aboard the bloated boat of Packer,” it says, “for the Church of Scientology is a blasphemy and the vessel was bought with ill-gotten gains from the abominable sin of gambling.” But it’s not only James who’s in trouble. It seems “all thy palaces of gin will be driven onto the rocks”.

There’s mention of a new 10 commandments but I can’t find all of them. “Thou shalt have no other God before Me” survives, as does the reference to lusting after thy neighbour’s wife or ox. But that’s been modified as follows – “particularly if her bosom has been inflated with cosmetic surgery, another abomination in the eyes of the Lord”. Oh, and the ox is now a BMW.

The others seem to be regulatory recommendations. “Thou shalt not take the widow’s mite nor tempt her with filthy richness” and “thou shalt not hide thy money in the Bahamas and refuse to give unto the ATO the things that are the ATO’s”.

There are big threats about Sodomising Wall Street, in the sense of shock and awe. And a reference to a burning bush is about burning George W. in fire and brimstone. For sins including the claim that the Lord supported the Iraq invasion. If I were Bush I’d get out of the White House even before the elections as the Lord is threatening to Gomorrah Washington.

It’s not clear whether the past few weeks have seen the Last Judgment or just a trial balance. But He’s really pissed off.