Jesus is difficult to portray. Frankly, it’s a difficult role. Jesus is often mysterious, and his motivation
is difficult. If you are portraying a
divine Jesus, then how could you know his motivation? Perhaps you might want to be as otherworldly
as possible, and so make him to be as disconnected from personal motivation as
possible. The result is to make a Jesus
that is saintly, but not really comprehensible.
Or you might make Jesus a very human man. After all, it isn’t heresy to declare Jesus
human. And it shouldn’t cause waves to
say that Jesus was tempted in every way that we are (yeah, right, even though
it says just that in the Scripture located in Hebrews 4). The problem with this Jesus is to interpret
him as too human is to make him too modern.
Jesus WAS human, but he probably didn’t have existential doubt. Jesus was an ancient Jewish rabbi, not an
American rock star.
In overviewing different Jesus’ in film it is clear that
Jesus is hard to get right. How can we
make him both charismatic and enigmatic; both caring and angry; both mystic and
down-to-earth? Not only that, but Jesus
is the second most popular person in the United States—how can one draw on
that, but still match the “Jesus” they have in their heads?
In the next episodes, I’ll look at some films and rate how
Jesus is portrayed in each. Then I’ll
draw some conclusions at how I’d like to see Jesus portrayed.
To respond to the first question you put here, although it probably was rhetorical, I think it's a better way to go to try to make something that makes sense from a spiritual way rather than doing pretty illustrations from the Bible. The standard, clichéd kind of movies are really the worst and frankly you can't tell one from the other.
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