Killing Jesus

[wmscott]

Does any one know anything about the National Geographic Channel presentation of the show Killing Jesus?

 

[Nelka]

No, sorry.

 

[Gfyuwatr7]

Does any one know anything about the National Geographic Channel presentation of the show Killing Jesus?

All I know is that a Muslim will be portraying Jesus, but that’s about it. Hope this helps.

 

[Mary_Estelle]

It is highly acclaimed and has been on the bestsellers list for months> Is from the book written by Bill O Riely(sp) from fox TV. Worth watching.

 

[Alex1]

The book is excellent, and the author worked with the producers, so it should be good as well.

 

[Mummsie]

Agree with the others. Outstanding Book. It is an historical book, rather than a religious book. I learned a few things about the culture during Our Lord’s life of preaching. Bill O’Reilly feels the Holy Spirit motivated him to write the book. Bill is a Catholic.

I’m watching for sure. God Bless You.

 

[sam_romo]

The movie , Killing Jesus ,will be showen on Palm Sunday 29 . 8 p.m.eastern , 7 central . Praised be the name of Jesus . Amen

 

[patrick457]

All I know is that a Muslim will be portraying Jesus, but that’s about it. Hope this helps.

Yes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I did hear of that minor controversy, where some people went like “Oh noes! A Muslim’s gonna play Jesus!” For some odd reason, some Christians out there just get allergies when they learn that actors are not cast based on their personal beliefs. Sure, I can understand the protest if it’s someone like Christian Bale (“I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life”) , but I mean, it’s not like the actor (Haaz Sleiman) is proselytizing or inciting anti-Christian rhetoric or anything. (Quite the opposite.)

Look at other examples. Pier Paolo Pasolini directed what many people consider to be one of the finest Jesus films ever made and he was homosexual and a Marxist (the actor who played Jesus in that film BTW is a non-religious agnostic). Ben Kingsley played Moses once and he isn’t even Christian!

As for the show, I’m expecting it. Though being in Japan I doubt I can catch it in real time.

 

[DavidFilmer]

All I know is that a Muslim will be portraying Jesus

I did not know that. I wonder what would happen if that guy fell into the hands of ISIS?

It’s a pretty brave thing for a Muslim to take such a role. You gotta respect that.

 

[DavidFilmer]

Ben Kingsley played Moses once and he isn’t even Christian!

Well, neither was Moses. He was barely even a Jew.

 

[wmscott]

Thanks for the responses. i did not realize that it was by Bill O’Reilley. I did hear that hr did a good job on the book. but since it was national geographic, much like the history channel, i was a little suspect of it. i guess i will watch as see how it comes across.

 

[patrick457]

Trailer for the show’s already up on Youtube apparently.

youtube.com/watch?v=hgccekzzZ3Q

And a behind-the-scenes sort of thing: youtube.com/watch?v=N5W3FKCN8Z0

 

[Larry1700]

O’Reilly has said multiple times on his show that Jesus was killed for political reasons, not for spiritual ones.

I read his book a year or so ago, but I don’t recall enough to remind me what he means.

I am currently reading the gospel of John, and John 6:18 says:
“This was why the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his Father, making himself equal with God.”

I know the Romans were the ones who actually crucified Jesus, but doesn’t this verse imply that the Jews pushed the Romans to do so for spiritual reasons?

 

[KSU]

A poorly written and directed, greatly hurried mishmash with a lot of invented dialog and events that O’Reilly advertised as “history” rather than Biblical. It was neither; nor could it ever be.

The invented dialog was supposed to show that Pilate wasn’t all that eager to release Jesus as John said he was; but what does John know about it?

The movie, without the religious background, came across as hollow, boring and hard to follow. An irritating waste of time, in my opinion; and I love good history.

Theologically, it was typical of O’Reilly’s arrogance: My research as to why Jesus was killed is more accurate than the Gospel narratives.

Clearly implied was: James also was a son of Mary; Jesus didn’t know who He was until very late in life, and even then He was surprised at certain events; He ate, drank and made merry with the Apostles and Mary Magdalen who lived and traveled with them; and there were no Roman guards at the tomb (Wow! Maybe His body WAS stolen by the Apostles after all. Thanks, Bill, for that “history”).

For me, it did not help that the story of Christ’s death was interspersed with the usual slew of inane commercials.

 

[Faith1960]

A poorly written and directed, greatly hurried mishmash with a lot of invented dialog and events that O’Reilly advertised as “history” rather than Biblical. It was neither; nor could it ever be.

The invented dialog was supposed to show that Pilate wasn’t all that eager to release Jesus as John said he was; but what does John know about it?

The movie, without the religious background, came across as hollow, boring and hard to follow. An irritating waste of time, in my opinion; and I love good history.

Theologically, it was typical of O’Reilly’s arrogance: My research as to why Jesus was killed is more accurate than the Gospel narratives.

Clearly implied was: James also was a son of Mary; Jesus didn’t know who He was until very late in life, and even then He was surprised at certain events; He ate, drank and made merry with the Apostles and Mary Magdalen who lived and traveled with them; and there were no Roman guards at the tomb (Wow! Maybe His body WAS stolen by the Apostles after all. Thanks, Bill, for that “history”).

For me, it did not help that the story of Christ’s death was interspersed with the usual slew of inane commercials.

So much of it looked fake, starting with Jesus’ beard.

 

[patrick457]

A poorly written and directed, greatly hurried mishmash with a lot of invented dialog and events that O’Reilly advertised as “history” rather than Biblical. It was neither; nor could it ever be.

The invented dialog was supposed to show that Pilate wasn’t all that eager to release Jesus as John said he was; but what does John know about it?

