by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the second of four parts of
a sometimes compelling, sometimes maddening mini-series on the History Channel
called Jesus: His Life. As I noted last
week when I watched the first episode — or, rather, two episodes, since the series is structured in such a
way that each two-hour episode can be further divided into two one-hour
episodes for later reruns — it’s neither a documentary nor a dramatization of
the life of Jesus but a weird (though rather common for the History Channel)
mix of both. Oddly, imdb.com identifies the actors who portray the Biblical
characters but only a handful of the religious authorities who appear as
talking heads (and reflect a wide variety of ecumenical viewpoints — something
of a surprise given that the show’s overall producer is evangelical TV minister
Joel Osteen — even though there’s no room for doubt here that the Virgin Birth,
the miracles and the Resurrection are actual historical events that occurred
just as the Gospels describe them). The two parts shown last night include a
narrative of the beginnings of Jesus’s ministry narrated by his mother Mary
(Houda Echaoufni — I’m presuming she’s Moroccan, since that’s where the film
was shot) and an account of the raising of Lazarus narrated by, of all people,
the Jewish high priest Caiaphas (Gerald Kyd). One thing I’ll give the creators
of Jesus: His Life credit for is
that when they said in their opening narration that “for the first time, the
life of Jesus is told in the words of the people who knew him best” (even
though, as I joked in my comments on the last show, I thought that’s what
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were doing!) they were going to include accounts
from the story’s traditional villains (Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas) as well as its
heroes.
The segment dealing with Mary makes it clear that Jesus grew up with
siblings, Simon, Judah and two others whose names I can’t recall, though
various Christian traditions disagree about who those people were. Roman
Catholics believe they were Joseph’s children by an earlier marriage — which
would have made them older than
Jesus — while Protestants, as one of the talking heads put it, “have no
problem” with the idea that Joseph and Mary went on to have children in the
normal human fashion after the miraculous birth of Jesus from her virgin’s
womb. (I inevitably joked, “That’s because Protestants have no problem with
their priests having sex.”) It also portrays Jesus’s family (Joseph disappears
from the later accounts of Jesus’s home life in Nazareth and the presumption is
he died and left Mary a widow) as highly skeptical of his mission and in
particular concerned that he would bring down the wrath of the Roman occupiers
on them and get them all killed. The show goes into the history of previous
Jewish attempts to rebel against Rome and how viciously the Romans suppressed
them — in one case they not only slaughtered the rebels but crucified 2,000
Jews and left them on their crosses on the road leading into Jerusalem just to
make sure the Jews got the message of what would happen to them if they ever
tried to rebel again — in ways future dictators not only could have but
probably did learn from.
(Remember that Benito Mussolini, who founded fascism and coined the term from
the fasces, an ancient Roman
symbol of power, regarded his regime as the second coming of the Roman Empire.)
Jesus: His Life makes clear that,
even though Jesus disclaimed any challenge to the political orthodoxy of the
time (which is what the “Render unto Caesar … ” lines were about), the Romans
would still have considered him a threat because by running around Palestine
healing lepers, making blind people see and ultimately raising Lazarus from the
dead, he was going to inspire Jewish resistance to Rome whether that was his
intent or not.
The Caiaphas episode makes clear that Caiaphas was performing a delicate
balancing act, trying to keep his people safe from Roman oppression and to
safeguard the assets of the Temple from Roman taxation. Like just about anyone
who takes on the Jesus story today, the producers of this one have to deal with
the anti-Semitic aspects of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s arrest and
crucifixion — the ones on which were based the long-standing accusation that “the
Jews killed Christ,” which in turn inspired all manner of anti-Jewish laws and pogroms throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and on through
the 19th century. Anyone who tries to retell the story of Jesus
today has to deal with the propagandistic aspects of the Gospels and find some
way to reconcile the New Testament accounts with the recent historical
scholarship that places more of the blame for Jesus’s fate on the Romans than
the Jews and the inevitable
accusations of anti-Semitism on one side and whitewashing on the other if they
don’t get the balance just right. Certainly Caiaphas comes off here as a more
sympathetic figure than he usually does — something like the Claude Rains character
in Casablanca; he could easily
have said, “I blow with the wind, and right now the wind blows from Rome.” The
documentary portions of this film come off a good deal better than the
dramatized ones: the acting is O.K. (though poor Greg Barnett, playing Jesus
with mid-length hair instead of the hippie-ish long locks most movie and TV
Jesuses have worn, is absolutely hopeless at convincing us he’s really
performing miracles), the writing is poor to middling — as usual in Jesus
scripts, actual Biblical lines sit uneasily alongside screenwriters’ inept
concoctions — and it still jars
me to hear the “up-to-date” version of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father in
Heaven, hallowed be your name/Your kingdom come, your will be done … ”
