Back in the seventies NBC produced a miniseries title Jesus of Nazareth. Always been a favorite of mine. I have the DVD's but the film is also on Amazon Prime. And I love to read the reviews. Especially the one star ones. One really caught my attention titled "what were they thinking." Couldn't get past the first seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half minutes out of over six hours of film.
Well I couldn't resist. If you ignore the opening titles seven and a half minutes gets you through the betrothal of Mary and Joseph and just about to the point where a barking dog and a bright light wake her up. Looks pretty tame to me.
But the film opens in the synagogue. During services. Joseph has side curls. Could it be that everyone in that seven and a half minutes is a Jew? That Jesus was born to a Jew? Was raised as a Jew. Was bar mitzvahed? Etc. Etc. The awareness that Jesus wasn't a "Christian?" Didn't stick around long enough to find out that just about everyone in the film was a Jew. Even Herod Antipas. Probably wasn't a very observant one. Just glad he was still alive after dear old dad came to a very painful end.
And presented as one, hen pecked. He married his brother's wife while the brother was still alive. Two? he was a little too interested in his step daughter Salome. As interested as he could get in a seventies miniseries that had to make it past the censors.
All the disciples except Luke were Jews. Wasn't something that was really brought up even in my relatively liberal Methodist congregation while I was growing up. You sort of knew it but it JUST WASN'T MENTIONED. That almost everything that the itinerant rabbi from Nazareth taught came straight out of the Jewish prophets. That the difference was in who sent me. The prophets said "the Lord sent me." And most of them tried like heck to get out of the job. Jonah tried sailing away. Didn't help.
I left a comment. It was very tame along the lines of not much happened in the first few minutes what was so preposterous?
And you know, I don't believe it ever sank in so hard before.
1 comment:
Yeah... 'Tis the season to see images of a blonde, blue-eyed Mary cuddling her very white son in a barn where obviously no animal ever set foot. I'm not sure how much of the New Testament stories of Jesus and his life are historically factual. Pretty sure a lot of it is legend or composite or just plain made up. Even so, anti-semitic European Christians have had to change Jesus over the centuries to fit into THEIR version of respectable. And they brought that garbage with them when they settled the New World. Bah.
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