Jesus in the Movies

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Films recreate the past and make it come alive. For many people movies are their first and most memorable encounter with history. Movies can also reflect a society’s changing values, as well as its attempts to come to terms with its past and draw lessons for its future. This is especially true of movies about religious history and, in particular, movies about Jesus.

The pioneers of cinema were also the pioneers of the biblical movie. Early filmmakers focused on Jesus’ life in an effort to bring a degree of respectability to the new medium—regarded by many at the time as a vulgar gimmick for lowbrow riffraff. At least 16 films in the silent era were based on Christ’s Passion. The earliest, entitled simply The Passion, was released by the Lumière brothers in 1897, two years after they opened the first movie theater, in Paris.¹ For the past 100 years, Jesus has remained a popular subject—perhaps the most filmed subject in history.

Some filmmakers simply added excerpts from the New Testament to their films, as directors did in at least four adaptations of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1895 novel Quo Vadis? and in a handful of films based on Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Salome.²

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These films, however, had little or no artistic or religious merit. In Salome the biblical trappings were a lame excuse to watch Salome’s seductive dance. Kalem Company’s Ben-Hur (1907), despite its biblical setting, was little more than a chariot race. Such commercial exploitation of the Bible did little to resolve the tension between the church and the theater. (Illustrative of this tension, in 1879 actor James O’Neill was sentenced to prison for playing Christ on a San Francisco stage during the Lenten season.)³

The first feature—length treatment of Jesus’ life, From the Manger to the Cross, released by Kalem in 1913, was the most financially successful film Kalem ever made. It included footage shot in Palestine and Egypt; one famous image showed Joseph and Mary resting by the Sphinx.

D.W. Griffith’s classic 1916 film, Intolerance, which also incorporated period details,⁴ was a financial disaster, however. The famous director’s follow-up to his enormously successful Birth of a Nation (1912), Intolerance was, in effect, four films in one. In it Griffith interwove the stories of the fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and a fictitious “modern” story to show how intolerance—usually expressed in religious terms—had harmed societies throughout the ages.

Griffith’s more immediate agenda was to warn of the dangers of the growing Temperance movement. Intolerance came out a year before Prohibition became law in Canada, and four years before it became law in the United States. Griffith focused his life of Christ almost exclusively on two passages from the Gospel of John: John 2, in which Jesus performs his first miracle by changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana; and John 7:53–8:11, in which Jesus intervenes in the stoning of a woman caught in the act of adultery.

The point of the first story is almost too obvious: Jesus, by creating wine, legitimates its use and thus appears at odds with the Temperance movement, which was trying to ban all alcohol in his name.

The link between first-century moralists and those of Griffith’s own day is made even more explicit in his depiction of Jesus forgiving the adulterous 031woman. Significantly, Griffith does not record Jesus’ instruction to her that she “sin no more”; instead, the words “Now how shall we find this Christly example followed in our story of today?” appear on the screen in an intertitle (a title card cut into the scene). Self-appointed do-gooders are then seen clearing out a whorehouse. In Griffith’s modern tale, such acts of social Puritanism endanger the well-being of innocent families.

Griffith’s film also addressed another modern social problem—anti-Semitism. Protestants, fearful of the impact movies might have on American culture, were directing much of their paranoia at the Jews who had “gained control” of the new art form.⁵ Griffith thought it would help to place Jesus in a thoroughly Jewish context and to emphasize Jesus’ participation in Jewish customs in his film. He had a rabbi direct the details of the wedding at Cana and hired “real, old-time orthodox Jews” to play Jesus’ fellow party-goers.⁶ The intertitle that introduced the gossiping Pharisees outside the wedding explained in a footnote that the Pharisees were “a learned Jewish party, the name possibly brought into disrepute later by hypocrites among them.”

Most films about Jesus omit Matthew 27:25—the infamous verse in which the Jews cry out, “Let his blood be on us and our children!”—but Cecil B. DeMille, in The King of Kings (1927), went even further and explicitly exonerated the Jewish people. In that film, when Pilate expresses a desire to release Jesus, the high priest tells him, “If thou, imperial Pilate, wouldst wash thy hands of this man’s death, then let it be on me—and me alone!” When Jesus dies and Jerusalem is hit—in typically grand DeMille fashion—by a storm and an earthquake, the high priest shouts into the wind, “Visit not thy wrath on 032thy people Israel—I alone am guilty!”

