Saudi Royal Reads Bible To Family To Make Fun of Jesus Then This Happened
I was a Saudi royal who read the Bible out loud at a family dinner just to make everyone laugh at Christians.
But before I finished the first chapter, something happened inside me that no amount of royal blood or religious training could explain.
And what does it mean when the god you are trying to humiliate is the one who ends up finding you first?
My name is Zed and I am 26 years old. I grew up inside walls that most people in the world will never see from the outside.
Our family compound in Riyad sat behind iron gates on a street where every house belonged to someone connected to power.
The ceilings in our main hall were 40 ft high. The marble floors were so polished you could see your own face in them if you looked down while you walked.
I learned to walk on those floors before I was 2 years old. And by the time I could run, I already understood something that took most people their whole lives to figure out.
Our family was not like other families. And our name carried weight that ordinary names did not.
And that weight had a price. My father, Prince Mansour, was a man who filled every room he entered without raising his voice.
He did not need to raise it. When he spoke, people turned. When he sat, people stood straighter.
He had the kind of authority that does not come from being loud, but from never having been questioned.
He had never been questioned in his life. Not by friends, not by subordinates, not by anyone in our family.
And certainly not by his sons. He had four sons. I was the second. The one everyone said had the sharpest mind.
The one who made people laugh. The one who could take any argument apart in under 10 minutes and leave the pieces on the floor with a smile on his face.
My father loved this about me. He brought me into rooms where other men were debating and let me speak.
He watched the people’s faces when I dismantled their positions. He never said he was proud out loud.
He showed it by putting me in rooms where my mind could be used. That was how he showed love.
By using you for what you were good at. My mother Hessa was gentle and deeply faithful.
She prayed all five prayers without exception. She read Quran every morning before anyone else in the house woke up.
She did not debate or argue about religion. She simply lived it quietly and completely the way a river lives its direction without announcing where it is going.
She was the warmest person in our compound and the one most certain about God.
Not in a loud way, in a settled way. Like a tree that has been in the ground so long it no longer worries about wind.
I was not like her. I loved Islam the way you love the country you were born in.
Automatically without examination. It was the water I swam in and I did not think about the water.
I fasted during Ramadan because everyone fasted. I prayed because praying was what we did.
I could quote Quran verses accurately and debate Islamic theology competently because those were skills my father valued and I was good at learning what my father valued.
But faith, the personal living kind my mother had, the kind that made her wake up before the sun to sit quietly with God.
I did not have that. I had knowledge and performance. I did not know yet that they were different things.
At 22, I went to study law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. My father sent his sons abroad for education the way our family had done for three generations.
Edinburgh was cold and gray and full of rain that arrived sideways off the water.
I wore too many layers for the first month and gradually figured out the rhythm of a city that had been enduring that weather for centuries and had decided to simply live around it rather than complain.
I was good at university. I was good at almost everything that involved taking ideas apart and putting them back together differently.
My law professors liked me. My classmates liked me. I had a sharp sense of humor and a quick way of talking that moved faster than most people expected from someone with my background as though they expected a Saudi royale to be stiff and ceremonial.
I was not. I was irreverent and quick and I enjoyed making people laugh with observations about the gap between how things were supposed to be and how they actually were.
It was at Edinburgh that I first started treating Christianity as a source of comedy.
Not viciously. I was not a cruel person, but I had grown up in a world where Christianity was understood to be a corruption of God’s original message.
A religion that had taken the prophet Jesus and made him into a god through a process of historical distortion driven by a man named Paul who had never even met Jesus.
I knew these arguments thoroughly. My Islamic education had given me a complete framework for dismissing Christian claims.
The Trinity was logically incoherent. God becoming a human baby was undignified. The idea that God’s son had to die to satisfy God’s justice was, to my mind, self-contradicting and almost absurd when you said it out loud.
I found that saying it out loud to British students who were vaguely Christian in the way most people in Britain were vaguely Christian, meaning they had been to a church for a funeral or two and celebrated Christmas without particularly thinking about what it meant, produced reliable laughter and confused silence.
They did not have good answers. They had not thought carefully about what they actually believed.
And I was very good at identifying the weakest point in any position and pressing on it in a way that was funny enough that the person being pressed did not realize how completely they were losing until the room was already laughing.
By my third year at Edinburgh, I had developed a kind of informal reputation as the person you did not want to debate about religion if you were Christian.
