Last November at SBL in Boston, I had the privilege of sitting down with filmmaker Rob Orlando twice. One of those meetings was planned, and saw me in front of a green screen wearing makeup (more about that later and on future occasions). The other was serendipitous but provided a chance to chat less formally over breakfast, since it turned out that we were both staying at the same hotel \u2013 the hotel in which he was also filming interviews with scholars about the apostle Paul for his next movie, Apostle Paul: The Final Verdict. That will be a sequel to his earlier movie Apostle Paul: A Polite Bribe, which I have blogged<\/a> about more than once, as it first introduced me to Rob, and actually brought him to Indianapolis for a screening of his movie at Butler University<\/a>, followed by a Q&A with him as filmmaker. Rob also kindly made a guest appearance in my class about Paul and the early church on that occasion as well.<\/p>\n While the announcement that Mel Gibson is planning a sequel to Passion of the Christ was met with understandable jokes (where do you go from where the original ended?), it makes perfect sense for there to be a sequel to a movie focused on Paul\u2019s last journey to Jerusalem to make a \u201cgift\u201d from the Gentile Christians to the Jewish Christian mother church in that city. Of course, this very exploration leads naturally to questions about where one might appropriately end the story of Paul\u2019s activity, why Luke stops telling the story where he does, what fate Paul eventually met, and why he met it whenever you think he did. As I have said before, historians and scholars tend to be very good at analysis of the individual pieces of evidence, but we have much to gain from creative interactions with a filmmaker who is willing to take our work and ask what it looks like if turned back into a narrative. Obviously the public benefits from a cinematic rendition that incorporates scholars\u2019 insights. But we the academic experts also benefit, I believe, not just because our work can potentially reach a wider audience, but because the act of turning anakysis into story challenges us to think about the evidence we study in new ways.<\/p>\n For more about Rob\u2019s first apostle Paul movie, and his longstanding fascination with the apostle Paul, check out this interview (which I also mentioned here back in November<\/a>):<\/p>\n