I’ve been learning about St. Stephen the Great Charitable Trust. In particular, I have been watching a video about their plans to “Rescue Britain’s Christian Heritage“. Clearly, us Brits are not able to cope with the sheer amount of Christian Heritage that we have acquired, and so it is necessary for an American society to do it for us. Thank goodness.

Being a bit of a geek, the first thing I found out about SSG was who ran, updated, and owned the website on which I found the video. For those not in-the-know, every website has information about it published on the WHOIS database. This is the WHOIS record for ststephentrust.org.uk:

The Registrant’s address isn’t really a surprise. It’s the office of our friend Mark Brewer – a hard working man with a surprisingly high pitched voice. The bit that surprised me was the name of the Registrant, and who they were Trading as.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but a martyr is usually someone who is dead. Forty martyrs would therefore be forty dead people. The Forty Holy Martyrs of Sebaste were forty Christian people condemned to freeze to death next to a icy pond on a bitterly cold night – only for the survivors to be burned the next morning. It seems unlikely that these forty people had a meeting during the night and decided to register the domain name ststephentrust.org.uk for two reasons:

1. The martyrs died in the year 320AD. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989. I know it’s important to plan ahead, but I think 1,669 years is a little extreme.
2. The martyrs had very little to do with St. Stephen the Great – who lived 1200 years after the martyrs died.

This leaves only one possible explanation. Mark Brewer was able to summon up the martyrs, persuade them that there was great benefit in registering the domain name, and then return them to wherever they had come from without ever announcing his incredible deed – he is, after all, a very private man.

That is the only explanation I can think of – it would be wrong, possibly even libellous, for him to have claimed the martyrs supported the website without their permission.

On another, quite similar, note, I found this article from The Rev’d Dr. Christian Troll rather amusing.