In his initial response to Doyle’s post, Wilkinson immediately diverts the conversation away from the Old Man’s question through the introduction of a bit of cloak-and-dagger chicanery. Wilkinson provides links to prior Sir Toby’s threads in which the intrigue motif figured prominently. That he felt compelled to re-introduce this ploy so quickly in the new post suggests that Wilkinson may have regarded Sir Toby’s simply as a diversion from the usual theological discourse that characterized OST. On the other hand, he might have suspected that Doyle’s post was in fact an opening salvo of skeptical confrontation hidden under the Old Man’s cloak. “Invisibility? Precipitation? Surely these were coded words” – the Trappist’s paranoiac musings at least hint at this alternative interpretation of Wilkinson’s authorial intent.

In his silent musings the disguised Trappist reveals his thoughts about Jesus’s supposed disappearance in Luke 4; namely, that the event ought to be understood as a rather ordinary human occurrence. Why did Wilkinson not have the Trappist reveal his opinion through conversation with the Old Man? Was he concerned that, in giving direct voice to his own non-supernatural interpretation of the passage, he would be subjecting himself to criticism within the Christian readership of OST? Perhaps this is so, since he does add the seemingly gratuitous caveat that Jesus’s escape from the crowd was “no doubt aided by his divine presence.” But again, why does the Trappist not discuss with the Old Man his understanding of how the natural commingles with the supernatural in Jesus’s earthly ministry?

In the next paragraph the Trappist contemplates the “unholy alliance” that had tried to kill him in a previous encounter. In this re-imagined version of the Sir Toby’s Revisited story, the Old Man is part of a conspiracy to encourage widespread adoption of the “Otherways” manifesto – clearly a reference to Perriman’s recently-published book of the same name, a book which would prove improbably influential over the subsequent decades. On OST Wilkinson persistently presented counter-arguments to Perriman’s exegesis of the New Testament. In his review of the Otherways book Wilkinson graciously yet directly noted his fundamental disagreement with Perriman:

"Andrew has been remarkably generous in allowing me to review the book –
given my consistent questions and criticisms of his strategy. My
questions and criticisms remain – and have not diminished with time. I
have often felt that Andrew does not see the theological wood for
exegetical trees - but I would make that comment with considerable
reservation in the light of the book as a whole. I am aware that I need
to come up with rather more convincing arguments than the stock answers."

Is it conceivable that Wilkinson believed that Doyle’s agnosticism was a ruse, and that in fact he was acting as a kind of undercover operative on Perriman’s behalf, and perhaps even at his behest? Or did Wilkinson regard Perriman’s theology as inherently dangerous to the Christian cause, inevitably precipitating a landslide into the radical skepticism that had already undermined Doyle?

At the end of this first comment the Trappist refers to a new scroll that he himself has penned. The reader presumes that the scroll in question will not offer yet another alternative cosmogeny to be added to the Old Man’s collection. Instead, it will constitute an alternative to, and probably also a critique of, the Otherways Manifesto, which the Trappist regards as the real threat. Here it becomes clearer that Wilkinson’s dispute wasn’t with the agnostic Doyle but with the emergent Perriman.

In the end, of course, the Sir Toby’s discussions and the names of those who engaged in them would have disappeared forever in the long-abandoned internet servers of the age were it not for Perriman’s historical importance. Is it conceivable that, if Wilkinson had directed his attention to Doyle’s agenda instead of Perriman’s, post-evangelicalism would have veered onto a different trajectory altogether?