Sometimes the carefree way in which Jesus was used to espouse any message, anytime, produced contradictory results. Thomas Ince had Jesus preach pacifism in his Civilization, released in 1916, the year President Wilson was reelected for keeping America out of World War I. After Wilson changed his mind and plunged the United States into war in 1917, Ince reedited the film to support the war effort. As some historians have noted, “Christ now seemed the champion of war against the tyrants.”⁷

In 1922 Postmaster General Will H. Hays was appointed head of a body designed to oversee cinema in an effort to avoid government regulation. The resulting stringent set of rules—the Hollywood Production Code of 1934, straight from the “Hays Office”—demanded that filmmakers restrict how they portrayed violence and sex. Filmmakers felt unprecedented pressure to play it safe. Depictions of Jesus became not only rarer but increasingly reverent—which meant he was barely depicted at all. A flashback in the original Ten Commandments (1923) showed Jesus healing a leper, but the camera stayed behind Jesus’ back so viewers could not see his face. Similarly, Fred Niblo’s Ben-Hur (1925) kept Jesus just out of the frame, his hands gesticulating to a crowd from some off-screen platform.

In fact, with the arrival of sound in the late 1920s, Jesus seemed to disappear from American films altogether. It was as if filmmakers didn’t know how to give Jesus a voice. Thanks to centuries of paintings and sculptures, most people had an idea of what Jesus looked like, but how did he sound? Filmmakers did not venture to guess, at first, and by the time they were comfortable with the medium’s new requirements, they no longer wanted to risk re-creating Jesus’ face.

When, in the 1950s, Hollywood finally returned to the Gospels as a source for films, Jesus had been reduced to a faceless sound bite. In a throwback to the 1920s, Salome (1953) and The Robe (1953) studiously kept their cameras behind Jesus’ back, 033though they did permit him to say a few sentences, including a teaching from the Sermon on the Mount and the famous cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The first new American film of the life of Jesus was Day of Triumph, released in 1954, 27 years after the last such film. However, this independent, church-sponsored production, which told the life of Christ from the point of view of Zealot apostles Andrew and Zadok, remained something of an anomaly compared to the efforts of the major studios in the 1950s. Indeed, major Hollywood studios avoided direct treatments of Jesus until the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio (MGM) released its King of Kings in 1961.

In the 1950s, arguably this century’s most conservative period, the subject matter of cinema was shielded behind a thin veil of piety. Even the 1953 version of Salome, which had gained a small share of notoriety for Rita Hayworth’s suggestive striptease, was cleansed by a drastically rewritten script, in which Salome, as a proto-Christian believer, dances for Herod in an attempt to save John the Baptist’s life rather than to have his head!

MGM’s King of Kings (1961), directed by Nicholas Ray, allowed Jesus only a supporting role in his own life story. The film begins with Pompey’s conquest of Judea, a full century before Jesus’ ministry, and is far more concerned with the political machinations of Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas and a band of Zealots (including Barabbas and Judas Iscariot) than it is with Jesus. Even during such crucial sequences as the Sermon on the Mount, most of the shots were taken from behind Jesus, in the old tradition of keeping his face hidden.⁸ By the time Max von Sydow played Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the ancient epic was a lumbering, dead genre. Director George Stevens had filled the film with a seemingly endless string of high-profile cameos—culminating in John Wayne’s infamous appearance as the Roman centurion who drawls, “Surely this man was the son of God”—but the movie didn’t sell. Stevens recut the film three times until he had removed more than an hour’s worth of footage from its original length of four hours and twenty minutes,⁹ but no one cared. Nor did anyone have much reason to care. The Jesus films of this period singularly failed in presenting biblical history as anything other than a setting for a platitudinous sermon.

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In 1964 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew was the first film based on a single gospel made without narrative or historical embellishment.¹⁰ Pasolini shot it in a neorealist style, with natural Mediterranean landscapes and peasants for actors. As a result, his film feels unusually consistent and authentic. Pasolini, an avowed Marxist, said he chose the Gospel of Matthew for the “passionate violence of [Jesus’] politics.”¹¹ Matthew, he said, was “the most earthly of the evangelists” and “the most revolutionary; he is the nearest to the real problems of an historical epoch.”¹² Perhaps as a result, Pasolini’s film came the nearest in tone to the historical text he worked with and, wittingly or not, captured the format of the gospel in a way no film had before.

