T&T Clark Handbook of Jesus and Film

Richard Walsh

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780567698391
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567686916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The T&T Clark Handbook of Jesus and Film introduces postgraduate readers to the critical field of Jesus and/on film. The bulk of biblical films feature Jesus, as protagonist, in cameo, or as a looming background presence or pattern. The handbook assesses the field in light of the work of important biblical film critics including chapters from the leading voices in the field and showcasing the diversity of work done by scholars in the field. Movies discussed include The Passion of the Christ, The King of Kings, Jesus of Nazareth, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Son of Man, and Mary Magdalene.

The chapters range across two broad areas: 1) Jesus films, understood broadly as filmed passion plays, other relocations of Jesus, historical Jesus treatments, and Jesus adjacent cinema (privileging invented characters or "minor" gospel characters); and 2) other cinematic Jesuses, including followers who imitate Jesus devotionally or aesthetically, (Christian) Christ figures, antichrists, yet other messiahs, and competing Jesuses in a pluralist world. As one leaves the confines of Christian theology, the question of what a film or interpreter is doing with Jesus or Christ becomes something to be determined, not necessarily something traditional.

PART ONE

The Jesus Film Tradition

CHAPTER ONE

Obscure Gospel Elements in Jesus Films

PETER T. CHATTAWAY

Jesus is one of the most familiar figures in history and art—he is iconic in every sense of the word—but that does not mean audiences know his story well. Pier Paolo Pasolini once recalled that his Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Saint Matthew 1964), which portrayed Jesus as an edgy political activist but took nearly every line of its dialogue from Matthew’s gospel, was “a disconcerting and scandalous novelty” in his native country because “nobody in Italy reads the Gospel, really nobody,” and “no one [had] expected a Christ like that.”¹

While a plethora of biblical epics preceded Pasolini’s film over the previous decade and a half, only one—Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961)—depicted the life of Jesus directly. The other epics were all based on the Hebrew Bible or, in the cases of films like The Robe (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959), told stories on the periphery of Jesus’s life and ministry, coming closer only for such deeply iconic moments as the crucifixion and the events leading up to it.

Since Pasolini made his film, however, there has been a continuous stream of Jesus films and, with this abundance, has come an illusion of familiarity. Audiences have seen certain images again and again and may think they know the Jesus story well. But films shape our collective memory as much by what they leave out as by what they put in, and filmmakers have ignored many elements in the gospels for the most part—partly because earlier filmmakers ignored them, and partly because those elements posed challenges to conventional ways of thinking about Jesus. Audiences have come to expect certain things from Jesus movies; filmmakers cater to those expectations; and the films they make shape the expectations to which subsequent filmmakers cater.

In a sense, then, filmmakers have effectively built a cinematic canon and interpretive tradition akin to the scriptural canon and tradition of interpretation, and in some ways the evolution of one resembles the evolution of the other. Traditions and canons typically begin in a state of flux, as new ideas are tried out in a variety of ways—but over time, through repetition and familiarity, certain ideas rise to the surface and become the standard by which all other ideas are measured. This process of evolution can be traced within the New Testament itself and in its cinematic adaptations.

Sometimes stories fade from the audience’s consciousness. For example, Mark—widely thought to be the earliest canonical gospel—says an unidentified man, who was apparently not an apostle, ran naked through Gethsemane after fleeing Jesus’s captors (Mk 14:51-52). Some writers have identified the man with fictitious characters of their own invention, most notably the title character Judah Ben-Hur in Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880; bk. 8, ch. 8); for such writers, odd details like this are creative opportunities to expand the biblical story. But, perhaps because this particular detail is so odd, and because there is no obvious way to explain to an audience who this naked man was, he has been omitted from most gospel dramatizations. The scene is absent from all the major film adaptations of Ben-Hur,² and even the Lumo Project’s word-for-word adaptation of Mark does not include him. A narrator simply describes the event over generic footage of Gethsemane and the arrest of Jesus there.³

At other times, stories or story elements that were not part of the gospels to begin with are incorporated into the text and become part of the narrative that “everybody knows.” A prime example is the story about the woman caught in adultery released from stoning when Jesus told the crowd that only he who was without sin should throw the first stone. This story does not appear in the earliest versions of the gospels, and when it does begin to appear, it floats between different places in Luke and John before settling into its current position in Jn 8:1-11. Despite this story’s questionable provenance, it has become one of the most popular Jesus stories thanks to its depiction of his tolerance, and it is now one of the most-filmed gospel episodes outside of the nativity and passion.⁴

