Religion: Tales from the Good Book: rape, murder and luscious eroticism

'Curves of thighs like jewels', 'whispers like spiced wine' and 'breasts like twin fawns of a gazelle'.

Whoever said the Bible was boring? A churchman tells Clare Garner that it is full of 'the pleasures of loving and bonking'.

In between the Lord speaking to Moses and the walls of Jerusalem being rebuilt, there are plenty of juicy bits in the Bible. So says Canon Michael Saward, Canon Treasurer of St Paul's Cathedral.

With reference to the "luscious, erotic poem", the Song of Songs, which includes racy passages such as: "You are stately as a palm-tree,/ and your breasts are clusters of dates./ I said: 'I will climb up into the palm to grasp its fronds'", he insists that most of the really memorable bits of the Old Testament come into the category of sex and violence.

In a new book of his sermons, which is entitled These Are The Facts, a book of his sermons published today, Canon Saward writes that what first comes to people's minds about the Old Testament are the stories about what men and women do to and with each other.

"Genesis has its fair share of rapes and murders. Exodus vividly describes the drowning of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. Later books tell of local tribes who were massacred in what, today, we call ethnic cleansing."

And as for sex, "There's plenty of that in the Bible," he adds. The Song of Songs is "not only full of references to legs, thighs, breasts and so on, but includes a handful of coded allusions - common in Middle Eastern writing - to sexual intercourse. It leaves little doubt about the pleasures of loving and bonking there!"

Canon Saward reports that a vicar's wife once told him that her elderly mother preferred the Old Testament to the New because, as she put it, there were more dirty bits in it. "How sad," he adds, "that she had equated sex with dirt."

He goes on: "Certainly some - perhaps most - people get no further than that. Others prefer to forget the gory bits, or the sexy bits, and concentrate on the noble characters who emerge."

Elsewhere in the book, Canon Saward, whose skull was fractured when he was attacked by intruders in the notorious Ealing Vicarage rape case of 1986, in which his daughter was raped and her boyfriend beaten up, complains about press coverage of the Church. If 99 of every 100 vicars preached thoroughly orthodox sermons week after week, no journalist will bother to report it, he says.

"It only needs one unorthodox vicar to say something outrageous and every journalist will print his ravings. So British people (and that includes government ministers) are only ever told what the idiots, the extremists and the naughty boys say or get up to.

"As a result, the non-church-going nation, and its politicians, assume that the Church spends all its time teaching heresy, political revolution or a moral free-for-all.

"That is arrant nonsense but although the latest surveys tell us that the clergy are among the most trusted people in the community (and the politicians and journalists among the least trusted), people still believe what they read in the newspapers."