Consider the Sermon on the Mount, which scholars agree is not a record of any one speech but a collection of Jesus’ sayings, each of which would have “required time for digestion” to have the proper effect.¹³ Most films that tackle the Sermon, before and after Pasolini, record it as one long monologue. Inadvertently, they usually end up showing just what would have made such a prolonged speech untenable in the first place. Such portrayals are not realistic as historical reenactments, nor are they compelling as cinema. Pasolini solved the problem brilliantly. He shot each saying separately, moving the camera toward Jesus’ face each time, and he edited the sayings into a montage. Although Jesus uttered each aphorism from the exact same spot, the audience was aware that chunks of time had been cut from between the sayings for the sake of expediency. Thus Pasolini preserved the Sermon’s redacted nature while making it watchable, even exciting.¹⁴

In 1968 the Modern Picture Association of America replaced the Production Code with a rating system that, with some adjustments, remains in place today. Filmmakers could again, in theory, say and do anything they liked; they were free to use Jesus in a way they had not since the silent era. Jesus started showing up in virtually every genre imaginable: in fantasy and dream sequences in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Johnny Got His Gun (1971), as an object of satire in The Ruling Class (1972) and Greaser’s Palace (1972), and as the subject, or object, of pornography in Him (1974). In one of the more bizarre trends of popular culture, three musicals based on Jesus’ life were released in 1973: Godspell; Jesus Christ, Superstar; and The Gospel Road.

These three films elicited mixed reactions from the Christian community. Religion and film had always been uneasy partners. Tossing rock ’n’ roll into the mix made it especially volatile. Some Christians objected that Godspell and Jesus Christ, Superstar debased the memory of Jesus, not least by omitting the Resurrection. Others saw the films as an attempt to make Jesus relevant to youth disenchanted with the institutional church. Young evangelicals defining their own pop subculture found it important to cast Jesus as an antimaterialist and a revolutionary akin to members of the Woodstock generation.¹⁵ When church officials protested that the disciples in Johnny Cash’s The Gospel Road bore too close a resemblance to hippies, Cash replied, “I guess that’s because Christ was sort of a hippie in his day.”¹⁶

Other films took a more serious interest in placing Jesus in his cultural context, that is, coming to terms with the fact that Jesus and his associates were not just Jews in name—a fact to which 035Hollywood epics had paid little more than lip service. While making the TV miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Franco Zeffirelli said he felt a “moral responsibility” to restore a Jewish flavor to the Gospels; thus he set much of the film in synagogues and in the Jerusalem Temple. He portrayed several Jewish characters, including rabbis, as sympathetic to Jesus even though they did not side with him completely. By the time certain Jewish authorities condemn Jesus, it is perfectly clear that they do not represent all Jews.¹⁷

In The Passover Plot (1976), an adaptation of Hugh J. Schonfeld’s book, the characters even retained their Hebrew names—Yeshua, Yaacov, Yohanan the Baptist. That film was the first English-language film to reconstruct a “historical Jesus” based on something other than a precritical reading of the Gospels. (The quality of the historical reconstruction is another matter.)

Throughout the 1980s controversy was the order of the day, most famously typified by Martin Scorsese’s 1988 adaption of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. The outcry that accompanied the film’s release was due mostly to a sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (they were married to each other at this point in the film), though Scorsese’s film was essentially antisexual. According to the openingcredits, which quote Kazantzakis, Jesus personified a “battle between the spirit and the flesh,” and for 045the spirit to triumph within the film, Jesus had to renounce the things of the flesh, including sexuality.¹⁸ Conservative protesters actually agreed with this part, since they believed Jesus should never be caught in a woman’s sexual embrace.¹⁹

