I was watching one of my favorite movies the other day and I don’t remember ever hearing this line when I watched it previously. Can you guess which 2001 movie this is from?
“The oldest sins in the newest ways.”
If you guess correctly, I’m sending you a big high five and a look of awe, because that would be a very impressive! It’s from A Knight’s Tale, a movie I mostly think of as a romantic comedy but somehow they seem to slip nuggets of such quotable lines throughout the movie, mostly thanks to Paul Bettany’s character Geoffrey Chaucer. He was just so darn funny, yet insightful and perceptive.
It’s Mr. Chaucer that says the line as the movie heads towards its climax. Of course it’s him, a writer and poet, that repeats a line from Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV” which goes… Commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways.
The moment is not highlighted in the movie, almost spoken under his breath in a transition from one scene to the next but I love that it’s in there. Twenty-two years ago when the movie was made– nay, 400 hundred years ago when Shakespeare first penned the line– and now in 2023, it’s still true. All we ever do is invent new ways to do the same evil things. The idea even goes back to Biblical times, in Romans it says “…slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil…” which also kind of puts a spotlight on God as it’s said also in Romans… God, who calls things into existence that do not exist. All we can do as humans is repackage sin in a different way, but God can make something from nothing.
For me, it’s a modern reminder that whether it’s 1600 AD, 2001, or 2023, we all sense the need of something outside of ourselves to get along in this life. So God made something from nothing. Made a way where there really wasn’t a way.
Jesus.
I’ll wrap this up with another great line from A Knight’s Tale. Paul Bettany says in the inspirational monologue below (which was cut from the movie before it hit theaters, boo!!!), Sir William Thatcher is gold and everyone else is iron, who have just come to see him rust.
-Out of the Wilderness
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