by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the first part of
a four-week mini-series on the History Channel about the life of Jesus, a
follow-up to their presentation on the Old Testament (called simply The
Bible) which I’d missed (and
which they were dutifully re-running before the Jesus episode). I’d had high hopes for this one because
a new dramatization of the life of Jesus might have actually been interesting
filmmaking, if only because seeing various versions of an oft-told story can be
insightful in terms of what the new tellers choose to include and to emphasize.
My hopes were dashed almost immediately; instead of either a dramatization or a
documentary, the producer, televangelist Joel Osteen, and director, Adrian
McDowell, chose to make one of those bastard combinations of the two that clog
up the schedule of the History Channel and have leached over into PBS as well
(notably in their bizarre series Secrets of the Dead). The opening credits feature a third-person
narrator stating that “for the first time, the story of Jesus will be told in
the words of the people who knew him best.” For the first time? I thought that’s what Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John were doing! Though the History Channel has scheduled this for four
two-hour airings every Monday between now and Holy Week, they’ve also
subdivided the shows so they can be aired as eight one-hour segments, which
resulted in a wrenching break in the middle of the continuity of last night’s
episode from the first hour, which depicted the Annunciation, the Nativity and
the flight to Egypt (which I recalled recently when President Trump boasted
that he’d made it legal to say the word “Christmas” again because it struck me
forcefully that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were literally asylum-seekers, fleeing a
well-founded fear of persecution in Palestine and sought refuge in a country
that, as one of the commentators on this program stated, had a reputation at
the time of being open and welcoming to people fleeing danger in their
homelands), to the second, which told the story of John the Baptist and his
relationship with Jesus.
The leap reflects one of the most maddening aspects of
the greatest story ever told: the Gospels and the historical accounts of the
period tell about Jesus’s birth and his last two years but have virtually
nothing about what he was doing in the 30 years or so in between. Though the
show was produced under Joel Osteen’s auspices, I would give it credit for a
wider, more ecumenical view of the story than I might have expected — nobody
interviewed on the show was about to express doubt about the Virgin Birth as an
historical event, but there were some surprising questionings of the Biblical sources, including one
historian who said that Augustus’s census actually took place a decade or so after Luke says it did (which would locate it during
Jesus’s boyhood rather than Mary’s pregnancy), and that it was highly unlikely
that Augustus’s census-takers and tax collectors would have made people move
long distances to be counted in their ancestral homelands instead of where they
happened to be living then. The show’s producers and casting directors also
startled me by casting a Black actor, unidentified on the show’s imdb.com page,
as the Angel Gabriel (interestingly Gabriel is not only the angel in the
Christian myth who tells Mary she is “with child” even though she’s temporarily
separated from her fiancé and has never had sex, he’s the one in Muslim myth who dictates the Quran to Muhammad). There are a few interesting insights
in the script (imdb.com doesn’t credit a writer but I’m presuming director
McDowell did that, too), including noting that Joseph could have denounced Mary
and had her put to death for adultery but he didn’t; instead he became a
committed and dedicated father to a child that wasn’t his own. (This show
remain silent on whether Joseph and Mary ever had any kids in the normal
fashion.)
The one on John the Baptist tells one of the Bible’s most lurid
stories — you know, the one about Herod Antipas, Herodiade and Salomé, and
Salomé’s demand for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter — and also
expresses John the Baptist’s disappointment that the new Messiah wasn’t
preaching open rebellion against the Roman Empire but came bearing a message of
peace and love (and all that turning-the-other-cheek business most evangelical
Christians pretty much ignore). The authorities dragged in for on-the-record
comments are, frustratingly, unnamed on imdb.com (will I have to take notes
during future episodes just to have a record of who these people are?), but
they include a Black Episcopal bishop as well as another Black man who’s
introduced as “faith advisor” to former President Obama. (The idea of Donald
Trump having a “faith advisor” is pretty inconceivable.) But I was disappointed that they chose to draw their quotes
from the actual Bible from the New International version — if only because it’s
jarring, to say the least, to hear the Lord’s Prayer begin, “Our father who are
in heaven/Hallowed be your name/Your kingdom come, your will be done.” I was
also jarred by the way the voiceovers came from people who were shown on screen
— the actors included Greg Barnett as the adult Jesus and Adam Ayadi as Andrew,
the go-between between John the Baptist and Jesus (the actor playing John the
Baptist is not yet identified on imdb.com) — but without their lips moving, and
it took me a while to realize that they were supposed to be narrating their
bits of the story in first person and that was the fulfillment of the promise that this show would tell the story
of Jesus “from the people who knew him best.”
