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Later, some posters for movies such as Fabiola, Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, and The Sign of the Cross relied on the tantalizing promise of epic violence to interest the viewer. A surprising number also depended on sexuality, with posters for films such as The Silver Chalice featuring women in flimsy garb in the arms of strong, handsome men.

This is true even when the tale is ultimately one of redemption from a violent, promiscuous way of life. The Belgian poster for the 1955 retelling of the parable of the prodigal son (starring Lana Turner) depicts a lascivious scene, complete with fire, fleeing mobs, and what appear to be Vegas Showgirls. The American poster is the same—but uglier.

The Bible has been used as backing for many political groups, and unsurprisingly, movies based on Bible stories are often drawn into this function.

D.W. Griffith—who just a year before had produced Birth of a Nation, infamous for its positive portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan—made a film in 1916 called Intolerance, which presented a four-story narrative about tolerance and intolerance throughout history, using the life of Christ as its centerpiece.

Much later, Roberto Rossellini injected his 1975 film Il Messiah with a Marxist reading of the Gospels, which is drawn out in the French poster for the film, which uses the familiar workers-of-the-world-unite, power-to-the-people hand holding a hammer, but replaces the hammer with a cross.

Color of the Cross, a 2006 film, re-casts the crucifixion of Jesus as a racially motivated hate crime; the poster doesn't intimate this theme—except for a link to blackchristianmovies.com.

The most interesting of the politically-motivated Bible movies is Cecil B. DeMille's Sign of the Cross. Originally released in 1932, the film was re-released by DeMille in 1944—near the end of the Second World War—with an extra scene at the beginning of two Army chaplains flying over liberated Rome, talking about the martyrs who died there. The poster for the re-released film featured Allied planes flying in cruciform configuration over the burning city of Rome, and making a powerful implication about who was on God's side.

Today's Hollywood movie posters often rely on vivid photographs of stars or familiar figures to trigger the audience's interest. Movie studios have had a few extra tricks up their collective sleeve when marketing biblical films.

One effective way was to draw on familiar paintings to evoke a mood. For instance, the American poster for the 1920s re-release of The Passion Play explicitly quoted Heinrich Hoffmann's 1980 painting, Christ in Gethsemane.

Later, the Czech poster for The Gospel According to St. Matthew echoed Salvador Dali's surrealist painting, Christ of St. John on the Cross. The Italian poster for Rossellini's Il Messiah, produced in 1978, uses a pattern of faces to echo Warholian pop art.

Marketing biblical films also presents an easy partner to movie studios: the church. One of the most startling pieces in the exhibit is a display of marketing materials for the 1959 Ben-Hur, which lay out in peppy detail a number of ways to increase the ticket sales for the movie by marketing to religious organizations.

What's striking about these materials is their similarity to the way that Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ approached the same group: glowing letters from religious leaders; sample letters to churches, school superintendants, and Catholic school administrators, explaining why Ben-Hur would be a valuable film for their parishioners and students; ideas for capturing airtime on TV and radio; and, of course, group sales. Movies might change, but Hollywood stays the same.

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