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It seems network TV is high on Jesus this season. Maybe it's the millennium, or just the hunger for ratings, but the Son of God has been the subject of major films on each of the Big Three networks. Mary, Mother of Jesus premiered in November on NBC to mostly lukewarm reviews; ABC broadcast a critically acclaimed claymation feature, The Miracle Maker, on Easter Sunday; and a four-hour Jesus miniseries airs this month on CBS (May 14 and 17 at 9 p.m. et). In addition, ABC journalist Peter Jennings has turned his personal fascination with Christ into a forthcoming prime-time news special, tentatively titled Peter Jennings: In Search of Jesus.

Jennings is not alone. Humankind has been seeking the Christ long before and ever since the Magi's journey to Bethlehem. "We would see Jesus," said the Greeks in their petition to meet the Christ (John 12:21). That thirst has long driven our souls, and it has shown up in both wonderful and tragic ways: for every sacred pilgrimage there is a holy war.

The fact is that, deep down, if we had our druthers, we all would "see Jesus," even the blindest of us, for that connection with God is the intimacy for which we were made in the first place. We spend most of our lives longing for a glimpse, some intimate, palpable moment in which we know Light, and Light knows us.

We see this no place more clearly than in the tradition of high art in the West: the frescoes of Michelangelo, the oratorios of Bach and Handel, the allegories of Bunyan, Milton, and Tolkien, the poetry of Blake, Hopkins, and Eliot, ad mysterium. As diverse as they are, all of these attempt to encounter and interpret the divine.

And then there are the movies.

Since its birth about a century ago, cinema has produced innumerable retellings of the Jesus story. These range in kind from silent Passion plays (From the Manger to the Cross in 1912) to gaudy epics (The King of Kings in 1961) and even modern-day story-within-a-story treatments (1989's Jesus of Montreal). They all try to picture Jesus in this world, more or less according to the Gospels, but also from a mix of crass and noble motives.

Making a movie of Jesus is not an easy thing. In cinema, interpretive burdens multiply exponentially, for it is the "fullest" art medium—verbal, visual, literary, sonic. Filmmakers constantly choose and interpret: casting, costuming, music, editing, lighting, camera angle. Two of the best Jesus films, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and Jesus of Nazareth (1977), each biblically faithful, display diametrically different styles and, ultimately, significantly different Jesus figures.

And that has always been the case; filmmakers run Jesus through their own souls and cultural settings. In one of the earliest Jesus movies, Intolerance (1916), the great director D. W. Griffith, infamous for his celebration of the Ku Klux Klan in The Birth of a Nation (1915), surrounded a spectacular telling of Christ's Passion with modern stories in order to protest what he thought was artistic censorship. The 1950s show their face in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), which critics dubbed "I Was a Teenage Jesus" because of the blue-eyed-blond, beefcake looks of bad lead actor Jeffrey Hunter, whose striking physical attributes seemed his chief claim to divinity. Culture again asserts itself in the Christs of the two Jesus musicals, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell (both 1973), whose thrust is to make Jesus into the super guru of a hippie culture that wails rock songs and preaches love, not war. Both films ended with Jesus' death but with no resurrection, choices that perhaps reflect the pop "God Is Dead" movement of the late 1960s.

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6