Movies about Jesus

No film about Jesus Christ is perfect in all respects.
How could one be? But each has its merits.

My favorite film about Him is Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, although when I watch it now, after so many years, it starts to feel a little dated. I love it because its casting was carefully done, the characters closely resembling their appearance on Orthodox ikons.
I also appreciate how parables of Jesus are put into a historical framework. The one thing in the film that bothers me, and it bothered me when I first saw it 30 years ago, is where he has Jesus telling Peter, in the scene of 'the keys of the Kingdom' (cf. Matthew 16:18), not '…and on this rock I will build my church,' but instead,
'…I will build what I must call my church.'

Huh!? As if the Son of God had to do anything! Was this an early sign of the beginnings of the 'embarrassment Christianity' that has led many of today's churches to deconstruct themselves and emerge as religious coffeehouses and dance clubs?

Though I have watched Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ and can see what he was attempting to do, in my opinion he did not really succeed. This movie has many intriguing and memorable scenes, and is possibly very close to scripture, using the prophetic utterances of the holy prophet (cf. Isaiah 52) to configure the form of Christ's torture and execution, but the complete absence of Greek and the substitution of Latin, in combination with Aramaic in the dialogs, made it seem inauthentic to me. Gibson was, in my mind, clearly putting out a fundamentalist Roman Catholic message. His idea of using the languages of the film's time and place, as he does in Apocalypto, is a good one, but only if it is objective and not used as a propaganda tool.

I have another favorite film about Jesus that is my favorite in another way: It uses nothing but the actual words of the Holy Gospel as its script, and that film is The Gospel of John. I always watch the 3 hour version of it.

As soon as the film starts, I always remember why I like this film: Jesus is portrayed with more than the usual dose of humanity. He smiles, He even laughs (though never very loudly or lustily) and shows evidence of every nuance of His inner thoughts as He teaches, praises or rebukes—all shown without (for me) a hint of irreverence or flippancy.

The folk song Lord of the Dance just came to mind as I write this just before midnight. So we do have, in our Christian culture, reminders of this aspect of Christ's humanity.

Then, too, one of the first scenes in the film I just watched comes to mind: the wedding feast at Cana, where Jesus performed His first irrefutable miracle, changing water into wine. Jesus was there with His mother and the disciples—what a merry gathering! And how can we not imagine our Lord sharing in the joy and "jollification" that must have taken place?

We know what human laughter looks and sounds like. How happy the mother of Jesus and the disciples must be to have known, seen and heard the laughter of the eternal and living God of Israel, living bodily in their midst for those thirty-some years, and once more, after He had returned from His descent into Hades, as He met with them on the beach after that catch of 153 fish!