Page - 69 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

Cristiana Facchini The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Early Cinema: A Complicated Relationship ABSTRACT When, at the beginning of the 20th century, the influential German theologian Albert Schweitzer published a historiographical account of the “historical Jesus”, a number of silent films devoted to the life and death of Christ had already appeared in Europe and the United States. This article analyses the rise of early silent films about Christ against the backdrop of the debate intensified by growing interest in the “historical Jesus”, pre- senting some of the similarities and divergences that representations of the life of Jesus produced in different media as mass culture became increasingly relevant. KEYWORDS Historical Jesus, David Friedrich Strauss, Ernest Renan, Jewish Jesus, Passion Play, Silent Films BIOGRAPHY Cristiana Facchini is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna where she teach- es history of Christianity and religious studies; she is also a Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. She studied in Bologna, with specialized studies also in Oxford and Jerusalem. She earned her PhD in Jewish Studies at the University of Turin. She has been awarded many fellowships and grants, pursuing her research in Paris, Budapest, New York and Berlin. She has written extensively on history and theories of religions, with regard to Christianity and Judaism in particular. Her recent publications include “Il Gesù di Leon Modena. Per una storia materiale ed urbana del Magen we-herev di Leon Modena”, Annali di storia dell’esegesi 35, 1 (2018), 163–187; “‘The immortal traveler’. How historiography changed Judaism”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 20, 1 (2018), 111–134; Living in Exile: Wissenschaft des Ju- dentums and the study of religion in Italy (1890s–1930s) in Francesca Bregoli, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, Guri Schwarz, eds., Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: Bridging Europe and the Mediterranean (London, 2018), 101–127. Historical approaches aimed at understanding the historical Jesus within his re- ligious context and the subsequent development of Christianity can be found in different periods, starting with Christian historiographers themselves. This arti- DOI: 10.25364/05.4:2019.1.5 The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Early Cinema | 69www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1