Well, the thing is, one can read the accounts from Philo and Josephus that describe Pilate as showing him as anything but the common inference one gets about him from say, the gospels of Matthew and John: someone who was simply pressured by ‘the Jews’ to kill Jesus. The Pilate of Philo and Josephus, however, is (in Philo’s words) “a spiteful and angry person” who does not easily bow down to pressure. (Of course, it may be argued that both authors were exaggerating his cruelty, but still, even granting for some rhetorical exaggeration, Pilate still comes across as anything but what some folks who only know him from the gospels think he was.)

Second thing is this. Since the Holocaust happened, any filmmaker who tries to tackle the life of Jesus must find a way to deal with the anti-Jewish (not to be confused with anti-Semitic) sentiment present in the gospels without ending up making the temple priests or the Jewish crowd into two-dimensional caricatures that feed into the old anti-Semitic sentiments.

One has to remember that there was this pervasive anti-Jewish (not to be confused with anti-Semitic) sentiment in early Christianity, which sprung from Christianity’s Jewish origin. There was a common trend to emphasize Jewish responsibility over Jesus’ death starting from the first generations of Christians themselves (cf. 1 Thessalonians 2:13-16; Acts 2:22-38; 3:12-26; 4:8-22; 5:29-32), which was based on the traditional Jewish pattern of calling Israel for its disobedience and/or the rejection of its prophets (e.g. Nehemiah 9:26; 2 Chronicles 36:14-16). It’s not surprising that the two most Jewish gospels of the four, Matthew and John, are at the same time, paradoxically, the most anti-Jewish gospels.

If you simply film the gospels literally, that is what you will end up with: two-dimensional caricatures. Corrupt temple priests, holier-than-thou Pharisees, fickle Jewish crowds, a somewhat weak Pilate who bends to these ‘bad guys’. (But to be fair, the gospels don’t give much of their characters solid character traits.) Every filmmaker who has made a Jesus film knows this, but in order to make a good film out of the gospels one will have to go beyond what the gospels say (at times maybe even go against the gospels), because the gospels as they are are simply unfilmable - they don’t make good, engaging films. Mainly because (1) the gospels are not and should not be read as, objective modern historical accounts (they never pretend to be ‘unbiased’ histories: they were written with the objective to convince the reader that Jesus is who Christians say He is); (2) they never tell you the hows or whys. You don’t get much character depth, and no explanation as to why people acted like this or that or what they could they have been thinking in a given situation - it’s all dry narration (“At that time, Jesus said this” or “Jesus did that”); and most importantly (3) Jesus is not a typical film ‘hero’: He doesn’t fight, He doesn’t fall in love, He doesn’t get into real trouble (well yeah, He dies, but we all know He’s gonna rise again eventually so… )

(This was actually the weakest element of The Passion of the Christ. Now that film really went far beyond the gospels, but its portrayal of the Jewish crowds and Pilate is the one part where it kind of sticks close to the gospels, specifically, that of Matthew and John. But in doing so, the film failed to give a clear reason as to why the Jewish leaders hated Jesus and wanted Him dead and why the crowd was howling for Jesus to be crucified. In other words, the temple priests in TPotC are just that - two-dimensional bearded baddies in dark robes who bully the clean-shaven, intellectual, ‘soft’ Pilate to do their bidding. At least Caiaphas in John’s gospel still had the “Better for one man to die…” line.)

 

[patrick457]

(Continued)

Clearly implied was: James also was a son of Mary; Jesus didn’t know who He was until very late in life,

I haven’t the book with me and I haven’t watched the scene yet. Could you elaborate further?

and even then He was surprised at certain events; He ate, drank and made merry with the Apostles

So, are you suggesting that Jesus should have been portrayed in a 1950s Hollywood style: y’know, a nearly-Docetic Christ above human emotions with a big, booming James Earl Jones-type of voice?

and Mary Magdalen who lived and traveled with them;

There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem. (Mark 15:40-41)

Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means. (Luke 8:1-3

I’ve seen the same complaint with The Bible series from some folks a few years back: “Mary Magdalene’s journeying with Jesus and the apostles! Blasphemy!” But ironically, this is actually something that the gospels themselves say or imply: a group of female disciples did travel with Jesus and the Twelve when He was in Galilee. It just so happened to be one of the things in the gospels that people tend to overlook: most of us are just so used to imagining only ‘Jesus and the guys’ roam the countryside. Many Jesus films in the past either omitted or did not really flesh out this detail. (In some films you do see the women, but they don’t really do anything but just stand there while the male disciples do all the talking and the action.)

So much of it looked fake, starting with Jesus’ beard.

There was this anecdote that Robert Powell (Jesus of Nazareth) did not want to don a fake beard, so he took the time to grow one. And he’s all the more better for it really.

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[WestonGrant]

I just read a review that said, according to this movie, St. John the Baptist had to convince Jesus that he was God.



If that’s true, I’ve got no interest in this movie.

Bill O’Reilly might be alright as a political commentator, but I’m not sure I want to give him much time as a theological or historical scholar. There are real experts out there, why turn to him?

 

[Faith1960]

I just read a review that said, according to this movie, St. John the Baptist had to convince Jesus that he was God.



If that’s true, I’ve got no interest in this movie.

Bill O’Reilly might be alright as a political commentator, but I’m not sure I want to give him much time as a theological or historical scholar. There are real experts out there, why turn to him?

It’s true, in the movie he did have to convince Jesus He was God.

 

[Faith1960]

I was wondering about the scourging scene. In real life was it like in Killing Jesus or The Passion of the Christ? In the Passion, the scourging was much more severe, and thought that was how it was in real life.