Page - 12 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

gotiation between Pasolini, an influential intellectual close to the Communist party, on one hand, and Catholic groups inspired by the renewal of the Catholic Church, on the other. The article offers a new understanding of how Pasolini created the narrative of a film that was often praised by Catholic critics as a literal transposition of the Gospel’s narrative and therefore as an accurate and historically sound rendering. Martellozzo gives a semiotic analysis of musical motifs in the film, showing how the soundtrack was carefully interwoven with the textual and visual dimensions of the narrative, creating an “architecture of reality” which reinforced the message Pasolini aimed to convey. The musical syntax that Pasolini construed throughout the film creates “consonant scenes”, tied together by musical motifs that convey chains of meaning, which go far beyond the literal sense of the Gospel. The film director successfully connects the text of the Gospel of Matthew with a new web of meanings that reach the viewer and offer a more complex image of the life of Jesus. In doing so, Pasolini strengthens the theological undertext while also presenting the viewer with a personal message through a complex game of intertextuality. Overall, this thematic issue seeks to provide a more nuanced and more com- plicated history of how historical narratives about the life of Jesus were pro- duced and circulated in European culture. The focus on media is one of the most innovative ways to provide such an involved history, pointing to the cultural history of scholarship and the many ways in which societies produce historical representations of theological themes. BIBLIOGRAPHY Groetsch, Ulrich, 2015, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768): Classicist, Hebraist, Enlightenment Radical in Disguise, Leiden: Brill. Labanca, Baldassarre, 1900, La Vita di Gesù di Ernesto Renan in Italia, Rome: Ermanno Loescher & Co. Moxnes, Halvor, 2012, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-Century Historical Jesus, London/New York: I. B. Tauris. Mulsow, Martin (ed.), 2011, Between Philology and Radical Enlightenment: Hermann Samuel Rei- marus (1694–1768), Leiden/New York: Brill. Priest, Robert, 2015, The Gospel according to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth Century France, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 1972, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes, Alexander, Gerhard (ed.), 2 vols, Frankfurt/M.: Insel. Richard, Nathalie, 2015, La Vie de Jésus de Renan. La fabrique d’un best-seller, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Salvatorelli, Luigi, 1929, From Locke to Reitzenstein: the Historical Investigation of the Origins of Christianity, Harvard Theological Review 22.4, 263–369. Schweitzer, Albert, 1906, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 12 | Cristiana Facchini and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1, 7–21