By S. Brent Plate

In the midst of another Lenten season, film lovers can find a plethora of movies depicting the life of Jesus offered in the local video rental store or via their satellite dish. During last year’s Holy Week, Turner Classic Movies ran The Greatest Story Ever Told and Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings back to back, while Jesus played on the Spanish language station WAMI. This year’s Lenten line up includes Ben-Hur on Turner Classic Movies and several renditions of Jesus in Italian landscapes. Amidst these various accounts of the life of Jesus we find a revived interest in the quest for the “real” (i.e., historical) Jesus.

I tend to skip the sunrise services, but during last year’s Holy Saturday I did rewatch Franco Zefferilli’s classic mini-series Jesus of Nazareth on, of all places, the History Channel. My curiosity was piqued when the folks at the History Channel brought on a couple of respectable biblical scholars, Dr. W. Barnes Tatum and Dr. John McGuckin, to provide comments at station break and conclusion. I have utmost respect for their work and listened intently to their comments, but their remarks set the film within an undue concern for historical accuracy.

I think it’s time to stop having biblical critics tell us about the real Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are biblical critics, but I’m quite sure they would agree that a historically accurate Jesus only gets us so far. There is never only one. The problem with this historical rubric, as with so much of current U.S. political conversation, is that it all boils down to one singular correct view, and we are each either a winner or loser: There are red states and blue states, only one team wins the NCAA championship, one is for the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube or one isn’t. Such either/or theological and political discussion reduces the great complexity of these issues, and few seem willing to stop and wait and talk it through and realize that truth may be richer, more multifaceted, more messy. In the reigning regime, politics and religion have become extensions of ESPN, arenas for competitive sports that have singular clear-cut winners and losers.

In other words, the reason we keep getting more and more Jesus films (the varieties are now as old as cinema itself) is that Jesus is never just one thing. The fundamental paradox is that Jesus becomes historical only and when people from various times and places can find a particular and personal relation to this figure in their here and now. For Christians, historically in the past and in the present, Jesus is not reducible to a one-dimensional object situated in the past, and the variety of Jesus films in the past 100 years shows how this might be true. How people saw Jesus in his day was quite varied, which is why early Christians retained the radical idea of authorizing four different versions of the life of Jesus: the gospels of the New Testament.

Genesis One and Two give us varying versions of the creation story, but rarely in sacred scriptures of the world do we find four different accounts of a founder’s life. In the early second century, a wealthy businessman by the name of Marcion gave a lot of money to the emerging Christian church in Rome, and also insisted that there be only one gospel account (some watered-down Gospel of Luke). The Church, especially in the figure of Irenaeus, countered Marcion by affirming the importance of four gospels grounding Christianity in a unique plural narrative that continues today. While many contemporary Christians might want to imagine a single narrative, the authorized canon from the early days of Christianity tells a vastly different story.

The plurality at the heart of the Christian story is best understood in contemporary times through the plethora of Jesus films. But what is needed to make sense of this Jesus, these Jesuses, on Holy Week re-screenings, are a panel of experts who range from art history to film studies to Christian theology to religious studies to biblical criticism. Such a range would get us to realize the multifaceted dimensions of the mythologizing process: that Christian conceptions of the life and death of Jesus are as rooted in Cecil B. dDe Mille, Zefferilli, and Mel Gibson, as they are on the Latin Vulgate, the New Revised Edition, or the critics giving us the “historical” view. The current practice of continually coming back to the biblical critics maintains a misguided conception that religious ideas, beliefs and practices are based solely on the Bible; and that suggests there is only one true way to see the story. But this is to forget the very plurality at the heart of the gospels themselves.

So if you want the real Jesus, cue up your DVD player, order in some pizza or Chinese food, and watch: Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth for some of the Jewish dimensions to his life; Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ for the truly human (and thus, orthodox) struggles of the incarnation; Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ for the physical dimensions to this very humanity; Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal for an imaginative idea of what a messiah/prophet might look like in a contemporary age; Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings for its depiction of relationship dynamics, particularly between Jesus, Judas, and Mary Magdalene; The Argentinian film Man Facing Southeast, by Eliseo Subiela (the Hollywood K-Pax was an uncredited rip off of this) that toys with unending compassion in its cryptic, Christic key protagonist; Ben-Hur for the larger than life historical settings; and Monty Python’s Life of Brian for the downright silliness that proceeds from many of the followers of great religious leaders. And then we might understand why the Christian church approved not one gospel account, but four.

And then why it took the great imaging representational talents of artists like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio to give strong clear visions of what the life of Jesus might have looked like. These painted visions were then , only to be followed closely by the filmmakers. In word or image, the real Jesus is never a singular figure, but pluralistic, meant to relate to differing people in differing times.

S. Brent Plate, assistant professor of religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University, is editor of Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson’s Film and Its Critics. His last commentary for The Revealer was “Islam is the West.”