by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The final two episodes of Jesus: His Life deal with the Resurrection, told from the point of
view of Mary Magdalene (Cassie Bradley), and the establishment of the first
Christian church, told from the point of view of the Apostle Peter (John
Hopkins), nè Simon, the fisherman
who was recruited by Jesus to be one of the 12 apostles and later, at least by
Roman Catholic tradition, became the first Pope until he himself was crucified
later on when the Roman emperors started going after the early Christians. This
time the writers had the advantage of dealing with two of the most conflicted
characters in the Gospels, and they point out that Mary Magdalene was not described as a prostitute until the sixth century
C.E. Pope Joseph described her as one. Her original entrance in the Gospels is
as a woman supposedly “possessed by demons” in what the authors of this script
describe as quite likely a schizophrenic episode. They also make a good deal of
the fact that she is the first
witness to the Resurrection — she comes upon the family tomb in which Jesus’s
well-to-do Jewish friend Joseph of Arimathea laid him to rest after claiming
his body from Pontius Pilate, she’s the first one who finds that the stone door
covering the tomb has been moved, and she immediately assume that Jesus had
fallen victim to the grave-robbers that plagued the ancient world at the time
(though why grave-robbers would pillage the tomb of a man who died with nothing
in the way of physical possessions — even his clothes were stripped from his
body by the Roman soldiers who carried out the crucifixion — is something of a
mystery), and it’s only after the risen Christ accosts her in the street (and
she at first doesn’t realize who He is because, after all, she saw Him die). Apparently this was a really radical thing
in Jewish culture at a time because the Jewish community was so relentlessly
sexist that a woman’s testimony was literally considered worth only half that of a man in terms of
credibility, so making women the first witnesses to His Resurrection was yet
another example of Jesus reaching out to “the lowest of the low” instead of
trying to “sell” his message to the already wealthy, influential and/or
privileged.
The episode with Peter was a good deal less interesting, partly
because John Hopkins tried to portray Peter as the sort of British
working-class lout who were the protagonists of the so-called “kitchen-sink”
movies of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s — most of the other actors in this
show looked almost embalmed as they tried to enact motion-picture equivalent of
the cheap “religious” paintings of the life of Jesus and other Biblical
subjects that routinely get slapped by the faithful onto their walls — and
partly because Peter is a complicated figure but also an acutely annoying one,
first trying to lie his way out of his association with Jesus to save his own
skin from the soldiers who arrest Jesus in Gethsemane, then turning his back on
the whole Christian enterprise and going back to being a fisherman even though
he, along with the other remaining apostles, has seen the risen Christ, and only rejoining it after Christ
comes back to Earth again and
gives him some enigmatic instructions about feeding and leading his sheep and
lambs (which I guess is where the term “pastor” for the leader of a Christian
church comes from) before his bizarre end — narrated but not actually shown
here — in which he’s arrested and crucified in Rome for being an early
Christian at a time when the Roman emperors are trying to suppress Christianity
(before Emperor Constantine’s if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em agreement to
tolerate Christianity and then undergo a deathbed conversion to it himself),
and Peter insists on being crucified upside down because he feels the privilege of a right-side-up
crucifixion should be reserved for Christ Himself. Given the auspices of Joel
Osteen’s ministry under which it was produced, Jesus: His Life was surprisingly ecumenical — no, there was no room
for doubt about the accuracy of the Virgin Birth, Jesus’s Miracles and the
Resurrection, but within that framework there was quite a lot of surprising
uncertainty and some interesting emphases.
This is not one of those presentations (like advertising man
Bruce Barton’s infamous 1924 book on Jesus, The Man Nobody Knows) that tries to remodel Christianity into a religion
for the rich and powerful; it not only keeps faith with Jesus’s decision to aim
his teachings at the lowest of the low in the social hierarchy of the time, it
takes into account the humble origins built into the tale even from its
beginnings. (I’ll never forget going to one of my husband Charles’s Sunday
school classes and hearing him point out that a “manger” wasn’t just a stable
where animals were kept — which is what most Christians think when they hear
the word — but literally an animals’ restroom, so Jesus made his entry into
this world in a room full of animal piss and shit.) I’ve gone to enough
churches, taken enough Communions, and said enough prayers I no longer consider
myself an atheist and I can appreciate the beauty of the Christian story and
the lessons it tried to teach — at one point the narration of Jesus:
His Life calls Jesus an example of
“nonviolent resistance,” thereby naming him a forerunner of Mahatma Gandhi and
Martin Luther King (generally two people who are not among the heroes of Fundamentalist Christianity or
mega-churches like Osteen’s), and suggests that both Judas and Peter betrayed
and/or denied Him because they were disappointed that He did not lead a violent revolution against the occupying authorities
the way the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah had led them to expect
(which, given the Romans’ overwhelming military superiority and willingness to
be as bloodthirsty as they thought they could get away with in suppressing one,
would have been an enterprise doomed to failure), but rather to preach a
message of peace and love that, as it turned out, became the basis for one of
the world’s major religions, albeit one that (to say the least!) has not always
lived up to the peace-and-love ideals of its founder.
