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A movie poster proclaims "Not Suitable for Children" and "Twin Cities of Sin"; lurid couples adorn the background, caught in compromising positions, and the lower half of the poster boasts two beautiful people caught in passionate lip-lock.

A sleazy summer blockbuster? The latest "edgy" art house fare? No: it's from a 1963 movie, one of the later members of the "sword and sandal" genre of films based on the Bible, which also includes Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and The Robe.

Granted, this film is called Sodom and Gomorrah.

The poster, and other surprises, is currently at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) in New York City. The museum's "Reel Religion" exhibit, on view until May 17, is a survey of Hollywood films based on the Bible.

Not only does the exhibit show what a rich source of material the Bible has been to filmmakers, but it's is also a revealing look into the tactics that studios have used in the past hundred years to market films, and the ways that stories drawn from biblical narratives have fit into Hollywood.

"Reel Religion" is mostly made up of movie posters, drawn heavily from the collection of Father Michael Morris, a Dominican priest, prolific author, and professor at Berkeley. When he began collecting the posters to display, members of his department were initially delighted.

"'Finally, something uplifting on the walls!' they said. Little did they know!" recounts Morris, who wrote an essay and recently gave a talk to accompany the MOBIA exhibit, in which he points out some predominant themes in the posters: art, mysticism, magnificence, violence, and sexuality.

And indeed, to walk through the exhibit is to experience the entire range of Hollywood's aesthetic—from tastefully artistic posters to politically-charged implications to tawdry depictions of fantastical epics. Though we might be tempted to think of Bible films as reverent, moral tales, fit for Sunday school viewing, the exhibit shows a movie business that has treated its source material in different ways.

Many filmmakers, looking for gripping, relatable source material, naturally gravitated toward the life and death of Jesus. Early productions often borrowed the form of the Passion Play—a series of vignettes of the hours leading to Jesus' crucifixion. This "genre" has its roots in educational and devotional practices of the church stretching back to medieval days—and in fact, by 1900, more than a dozen Passion Plays were filmed in Europe and the United States.

One of the most famous of these is the Passion Play of Ober-Ammergau, and its 1898 poster set the size for the industry "one-sheet" standard poster, making it the very first movie poster in existence. Under an image of Jesus on the cross, the poster proclaimed that this was "THE CRUCIFIXION (Actual Scene)," and that it was "Reproduced by means of 2554 feet of LIFE MOTION PICTURE FILM."

The life of Jesus offered an irresistible wealth of material, inspiring such films as King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus of Nazareth (with Robert Powell as a Christ with unnaturally blue eyes), Jesus (also known as The Jesus Film), and countless others. It also spawned the "sword and sandal" genre, which can be best thought of as spin-offs in which Jesus makes a guest appearance: Ben-Hur, The Robe, Sign of the Cross, King of Kings, and others.

In 1928, the producers of Noah's Ark took out a two-page spread in the New York Times, proclaiming, "NOAH'S ARK TAKES BROADWAY." The advertisement spoke of a "colossal recreation of Deluge, crash of falling temples, tumult of war, human passions in eternal conflict … thrill after thrill—climax after climax—that outreach human imagination!"

That advertisement provided a foretaste of Hollywood's reliance on spectacle to sell tickets to biblical movies. Part of the MOBIA exhibit is a scaled-down reproduction of a recently restored billboard poster for Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 production of King of Kings, which features a scantily-clad woman wrapped in a red robe, riding in a chariot pulled by zebras with feathery red fans on their heads and driven by a buff soldier. Legions of people fall down around the chariot. One can only guess whether the actual "King of kings" will make an appearance in the film.

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