Sometimes the scriptural canon will include multiple, even contradictory, versions of a story or teaching, and the religious community that compiled or received the canon will come to prefer one version. For example, there are actually two versions of the Lord’s Prayer, one in Mt. 6:9-13 and one in Lk. 11:2-4.⁵ Matthew’s version—and, in English-speaking territories, its KJV translation—has become so standard that in Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018), Luke leads some Christians in reciting the prayer, and it is Matthew’s version that they recite, not the one in Luke’s own gospel (which, according to the film, Luke has already written).⁶ Similarly, Matthew’s gospel tells us that two women, Mary Magdalene and another woman named Mary, met the resurrected Jesus and took his message to the disciples, but John’s gospel says Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene by herself,⁷ so some churches now acclaim her, and only her, as “the apostle to the apostles”—a designation given some significance in the 2018 Mary Magdalene, a film that basically depicts the title character as the only female disciple who was close to Jesus.⁸

As with scripture, so with film. Matt Page has shown how silent films covered a much wider range of Bible stories than the medium covers now (2018: 275–6). Thus, some of the earliest silent films depicted such things as the healing of the widow of Nain’s son (Lk. 7:11-17), the disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath (Mk 2:23-28; Mt. 12:1-8; Lk. 6:1-5), and Jesus calling Zacchaeus from the tree (Lk. 19:1-10)—episodes that filmmakers since have largely neglected.

Sometimes the narrowing of stories can be observed between re-edits of a single film: Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) originally depicted that curious story in which Jesus tells Peter to pay the temple tax using a coin that he will find in a fish’s mouth (Mt. 17:24-27)—DeMille even milks the scene for comedy, as two soldiers try to replicate the miracle, one of them shaking a fish next to his ear in the hope that he will hear the rattling of coins—but when DeMille re-released the film with a music and sound-effects track just one year later, he left out this scene and a few others, and for the most part this story has gone unfilmed ever since.⁹

In addition to some of these isolated elements, one can point to broader patterns of themes, characters, and stories that cinematic adaptations tend to overlook. The rest of this chapter will look at the relative prominence of certain themes in the gospels—such as the families of Jesus and his apostles, the rituals associated with his Jewish upbringing and the movement he started, the role of women within that movement, and the sometimes ambiguous or even negative response to his miracles—and highlight some of the relatively few films that have acknowledged these themes.

FAMILY TIES: THE BROTHERS (AND SISTERS!) OF JESUS

Thanks in part to the popularity of the Christmas story, entire films have sometimes focused on Jesus’s mother and putative father.¹⁰ Jesus’s brothers and sisters are, however, virtually absent from mainstream Jesus films, which is striking, as the brothers in particular are mentioned throughout the New Testament. All four of the canonical gospels mention them, as do the book of Acts and the epistles of Paul, and while each source has its biases and emphases, a coherent picture does emerge: Jesus had four brothers named James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon, in addition to some sisters (Mk 6:3; Mt. 13:55-56). He went to social events such as weddings with his brothers (Jn 2:12), but they did not believe in him at first, and they expressed this disbelief by sarcastically daring him to show himself to the world (Jn 7:2-10) and/or by trying to stop him from preaching, believing that he was crazy (Mk 3:20-21). Jesus rebuffed his brothers during his ministry, claiming that those who followed God’s will were his real brothers and sisters (Mk 3:31-35; Mt. 12:46-50; Lk. 8:19-21), but he appeared to James after the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3-8) and, by the time Pentecost happened seven weeks later, the brothers were meeting and praying with the apostles on a regular basis (Acts 1:12-14). James went on to be a leader in the early Church, albeit one who sometimes butted heads with Paul over the application of Jewish food laws to the Gentiles (Acts 12:17; 15:12-21; 21:17-26; Gal. 1:18-20; 2:6-13), and both he and Jude are traditionally believed to be the authors of the epistles that bear their names. Paul also reports that Jesus’s brothers took their wives with them on their journeys (1 Cor. 9:5)—so Jesus had not only brothers and sisters but sisters-in-law as well.