Not because I was mean about it, because I was precise and quick and I made the whole exercise feel slightly embarrassing for anyone on the other side.
I enjoyed this more than I should have. It gave me a feeling of intellectual superiority that I told myself was just confidence.
In my final year, a classmate named Thomas invited me to his family’s home for Christmas.
He was from a Scottish family outside the city. His father a farmer, his mother a primary school teacher, must their house full of the kind of cheerful noise that big families in cold countries generate when they are all in the same room with enough food and a working fireplace.
I went partly because I was curious and partly because I had no plans and partly I will admit now because I thought it would be entertaining.
After dinner on Christmas Eve, Thomas’s father sat in the chair nearest the fire and opened a Bible and read from Luke the story of the birth of Jesus.
Shepherds and angels and a baby in a feeding trough. The family sat around him listening with the kind of quiet attention that I associated with my mother reading Quran in the morning.
That particular stillness that people show when they are not just hearing words but receiving them.
I sat slightly to the side watching all of this with the detached amusement of someone observing a cultural ritual.
They found interesting but not personally relevant. But I noticed something I had not expected to notice.
These people were not performing. Thomas’s father was not doing anything for show. He read the way my mother prayed like it was real, like the words were addressing someone who was actually present in the room.
His wife watched him with the expression of a woman who had heard this same reading every Christmas for 30 years and still found it worth hearing.
Thomas’s younger sister, maybe 12 years old. Boro sat cross-legged on the rug with her chin in her hands completely still, which was the opposite of how she had been during dinner.
The story had her completely. I looked at that girl and felt something I could not name.
Not mockery, something quieter. I pushed it away and made a small joke to Thomas as we went to bed about the biological impossibility of the virgin birth.
He laughed politely. But that night, I lay in the guest room in the dark and I thought about his father’s face by the fire light.
I thought about my mother’s face by morning light in our compound in Riyad. The expression was the same, the same settled certainty, the same real presence.
I did not know what to do with that. So I did what I usually did with things I could not immediately explain.
I filed it away and moved past it. I graduated and returned to Riyad with a law degree and more material than ever for arguing that Christianity was an intellectually indefensible religion that reasonable people had outgrown.
I was 25 years old and I was completely certain about this. I had no idea that within one year I would be sitting in my father’s house reading a Bible out loud to my family as a joke and that the joke would stop being funny about halfway through the first chapter and that nothing I thought I knew about God would survive the next 12 months intact.
I had been back in Riyad for 4 months when the Bible reading happened. It started at a dinner in my father’s house on a Friday evening.
The family gathered regularly for these dinners. My father and mother, my older brother Sad, my younger brothers Nabil and Jasim, several cousins and uncle.
The table was long and full of food, and the conversation moved fast the way it always did in a room full of people who had grown up competing to be the most interesting person speaking.
Someone mentioned a colleague who had recently converted to Christianity. A Saudi man from a respected family who had gone abroad for work and come back a different person.
The table reacted the way our table always reacted to this kind of news with a mix of genuine concern about the man’s spiritual state and barely concealed curiosity about how it had happened and more than a little contempt for the religion he had converted to.
My father shook his head slowly. My uncle said something about how western education weakened a man’s faith if he was not already rooted deeply enough.
My older brother sad said Christians worshiped three gods and anyone who thought carefully for 10 minutes could see the trinity made no sense at all.
I had a Bible. I had bought it in Edinburgh during my second year originally to improve my arguments against Christianity by reading the source material directly rather than relying on Islamic descriptions of it.
It had sat in my bookshelf in my room in Riyad since I came back spying out between a legal textbook and the novel I had not finished.
No one in the household had mentioned it. My mother had probably seen it and left it alone because she was my mother and she trusted me.
Ma, I left the dinner table, went to my room, and came back with the Bible.
I held it up and said I would read from it so everyone could hear for themselves exactly what Christians believed and why it was absurd.
The table laughed. My father raised an eyebrow that was not disapproval, more curiosity about where I was going with this.
My younger brothers immediately lean forward the way they always did when I was about to perform something.
I sat down and opened the book. I started with John chapter 1. I had chosen it deliberately because it opened with what I considered the most theologically overreaching claim in the entire New Testament.
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
I read it out loud in my clearest, most theatrical voice. The one I used when I was about to demonstrate why something was wrong.
I paused after it and looked around the table with my eyebrows raised, inviting everyone to appreciate how strange this was.