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Didn't any of you guys ever go to Sunday school?" So said Indiana Jones to a couple of bemused military intelligence agents in Raiders of the Lost Ark, easily the top-grossing film of 1981 and one of the greatest action movies ever made. And thus producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg seemed to make explicit what had only been implicit in the handful of films that they had made over the previous few years—films that had captured an entire generation's spiritual imagination.
Lucas, of course, had helped to revive interest in the power of myth with his space-opera throwback, Star Wars (1977), and its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980); the latter was particularly heavy on the spiritual development of its hero, Luke Skywalker. Some Christians, keen to capitalize on the franchise's popularity, even went so far as to draw extensive analogies between the first movie and the biblical narrative; the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi was betrayed by his disciple, and died, and continued beyond death as a counsellor to Luke was, of course, key to their interpretations. [1] Spielberg, for his part, had directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, re-edited and re-released in 1980), a film about aliens that spoke very strongly to the longing for enlightenment from above; in both images and dialogue, the film even made indirect references to the story of Moses and his encounter with God on Mount Sinai. [2]
Now here they were, collaborating on their first movie together, a tongue-in-cheek ode to the Saturday matinee serials of their youth—and it was all about the Ark of the Covenant, the gold-plated chest within which the Israelites had stored the tablets of the Law, and above which the spirit of God himself was said to reside. There was no need for allegory here; this movie really was bringing a piece of the Bible to life. Even better for an 11-year-old Bible geek like me (I would begin my first subscription to Biblical Archaeology Review just a couple years later), the hero of the film was an archaeologist who spoke knowledgeably about obscure biblical characters like the Pharaoh Shishaq. No one really knows what became of the Ark in the end—outside the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, at any rate, which claims to have the Ark—but the film floated a theory that was, at least, plausible: that the first foreign power to attack Jerusalem after Solomon's death had taken the Ark away, along with all of the Temple's other gold-plated treasures. [3]
Everything after that—the Egyptian city buried by an ancient sandstorm, the Staff of Ra containing the jewel that points the way to the building that houses the Ark, and all the various fights and chases that ensue between Indy and the Nazis—was just plain, old-fashioned Hollywood nonsense, of course. And the sequels which followed turned increasingly silly and cartoonish—none more so than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which brought the character back to the big screen this past summer for the first time in almost 20 years. But the original movie was animated by a biblical idea—even to the point where the Ark itself steals the show from the film's ostensible hero—and if you look at the franchise as a whole, it is possible to isolate some striking developments in their approach to faith, family, and the seemingly divine.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this series is that, if you watch the films in sequential order—the second film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), is actually a prequel that takes place one year before Raiders—you can chart a spiritual journey of sorts from paganism to Judaism to Christianity and, now, alas, to some sort of post-religious, pseudo-scientific, New Age sensibility. In a strangely microcosmic and presumably unintentional form, the spiritual journey of Indiana Jones happens to match that of the civilization which produced him. [4]
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