Page - 80 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

that they are telling a story about people who really existed, but also that they are telling a “true” story. More than this, the Jesus movies explicitly assert their claim to historicity, often through the use of scroll texts, titles, and/or narration. The 1912 silent movie From the Manger to the Cross, for example, announces itself as a “re- view of the savior’s life according to the Gospel-narrative.46 Early silent films are very instructive when analysed in light of the debate over the “historical Jesus”, especially as problems evident in the early 20th centu- ry are often also found in much more recent films, from Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According To St. Matthew, IT 1964) to Gibson’s controversial The Passion Of The Christ. For many film directors and critics, a representation of the life of Jesus is trustworthy if it is based on a literal account of the Gospel, a requirement that Lloyd Baugh also expects a film on Jesus to fulfil.47 Their approaches to textual tradition provide a striking distinction between historical and biblical scholarship and the filmic imagination. Scholarship has deconstructed biblical narratives to date the information recorded in the Gos- pels and the New Testament. Historical interpretation of the life of Jesus thus required skilful reading of the biblical material. The Gospels were treated as literary documents of the past and analysed philologically, searched for incon- sistencies and contradictions. Modern scholarship believed it essential that the textual material be read against the backdrop of other ancient sources. Schol- ars also criticized and challenged theological interpretation of Old Testament passages that sustained Christological claims. Films, by contrast, either claimed the Gospel’s narrative to be the literal truth or, more often, provided a “harmony narrative” of the life of Jesus, re-written from the manger to the cross by assembling passages from the three Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. The harmony provides a montage of elements from the four Gospels that narrates a coherent story, a biographical narration with no contradictions, countering any doubts unearthed by scholars. Screen- writers and film producers did opt, however, for certain stories to be told and others dismissed, an indication of the sensitivity of their topic in the burgeon- ing mass culture of the time. We can highlight here two processes that have had longstanding impact on the public discourse about Jesus, with one related to censorship and control that reflected the influence of official churches and one related to debates that seem inevitable for a “modern” society, for exam- ple about the passion narrative. Strikingly, Jews have played a significant role in framing the filmic Jesus, as actors, entrepreneurs, critics and writers. Jewish 46 Reinharz 2007. 47 Baugh 1997. 80 | Cristiana Facchini www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1