In May, 1988 I was invited to be the Guest of Honour at the Celebration of the Millenium of the Ukrainian Church in Philadelphia. I had many friends there, one a Roman Catholic priest, who asked me to attend one of his services…The congregation was mostly of the Black Community and the service was as near to Church of Ireland as made little difference…I asked him why this was. He said that the congregation was once Irish Catholic but they had long since moved to the suburbs. He had tried to convert the new Black people around him but to no avail, so had just had to facilitate them…They were all, he said, “People of the Book”.

The People of the Book (Arabic: أهل الكتاب  ′Ahl al-Kitāb) is a term used to designate non-Muslim adherents to faiths which have a revealed scripture called, in Arabic, Ahl-Al-Kitab (Arabic: أهل الكتاب ‎ “the People of the Book” or “people of the Scripture”). The three types of adherents to faiths that the Qur’an mentions as people of the book are the Children of Israel, including Jews, Karaites and Samaritans, all Christians and Sabians. But some Muslim scholars have also seen the Supreme Creator Being of the Book in Hinduism and even in its Buddhist off-shoot.

In Islam, the Muslim scripture, the Qur’an, is taken to represent the completion of these scriptures, and to synthesize them as God’s true, final, and eternal message to humanity. Because the People of the Book recognize the God of Abraham as the one and only god, as do Muslims, and as they practice revealed faiths based on divine ordinances, tolerance and autonomy is accorded to them in societies governed by sharia (Islamic divine law).

In Judaism the term “People of the Book” (Hebrew: עם הספר, Am HaSefer) was used to refer specifically to the Jewish people and the Torah, and to the Jewish people and the wider canon of written Jewish law (including the Mishnah and the Talmud). Adherents of other Abrahamic religions, which arose later than Judaism, were not added. As such, the appellation is accepted by Jews as a reference to an identity rooted fundamentally in Torah.

In Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church rejects the similar expression “religion of the book” as a description of the Christian faith, preferring the term “religion of the Word of God”, since the faith of Jesus  Christ, according to Roman Catholic teaching, is not found solely in the Christian Scriptures, but also in the Sacred Tradition and Magisterium of the Infallible Church. Nevertheless, members of Protestant denominations, such as the Baptists and Methodists, particularly in the former Confederate States of America, especially the beautiful Black Community, forming the Common Identity of all its inhabitants, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists, as well as the old Puritans and Shakers, have embraced the term “People of the Book.”

So it is that respect for the Book of God is considered a Divine Ordinance by a large percentage of the people of our world. The decline of the old aristocracy in our British Isles following the Great War, culminating in the rise of the Blairite meritocracy, made up of the mammon of our time – Corrupt Politicians and their new Life Peer cronies, London City folk, Bankers, Media Moguls and stars of the fashion, entertainment and sports worlds – has resulted in the replacement of new money for old. This Mediacracy controls our lives. And, worshipping mammon rather than God, they despise the Book which tells them otherwise.

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” 

Jesus of Nazareth

Matthew 6:19–21,24 (KJV)

Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them

  — Psalm 39 v 6

King James Version

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28.

William Shakespeare