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Although biblical movies could be considered an almost defunct genre, television and cinema audiences in the first years of the 21st century are discovering a new interest of producers, motivated more by the desire for profit than by religious reasons. Among films, modern audiovisual apocrypha, we can observe new tendencies: animated feature films aimed at large family audiences, the appearance of a "professional Jesus" (Bruce Marchiano), and the tendency to put the figure of historical Jesus in modern ahistorical situations and in racial contexts (black Jesus). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movies in the Jesus film genre often claim to be not only faithful renditions of their texts—the New Testament Gospels—but also accurate representations of the person, words and deeds of the historical Jesus himself. More fundamentally, they also presume a tight connection between historicity and faith. A viewer who learns about the historical Jesus through these films, they suggest, will have his or her faith forever strengthened. The irony is that whereas the Gospels have inspired profound ideas and beliefs that have shaped Christian spiritually through the two millennia since Jesus' lifetime, their transformation on the silver screen almost always results in a superficial, shallow, simplistic representation of Jesus, his life and his significance for humankind. While almost every Jesus movie has its moments of grace and artistry, most of them plod through the story even as they claim to bring to life both the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This paper explores two films—Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal (1989)—that break out of this pattern, and in doing so mount a fundamental and explicit challenge to the links between scripture, history and faith. Paradoxically, this challenge allows them a more profound and nuanced exploration of Christian faith than can be found in most other films of this genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jesus films improve the Judas story by adding plot connections and amplifying Judas' character, but their Judases reprise "the Gospel according to _" pattern. Like Jewison's Judas, they all are part of the adoring Christian chorus. Films' selective uses of the gospel Judas incidents intensify the gospel exclusions. Judas remains the traitorous disciple who deserves his fate. Films' visuals continue the iconography of art and create interlocking scenes associating Judas with Jesus' opponents. While some films motivate Judas traditionally, others modernize Judas' motivation in order to create a simulacrum of a modern person. Regardless, Judas remains the mythic other whose exclusion separates us from the evil that we do not wish to accept as part of our self-identity. Films' Judases define what "we" are not. We can arrange the Judases of Jesus films into four types: a traditional Judas, a modern, human Judas, a Christ-figure Judas, and a parabolic Judas. The first two Judases are clearly part of Christian myth-making. While the Christ-figure Judas may suggest an antimyth opposing the Christian myth, it ultimately supports Christian mythology as well. Only the parabolic Judas contests the continuing power of Christian discourse by telling stories alongside "the gospel" story. The parables of Arcand's Daniel and Jones's Brian suggest a view askew on Christian discourse that invites us to read other Jesus films and the gospels themselves parabolically and to find the evil lurking and the "dark night of story" within Christian mythology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the success of the motion picture "The Passion of the Christ," starring Mel Gibson. Information on the attention being given by biblical scholars on the subject of the Bible and film is presented. It also offers information on film as an influential medium, and the Bible as an influential text.