on The History Channel<\/a> \u2014 but the first is centred on Joseph, while the second is centred on John the Baptist, and future episodes will revolve around Mary, Peter, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, though probably not in that order. (Curiously, the series announces that it will tell the story of Jesus \u201cthrough the eyes of those who knew him best,\u201d but I\u2019m not sure that that\u2019s how I would describe the enemies<\/i> of Jesus.)<\/p>\nAs in other shows of this sort, there is a tension in this one between the scholarly desire to correct popular misconceptions about the historical record on the one hand, and a need to give the audience at least some<\/i> of what it\u2019s expecting on the other hand.<\/p>\n
Some of the scholarly \u201ccorrections\u201d are quite good. For example, one of the interviewees points out that the Greek word \u201ctekton\u201d, which is commonly translated \u201ccarpenter\u201d, actually refers not just to people who work with wood but to construction workers of all sorts \u2014 so it is likely that Joseph and Jesus built houses and so on as well.<\/p>\n
(The episode doesn\u2019t get into this, but at least one scholar has also pointed out that, in a peasant culture of this sort, people who had to make a living this way may also have been from the lowest social classes, because they did not have any farmland of their own to work. So \u201ctekton\u201d may have been an insult, too: The only time Jesus is called one in the gospels is when his neighbours are blithely dismissing his ministry.)<\/p>\n
Other scholarly soundbites push against the show\u2019s dramatic grain by questioning the historicity of the gospels even as the dramatizations build on the gospels by adding their own fictitious elements. Thus, the episode on Joseph includes soundbites from scholars who doubt that the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke really happened, but it also includes soundbites in which those same scholars speculate as to how Joseph \u201cmust have\u201d felt when he learned that Mary was pregnant with Someone Else\u2019s child \u2014 and while all this is going on, there are scenes in which an angry Joseph tells Mary he loved her \u201cso much,\u201d and he worries that he will not be able to love her son \u201clike a real father.\u201d (It bears mentioning that the gospels say nothing about Joseph\u2019s age or his feelings for Mary, and that the oldest traditions tell us he was actually an older man \u2014 a widower, even \u2014 who agreed to marry Mary more to protect her than out of any romantic impulse.)<\/p>\n
Similarly, those who are familiar with the stories of Jesus\u2019 baptism might be frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary way the second episode picks and chooses which bits to dramatize. As per the historians, it dismisses Luke\u2019s claim that Jesus and John were cousins, and it fleshes out the idea that John was a \u201cmentor\u201d to Jesus for some time before John baptized Jesus. But it still tries to retain the idea that there was something mystically significant about Jesus\u2019 baptism \u2014 so the Baptist says Jesus saw something and didn\u2019t tell him what it was. \u201cWhat couldn\u2019t I see?\u201d he asks. But in John\u2019s gospel, John the Baptist tells everyone that he did<\/i> see the Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove.<\/p>\n
If the series had simply presented scholars arguing over the finer points of the gospels, without all of the speculative psychologizing, that would have been one thing. If it had offered a simple dramatization of the Jesus story, then that would have been fine too (and it wouldn\u2019t necessarily have mattered if it ignored or contradicted some of the details in the gospels, because the gospels don\u2019t agree among themselves on every single detail either). But in its current format, the series presents some<\/i> scholarly disagreements while maintaining some<\/i> sort of unified narrative that ignores some<\/i> aspects of the gospels, and the package as a whole isn\u2019t entirely satisfying to me. It doesn\u2019t cohere very well.<\/p>\n
All that being said, the series does combine bits of the gospels in ways that shed new light on them, and will probably affect how I look at them for quite some time.<\/p>\n
Most notably, the second episode links the Lord\u2019s Prayer to the death of John the Baptist by having a grief-stricken Jesus teach his disciples the prayer pretty much right after<\/i> he hears about John\u2019s death. The gospels don\u2019t link the Lord\u2019s Prayer and the death of John that way: in Matthew\u2019s gospel, Jesus teaches the Lord\u2019s Prayer in chapter 6 (it\u2019s part of the Sermon on the Mount) and John isn\u2019t beheaded until chapter 14, while in Luke\u2019s gospel, there is a passing reference to John\u2019s death in chapter 9 and it isn\u2019t until chapter 11 that Jesus\u2019 followers ask him to teach them to pray the way that John taught his own disciples to pray. But Luke\u2019s gospel does<\/i> tell us that Jesus taught his disciples the Lord\u2019s Prayer in imitation of John, on some level, and Matthew\u2019s gospel strongly suggests that Jesus was emotionally affected by John\u2019s death (\u201cWhen Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place\u201d), so linking the two passages like this does fit with what we know from the gospels \u2014 and it is precisely this sort of creative interpretation, which teases out the relationship between biblical characters in new and surprising ways, that I look for in films and TV shows on the life of Jesus.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s hoping that future episodes will have similarly illuminating insights.<\/p>\n
\u2014 <\/i>Jesus: His Life will air two new episodes on The History Channel every Monday night between March 25 and April 15.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thoughts on the first two episodes, premiering tonight (March 25) on The History Channel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":60799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1650,4],"tags":[345,4621,858,728,4666,559],"class_list":["post-61105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible-movies","category-blog","tag-jesus","tag-jesus-his-life","tag-john-the-baptist","tag-joseph","tag-lords-prayer","tag-nativity"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/p>\n