Jesus movies I have seen, and what I think of them.
I’m a big fan of Jesus, and I also like movies. So naturally, I’d like to see the two come together. Unfortunately, they don’t always come together well.
Here’s a list of Jesus movies I have seen; some of which I own. I have them listed in the order that I like them: favorites to suckiest. This is not a comprehensive list, of course. But it’s a start.
The Gospel of John. By far my favorite Jesus movie, and not just because it comes word-for-word from my favorite gospel. In spite of the budget, the actors are first-rate and the director did a great job with what he had to work with. This is a particularly hard form of Jesus to portray because, in John’s gospel, he’s so transcendent that it’s sometimes hard to picture him as human. (Christians regularly have a problem portraying Jesus as human in their movies—they’re so fixated on the fact that he’s also God that they sometimes forget he’s also human.) Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Jesus, manages to humanize Jesus in an outstanding way—it reminds you that these remarkable words came out of a human mouth.
The Miracle Maker. One of the few movies where Jesus actually looks middle eastern; too bad it’s because they used clay. Probably the most scriptural portrayal of Mary Magdalene I’ve ever seen; every movie tends to perpetuate that myth that she was a whore, and it’s simply not found in the scriptures. (She was, however, demonized until Jesus cured her. That’s in this movie.) The plot is solid, the claymation/animation medium works rather well in this movie, and I’ve found it’s the best Jesus movie to present to children. Every other animated Jesus movie I’ve seen is just too bloody slow and boring.
The Passion of the Christ. But man, is it hard to watch. This is someone I know who’s getting beaten to death and crucified, and it would be hard to watch even if it were someone I didn’t know and love getting crucified, like Spartacus. Those who nitpick its historical inaccuracies don’t understand what Mel Gibson was trying to do. Look at any of the most popular images of the crucifixion in Christian art; you’ll find its parallel in the Passion. (You’ll even find the devil’s grotesque parody of it; that’s what that whole ugly baby sequence was about.)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew. It annoys me that one of the better Jesus movies was made by an atheist. But it’s not surprising. We feel it’s an important story, so we’ve got to overdo it. Pasolini underdid it—on a budget—and the result was a stark, minimalist, dramatic movie that makes Jesus look like a revolutionary. Which he is.
Jesus. Also called “the Jesus movie” because it’s getting translated into every language you can think of. Available on the internet here. More historically accurate than most movies—but it still has the usual nitpicks. I find it a little slow at times.
Matthew. The Visual Bible movie, shot on a budget, and boy does it show. Bruce Marchiano and Richard Kiley are the only good actors in the bunch; the rest don’t stand out at all. Marchiano got a lot of great reviews from Christians for the way he played Jesus; he was the first guy to play Jesus who actually smiled on a regular basis. All the other Jesuses were terminally depressed, like they were constantly on the march to Calvary. In this movie, you finally saw a Jesus who loves people. It changed the way Jesus movies have been made since.
Jesus of Nazareth. This is the first Jesus movie I saw, and it still holds up. But good grief, Robert Powell plays Jesus so seriously that you wonder why the heck the disciples are following such a wet blanket.
The Last Temptation of Christ. Many wonder what on earth this movie is doing in a best-of list. This should show you where the dividing line is between the good Jesus movies and the bad ones. The Last Temptation I would say is the best of the bad. I found it thought-provoking—if you don’t believe that Jesus is God, then what would that make him? This movie shows the answer to that question. Martin Scorsese is an amazing director regardless of the poor choice of material—and some rather unfortunate casting choices. Even so, I do not recommend this movie to most Christians; they can’t handle it.
Intolerance. Not primarily a Jesus movie; the story of Jesus was one out of four plotlines that D.W. Griffith jumped back and forth between. I include it because it’s one of the first Jesus movies that I know of. Griffith was trying too hard to create a spectacle, and Jesus just got dragged along for the ride.
Jesus. Not “the Jesus movie” but the
The Greatest Story Ever Told. Boring and slow. And we really shouldn’t be laughing when John Wayne says, “Truly this was the Son of God.” I did like the book, though.
King of Kings. Also boring and slow. The guy who played Jesus can’t act.
The Revolutionary. Produced by Paul Crouch, who apparently thought the life of Christ could do with some Hollywood-style special effects. As a result, it is the cheesiest Jesus movie I have ever seen. If you have a non-Christian friend who is skeptical of the Gospel because it sounds too “mythological,” this movie won’t help. He even made a sequel; even though Jesus gets killed and raised in the first movie. Both are here.
Okay, now my nitpicks, as I call them.
The most glaring problem is always that some Anglo is regularly hired to play Jesus. Even the Jesus movie, which made the point of hiring middle easterners to stay authentic, hired Brian Deacon, a blue-eyed Brit, to play Jesus. And of course, most of the time Jesus is played as a very serious guy. He’s not a fun guy to be around at all; too busy instructing his disciples and rebuking Pharisees.
Next, the disciples are always too old. If they’re not contemporaries of Jesus, sometimes they’re actually older than him. Why would Jesus’s elders follow him? They wouldn’t. (Read your bible—they didn’t.) Jesus’s disciples would have been younger than him, and he was thirty. They’d be in their twenties, likely even younger. But what do you get in the movies? Usually forty-something guys hanging around a forty-something Jesus.
Did I mention that Mary Magdalene wasn’t a whore?
Historical accuracy is an easy nitpick; but I do tell people regularly that if they want historical accuracy, they should get a documentary. Facts are regularly sacrificed to the dramatic nature of the movie, and sometimes facts are sacrificed in place of what people commonly believe. Lots of people have seen paintings of Jesus carrying a cross, not a crossbar; of Jesus getting nailed through the palms, not the wrists, or through both feet with one nail, not each ankle individually nailed to either side of the cross. In the movies, Jesus is regularly wrapped with a Shroud of Turin-like cloth when Scripture shows that people of the day were wrapped in linen strips. He sits to eat instead of reclining; he never wears a phylactery during prayer; he manages to multiply the loaves the fishes instead of the disciples (read that story again!) and his manner of baptism largely depends on the denomination of the director. (And John the baptist, who had never experienced a haircut, is never hairy enough.)
But like I said, if you want a documentary…