But while friends and acquaintances come to put their faith in him, Judith is less impressed. She does, though, get to have sex with him after all those years - Baxter is a very flawed human messiah. Eventually she reluctantly concludes that he might be right and, if so, it's time for God to die. On the night which Baxter expects to be the world's last, Judith invites him for a meal - spaghetti and rat poison Bolognese. When he realises that she is not joking when she tells him the ingredients, he protests that he can't be killed - a claim that he had already substantiated pretty impressively by being invulnerable to both fire and bullets. But Judith tells him that when the time is right, he can die. She says, 'and when you die, you're not going to Paradise. You're dying properly and for ever, and you're taking the whole thing with you. God and heaven and hell - all dead. The end of this world and the start of a new one without religion on our backs.'
Steve asks what kind of world it would be without God. Judith is confident that it would be better because 'right now we're promised an afterlife so we waste the seventy years we've got. If God is dead, though, this is all we've got. Then maybe we'll use it. Maybe we'll become better - than you.'
Steve Baxter stares into camera and sees that Judith is right. He realises what the content of the third Testament is to be: 'family business closes down.' And faced with the apparent rightness of his friend's judgment on him, he shoulders his own responsibility and greedily swallows down his spaghetti to die a rapid, but clearly painful, death. 'In that second,' says one of the characters afterwards, 'all of his creations felt his death. Right at the end, everyone believed, everyone. And everyone knew he was gone.'
New Testament teaching about Jesus' is rather different there will be no second virgin birth, no repeat of growing up in northern obscurity. People will not be trying to work out whether or not he's genuine. Jesus himself says that when he does return, 'all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other' (Matthew 24:31 (NIV)).
