There were two dramas shown over the Christmas weekend that nicely captured the prejudices of our times. Neither was actually set in our times, but in a way that's the point. More and more, we are projecting our own values on to those who lived in the past as though there can be no other way to live, or to think, than the way we live and think now.

The first was Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. In the old days, Holmes was this smarter-than-average bloke who liked traipsing around in a deer-stalker hat solving mysteries. Watson was the guy who asked the sort of questions we wanted to ask like, "How in the world did you think of that, Holmes?"

Now both characters have been made much darker. The new Watson is more aggressive, more edgy, and has a difficult, combative, more egalitarian relationship with Holmes.

The new Holmes is really a sort of Hannibal the Cannibal only without the cannibalism. Like Hannibal, he's an aficionado of high-brow culture. Like Hannibal, he's a snob. Like Hannibal, he looks down on lesser mortals. Like Hannibal, he's a genius and like Hannibal he has a vice, except in Holmes's case that means shooting up with opium rather than eating people.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not write Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, nor would he have been able to. First of all, readers back then would never have accepted a Holmes half so dark as the one portrayed by Rupert Everett. Secondly, Conan Doyle himself would have found the plot - pervert with a foot fetish tortures and kills nubile young women - repugnant. Back then, the transgressive was out. These days, it's almost de rigueur.

The other drama was Chocolat. Set in a small town in rural France in 1959, we encounter the liberated, bohemian Vianne, played by Juliette Binoche. Vianne arrives in town right at the start of Lent.

Lent is observed with the utmost rectitude in this town because of the towering influence of the local count, played by Alfred Molina. Molina is a strict, repressed Catholic of the old school who has made the town in his image. It is dreary, lifeless sort of place where no one seems to smile. Vianne has other ideas. She opens a chocolate shop right opposite the church in the town square.

Her message to the townsfolk couldn't be clearer: forget self-denial, forget convention, give into your desires. In no time at all, she has effected a social revolution and everyone - including the count - is pigging out on her mystic, Mayan chocolate and generally having cosmic orgasms.

How does Chocolat project our prejudices into the past? Well, for a start, it presents the count - the defender of family, church and tradition - as a straw man. He is no match for Vianne, intellectually, emotionally or otherwise. Not a single decent argument is put into his mouth because most modern scriptwriters wouldn't know how to put a credible argument into the mouth of a traditionalist. Secondly, he is a hypocrite - aren't they all? As we discover, all along he has wanted to gorge himself on Vianne's chocolate, a metaphor for the wild thing, in case you hadn't worked it out.

Also, the movie presents as an incontestable fact the very modern illusion that we can give into every desire with only good consequences and never bad ones. In this film, for example, no one puts on so much as a kilo from eating all that chocolate.

All ages have their prejudices. We're no different. We are different in one respect, though. Ours is the only one ever to think that it has nothing at all to learn from the past. One result of this is that it has become all but impossible for us to make a drama set in the past in which a credible character doesn't think exactly like us. The writer CS Lewis called this kind of attitude 'chronological snobbery', meaning the belief that the latest thing is always the best. We're all chronological snobs now.

It's as traditional as plum pudding at this time of year to try and debunk the Gospels, and more precisely, the Christmas story.

Newspapers and magazines will wheel out one or another Bible scholar to tell us with the utmost confidence that the virgin birth never happened and that there were no angels over Bethlehem.

When Easter comes around these same scholars will inform us that there Christ did not rise from the dead, and that his followers imagined the whole thing.

Bible scholars are divided into two camps. The first is open to the possibility of miracles. The second, and much larger one, is not. The second camp, which dominates the major universities, tends to get all the publicity.

The fact that this second camp does not believe in miracles is absolutely crucial to understanding how its followers understand the Bible and the Gospels. They do not reject the virgin birth, the incarnation and the resurrection because they have found independent historical evidence that none of these things happened. Not at all. Instead these are conclusions that logically follow from their prior belief that miracles don't happen and that everything has a natural, as distinct from a supernatural, explanation.

Take away this assumption from their Bible scholarship, from their exercise in debunking, and it falls to pieces.

PS, If you're interested in this kind of thing, and want an intelligent riposte to the radical Bible critics, then check out The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson.

David Quinn

dquinn@unison.independent.ie