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Regardless of their virtues or failings, these ambitious and sometimes dubious efforts to capture Jesus on film have enormous clout in shaping popular understandings of Christ. Like the Gospels themselves, films about Jesus can work on the human psyche in multiple ways. They often dispute popular conceptions of religion and everyone's favorite "right" notions of God, and they sometimes even rearrange the very terrain of the human heart. Such was the obvious power of the medium that Christian groups like Campus Crusade for Christ embraced it for evangelistic purposes. In 1976 Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright joined forces with producer John Heyman's Genesis Project to make Jesus (1979). Campus Crusade takes great pride in the film, claiming that it has reached an estimated 3 billion viewers in more than 550 languages and effected over 108 million "decisions for Christ." Though other ministry-driven Jesus films have been produced, Jesus stands out as the most influential.

Ultimately, though, Hollywood has the deepest pockets when it comes to making movies, and clearly Jesus' life is one of the greatest non-copyrighted sources of story material for studios and television networks looking for a hit. And if this TV season is any indication, mainstream filmmakers will continue to offer new views of Jesus—both who the Bible says he is and who they want him to be.

The challenge is how to tell the "greatest story" freshly enough to keep viewers interested. That desire for freshness clearly stood out in the first movie epic devoted entirely to Jesus, Cecil B. De Mille's silent classic The King of Kings (1927). Later in life, De Mille would produce such cinematic spectacles as The Ten Commandments (1956) and become the master of the Hollywood religious soap opera by playing freely with biblical history, melodramatizing plot, and sensationalizing characters toward the lubricious. His desire to grab audiences with whatever it takes is plain enough in his plot "innovations" in The King of Kings: Mary Magdalene becomes a wealthy and scantily clad courtesan in love with Judas Iscariot, who has attached himself to the political coattails of the popular miracle-worker, Jesus. Some of the most popular "Jesus films" have put Jesus himself at the periphery, like the hugely successful "bathrobe epics" The Robe (1953) and Ben-Hur (1959). In these works, Christ's story is incidental, a mere backdrop for a larger and generally more romanticized first-century adventure.

One of the more compelling leads into the history of Jesus, Roberto Rossellini's The Messiah (1978), a film never theatrically released in this country, starts far back in Israel's longing first for a king and then for the Messiah. In contrast, Ray's King of Kings, borrowing only the title from De Mille's film, hauls in marital feuds, court intrigue, and Jewish rebel raids led by the zealot Barabbas. Occasionally even Jesus shows up.

The new Jesus miniseries on CBS continues the Zealots' anti-Roman crusade, develops a hopeless "love story" between Jesus (before his baptism) and Lazarus's sister Mary, and has Jesus clash vividly with a decidedly contemporary Satan. Not all of these story devices work to good effect [see "Desperately Seeking Jesus," p. 62].

Unfortunately, in its adaptations of the Bible to the screen, Hollywood has often mistaken lavish sets, sweeping locales, soupy subplots, and splashy casting for reverence. For instance, George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told is based not directly on the Gospels but on Fulton Oursler's romance novel about them. The film looks like earnest biblical scholarship, and one cannot fault Stevens, a devout Christian, for wanting to do full cinematic justice to the Gospels' story. Still, pious intentions readily go awry.

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May 22 2000, Vol. 44, No. 6