The Bible, Brought To You By Wal-Mart

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http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/paulharvey/6989/the_bible__brought_to_you_by_wal_mart/

April 1, 2013 4:23pm
Post by PAUL HARVEY

The Bible miniseries concluded Easter Sunday on The History Channel, with a fairly conventional playing out of the Passion story. From Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) to Jesus (a Campus Crusade for Christ production from 1979) to Mel Gibson’s 2004 gorefest The Passion, generations of Americans have seen this in film form before. And, while the twitter-storm that grew up (and quickly passed over) about how Satan looked like Obama was a tempest in a teapot, it is entirely true to the genre that Satan must appear as darker-skinned, as Scott Poole (a scholar of how Satan appears in American history) explains here. (To me, he most resembled Emperor Palpatine from The Empire Strikes Back; either that, or the Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal).

Following the stories from the Gospels, in a brief coda for the rest of the New Testament, the final hour races through the Pentecost traced in the Book of Acts, Paul getting struck down on the road to Damascus, and John making it to the Isle of Patmos, ready to receive Revelation. Alas, that weirdest and most apocalyptically dramatic of books is passed over entirely, despite the vaunted CGI budget the producers insisted on from THC. Doubtless that was a smart move on the part of the producers, since not even a basically literalist reading of the Bible (but one full of inaccuracies of the sort that have driven commentators and Bible scholars nuts) can be sustained through its most psychedelically trippy book.


With all the attention the series has gotten and silly brouhahas it has generated, ultimately the show’s concluding hours and the spinoffs planned by the producers have settled into a formula that fits the genre of films and television shows from the Bible. I’ll just enumerate briefly here three of those.

1. The providentialist interpretations these filmmakers brought to the project (essentially, how God led them to the project in the first place, and how they felt sure He would oversee its success) are akin to like movie productions in the past. In filming King of Kings, for example (as Edward J. Blum explains in The Color of Christ), Cecil B. DeMille had Protestant and Catholic advisors; days opened with interreligious prayer services that featured Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Actors’ contracts for the film contained clauses that demanded “exemplary conduct” on and off the set. Finally, the actor who portrayed Jesus was treated as more than a man. Only DeMille was allowed to speak to him when in costume, and he was “veiled” or driven in a closed car from his dressing room to the set. The reverence on the set and in the film paid spiritual dividends. Years later, according to DeMille, a minister told the English actor who portrayed Jesus: “I saw you in The King of Kings when I was a child, and now, every time I speak of Jesus, it is your face I see.”

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