IN 1993, I pitched an idea to the BBC for a four-part series about the historical Jesus to mark 2000 years since his birth. There was a lot of new scholarship at the time, and I considered various learned figures to present the series. Then, one night, I had a dream that a mysterious “abbot” had taken on the job. Waking up, I “knew” that this was not an abbot at all, but the BBC’s voice of India: Mark Tully.
I was delighted to discover that Mark was up for the job. We spent more than a year making Lives of Jesus, which was transmitted in 1996. The series began in India, but it also took Mark to Rome and Ravenna, Jerusalem, Galilee, and Egypt. We sat on the Temple Mount, climbed Mount Sinai together, spent a night in the Egyptian desert, and visited St Antony’s monastery.
I remember him arriving at Cairo airport with a huge bottle of whisky in his suitcase. He had judged, rightly, that the Red Sea hotel that we were booked into would have only weak beer — and he was not one to forgo his creature comforts. We talked about our home lives, and he told me about his unconventional arrangements by which he lived with his wife, Margaret, when he was in England, and with his long-term partner, Gillian, in Delhi. He was aware of the pain that this caused both women, and felt guilt for letting them both down.
Mark was culturally Anglican; he had even started training for the priesthood under the influence of Robert Runcie. But he always believed that there was more than one way to God. By the end of Lives of Jesus, he admitted that he thought that the resurrection must have happened, since nothing else could have accounted for the belief that Jesus was divine. This conclusion did not go down particularly well with the BBC Controller who had commissioned the series and was expecting something more conventionally agnostic; but Mark had no regrets.
For all his humour and his well-deserved reputation as a bon viveur, he had a steely courage and a refusal to be pushed around. Shortly before retirement, he fell out with the BBC Director-General, John Birt (21 November 2025), over the future of the World Service. Mark continued broadcasting, though, and his Sunday-morning series on Radio 4, Something Understood, was widely appreciated.
Every year, we exchanged Christmas cards and a few lines of news. Last Christmas, I had a message from Gillian that he was very frail; so I was not entirely surprised to hear that he had died on 25 January, nor that his funeral in Delhi had been attended by friends of many faiths — not so much because he hedged his bets, but more that he was one of those rare spirits who can find a home anywhere and everywhere.
