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Making a movie about Jesus is difficult enough. Anyone who would dramatize the life of Christ must strike a fine balance between his full humanity and his full divinity, and many filmmakers have erred on one side or the other. But at least the Scriptures give us ample data to work with, and at least there is broad agreement across church boundaries that Jesus was, and is, both divine and human.

But making a movie about Mary poses even thornier challenges. The Bible says little about her life, so dramatists who focus on her life—such as the writer and director of The Nativity Story, which opens Friday, Dec. 1—must invent whole aspects of her story from scratch. Even more daunting, for filmmakers who want to reach as broad an audience as possible, is the fact that different churches have strongly different views on Mary.

Was she as fallible as any other human being? Or was she free from the stain of sin? Did she bear any other children? Or did she remain a virgin throughout her life? Should Jesus ever be shown correcting her, possibly even offending her? Or, as the mother of Jesus, should she offer him any guidance and possibly correct him?

The earliest Bible movies didn't have to wrestle with these questions so much, partly because the silent era relied heavily on traditional religious iconography—which is to say, Catholic iconography—for its visuals.

The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, a French production released in various versions between 1902 and 1905, was more of a pageant than a drama, each scene a tableau illustrating an episode from the Gospels or from later legends. Much of it concerns the birth of Jesus, and there is little concern for realism; the baby Jesus appears in the manger, seemingly out of thin air, while Joseph and Mary are praying.

Later films brought more dramatic innovation, while piling on the visual symbolism. The silent Ben-Hur (1925) begins with an extensive Nativity sequence, in which Mary smiles beatifically at an angry woman and a stubborn innkeeper and, by the sheer power of her pretty gaze, melts both their hearts. Doves fly around her as Joseph—an old man who seems more guardian than lover—leads her donkey on. When they come to the cave where Jesus will be born, she declares, "This place is sanctified." And when the shepherds arrive, the film switches from black-and-white to an early form of Technicolor—and Mary's head is crowned by a full-blown halo.

There is no Nativity sequence in The King of Kings (1927), which begins when Jesus is already an adult; but director Cecil B. DeMille gives Mary a heightened role, and uses some of the same symbols, especially the doves. Although he was a Protestant, DeMille's Mary owes much to Catholic piety; her attire resembles a nun's habit, her youthfulness (the actress was in her late 20s) hints at her incorruptibility, and she is first seen bringing a blind girl to Jesus and interceding on the girl's behalf.

A few decades would pass before Hollywood turned to the Gospels again, and when it did, Mary was once again treated with special reverence. The remake of Ben-Hur (1959), starring Charlton Heston, gives a few lines of dialogue to Joseph, during the Nativity and afterwards, but it keeps Mary in the distance, obscured by shadow—just as it will eventually limit its depiction of Jesus to the back of his head.

Two years later, Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) endowed Mary with some of the authoritative qualities that she had had in the silent era. Characters like John the Baptist visit Mary when they need help trying to understand their recent encounters with her son. Mary Magdalene even asks Mary to "intercede" for her. Finally, Jesus himself visits Mary before going to Jerusalem for that fateful Passover, and she seems to have a deeper awareness of what will happen to him there than he does.

By the time this film came out, audiences had begun to tire of lavish big-studio Bible epics. So when Pier Paolo Pasolini, a gay Italian Marxist, released The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)—with its scrappy black-and-white cinematography, its cast of real-life peasants, and a script in which virtually every line of dialogue comes straight from Matthew's Gospel—it was hailed by many as a culturally and historically realistic rebuttal of the films that had preceded it.

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