Just as The Last Temptation exalted the spirit at the expense of the flesh, so it exalted a spiritual message at the expense of history. Although Scorsese relied on the help of historians and scholars to root the details of the film in firmer historical ground than that of the films that had preceded it, especially during the crucifixion scene, there were still anachronisms, angelic visitations and awkward details—such as the tattoos that covered Mary Magdalene’s body, in direct violation of Jewish law.²⁰ Overall, the film was more of a mythological reworking of the Gospels than an attempt to grapple with history. Judas rejects a life of political revolution in favor of otherworldly spirituality, and, ultimately, so does Jesus. Their heroism comes from their refusal to take an active role in their nation’s history and from their passive withdrawal into an atemporal spirituality. Like the film’s version of Paul, who invents the Resurrection because that’s what his audience wants, Scorsese argued that Jesus could be reinvented to suit anyone’s needs. As Scorsese told one reporter, “Ultimately, it was all a choice between my wrong version, and your wrong version, and somebody else’s wrong version.”²¹

Other films made more serious efforts to come to terms with history. Two such films, produced at either end of the decade, were, ironically, produced by filmmakers better known for their biting satire than for their piety. Yet both films—Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal (1989)—were the most positive statements their respective filmmakers had ever made.

Life of Brian mercilessly mocks religious epics. It was even filmed on sets that had been constructed, to a more reverent end, for Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth!²² But even so, the renewed emphasis on history that marked the 1970s had an effect. Though the Python troupe set out to mock the life of Jesus, according to charter member Eric Idle, once they had done their research, “we realized, in fact, you can’t really make fun of J.C. because he’s actually saying quite good things.”²³ So in the end, Life of Brian satirized the crowds that chased messiahs all over Palestine but avoided mocking Jesus himself. If anything, it sympathized with him.²⁴

In a similar vein, critics have remarked that Jesus of Montreal was a sensitive departure for Denys Arcand from his usually indiscriminate cynicism. Although traces of his trademark sarcasm remain, the film offers a rare, sympathetic treatment of its characters.²⁵

Jesus of Montreal follows a theater company, led by Daniel Coulombe (actor Lothaire Bluteau), as it puts on a Passion play true to the historical Jesus. Coulombe’s research for the part results in a play that undoes much of the traditional gospel story. In this telling, Jesus is the son of Mary and a Roman soldier, his miracles are put on a level with the works of other magicians, and “five years, perhaps ten” pass before the followers of Jesus begin to talk of resurrection experiences. Naturally, these revisions infuriate the church authorities who commissioned the play. Coulombe alienates them further by quoting Jesus’ tirades against hypocrites at them when they express their displeasure.

Arcand’s film does not attempt to reimagine the life of Jesus in a modern setting. Instead, it works out of the belief, seen elsewhere in Arcand’s work, that history repeats itself and that conflicts persist without resolution. Coulombe, like Jesus, is surrounded by charlatans who hope to tempt him with worldly success, by adoring fans who spread inaccurate reports about his play and by angry authorities who want to silence him and censor his work.²⁶ Near the end of the film, a mortally wounded Coulombe stumbles through a subway station and predicts its demise in words that echo Jesus’ prediction of the fall of the Jerusalem Temple. But there is no eschatological urgency behind Coulombe’s ramblings; rather, he despairs that all human endeavors will prove impermanent in the end. Coulombe recognizes a bond of shared futility between himself and the Jesus of his reconstruction.

Futility of another sort plagues producers of the 1990s who want to make films about Jesus. Apart from a few church-sponsored productions, which, typically, have suffered from poor performances and unimaginative scripts, this decade has produced very few movie treatments of the Gospels.²⁷ The major movie studios today are reluctant to spend money on controversial films that have no obvious audience.

But the same secularization responsible for this trend also opens the door for new and intriguing possibilities. The renewed popularity of the historical Jesus, as evidenced by the sales of numerous books and by high-profile groups like the Jesus Seminar,^a suggests the existence of an audience ready to explore the life and message of Jesus in innovative, powerful and dramatic ways. Is there anyone in Hollywood—or the church, for that matter—willing to meet the challenge?

Films recreate the past and make it come alive. For many people movies are their first and most memorable encounter with history. Movies can also reflect a society’s changing values, as well as its attempts to come to terms with its past and draw lessons for its future. This is especially true of movies about religious history and, in particular, movies about Jesus. The pioneers of cinema were also the pioneers of the biblical movie. Early filmmakers focused on Jesus’ life in an effort to bring a degree of respectability to the new medium—regarded by many at the time […]