Jesus Stories

Jesus Stories– After being profoundly affected by The Passion of the Christ, I decided to begin my journey down the path of Jesus movies. I watched Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ last night. It was a really weird experience. I recognized the elements in it that were controversial in 1988 when it was released, but I also found myself using it to fill in the holes in the story within Mel’s Passion. See the Last Temptation spends a lot more time on Christ’s life, breezes through the suffering parts that Gibson focused on, and then takes us down a hallucinatory path of Christ actually not dying on the cross, but instead marrying and having kids. In the beginning I was so irritated at William Defoe and Harvey Keitel with their cheesy English-speaking dialog, that I nearly gave up. But, suddenly I became so riveted in the film-making and the internal battle going on in Jesus’s mind, I completely forgave them. In the end, both movies are honestly great films. My quest continues to see more depictions of Christ’s life in film. I’ll have to spread out my viewings though ’cause it is the SAME story. The next ones to see:

The Greatest Story Ever Told
The Gospel According to St. Matthew