Very little of this has made it to the screen, and there are several reasons why that might be. First, there may be a perceived need for dramatic simplicity; even films that do depict Jesus’s extended family tend to reduce the number of characters that are juggled onscreen. (The Young Messiah 2016, an adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt 2005, reduces the number of adult relatives who travel with Mary and Joseph in the novel to two—Mary’s brother Cleopas and his wife.) Second, Jesus’s evidently contentious relationship with his brothers is out of step with the positive, pious approach that most films have taken toward Jesus’s relationship with his family, particularly his mother.¹¹ (Joseph is generally presumed to have died before Jesus began his ministry but is sometimes shown interacting with Jesus beforehand.) Third, what information the gospels do have about Jesus’s siblings is somewhat sketchy, and filmmakers may be reluctant to fill in the gaps lest they be accused of straying too far from the text. And fourth, depicting the brothers and sisters of Jesus would require filmmakers to choose (or at least tiptoe) between the different churches’ traditions, as they disagree as to whether these siblings were Mary’s biological offspring, her stepsons through Joseph, or even cousins.¹²

To the extent that Jesus’s brothers and sisters are shown onscreen, it is usually in films that are set before or after the events of his ministry. James shows up in films based on the book of Acts, such as Atti degli apostoli (Acts of the Apostles 1969), Peter and Paul (1981), A.D. Anno Domini (1985), and San Paolo (Saint Paul 2000). Films about Joseph and Mary’s courtship do sometimes depict the brothers in ways that honor the traditional belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity and, thus, they depict Jesus’s siblings as someone else’s children. In Giuseppe di Nazareth (Joseph of Nazareth 2000), Joses, Simon, and Judas are the widower Joseph’s nephews rather than his sons (so they are the cousins of Jesus, technically, rather than his brothers); and in La sacra famiglia (The Holy Family 2006), James, Judas, and their sister Sarah are the widower Joseph’s biological children from his previous marriage¹³—and because James is roughly the same age as Mary, he develops a romantic interest in her before she and Joseph are formally married. (Later, after Jesus is born, James complains that Joseph would rather go on having children of his own than have grandchildren.) A.D. The Bible Continues (2015) combines aspects of the films that are set before and after Jesus’s ministry: the series is mostly based on Acts, so it shows James getting involved in church politics around the time of Paul’s conversion, but it introduces James through a flashback in which it is the young James, rather than Mary or Joseph, who finds Jesus in the Temple (see Lk. 2:41-50)—and when James tells this story to the apostles, he refers to Mary as “his [i.e. Jesus’s] mother,” thereby indicating that he, James, is probably not one of Mary’s biological children.¹⁴

The Young Messiah, which follows Jesus’s family as it returns to Galilee following the death of Herod the Great, is the one major film that imagines what it might have been like for Jesus to grow up with male and female relatives close to his own age. In this film, James, who is only slightly older than Jesus, is an orphaned cousin of Joseph’s that Joseph has adopted¹⁵—so he is Jesus’s cousin of sorts and a legal step-sibling—and Jesus, who is about seven years old, is first seen playing in the streets of Alexandria with his female cousin Salome. Interestingly, because this James was present for the nativity, he knows that Jesus is the messiah before Jesus does—but this knowledge fuels his jealousy, which prefigures the later friction between Jesus and his adult siblings.

Depictions of Jesus’s siblings during his adult lifetime are few and fleeting. In Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977), the transition between the earlier, nativity-themed section of the miniseries and the section depicting Jesus’s baptism includes a scene in which Joseph, on his deathbed, tells Mary not to worry about his carpentry shop because “they”—here he looks at four men standing against the wall—will look after it. The silent, unnamed men are never seen in the film again, but they presumably represent Jesus’s brothers, however their relationship to him is understood. Color of the Cross (2006) depicts Jesus’s family differently: the entire family is black; Joseph is still alive during Jesus’s ministry; and Jesus’s brothers and sisters are clearly identified as Joseph and Mary’s children. Finally, Killing Jesus (2015), which also implies that James is Mary’s son, places James with Mary at the crucifixion and the empty tomb,¹⁶ and it shows a girl who may be Jesus’s sister hugging him when he visits his family in Nazareth.¹⁷

MORE FAMILIES, MORE TIES: THE ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes On Contributors
• Introduction: The Jesus Film Tradition
• Part 1 The Jesus Film Tradition
• Part 2 Other Jesuses, Christs, Messiahs, Sons of Men …
• Filmography
• Scripture Index
• Modern Authors/Filmmakers Index
• Film Index
• Copyright