It has to be fictional about st.Paul’s encounter with her. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do not recollect any love story about st.Paul in the bible.
If I may, without stepping on anyone’s toes, save yourself a lot of grief going to biblical movies which never get things right and add all sorts of things to make money.
In addition, they just make it difficult for us to remember after seeing one of these what is truth and what is fiction. It gets blurry and confuses what we know about our faith. Not to mention that it is insulting in many cases.
Just a thought.
“Add all sorts of things to make money.” So does that mean that when Peter Jackson filmed
The Lord of the Rings and made those changes and omissions he made it simply for the $$$? I don’t think so. The thing is, when adapting something to another medium, changes and additions
are bound to happen. What may work in a book may not work as well in a film.
In the case of the New Testament, let’s face it: much of it is simply unfilmable as they are. They don’t give us character traits, they don’t describe what this person looked like or what he or she was thinking. This is true especially in the case of the gospels, which of course have some divergence with each other. The scholar E.P. Sanders once said this (a favorite quote of mine, actually):
The synoptic gospels lack most of the things that we now expect in the story of someone’s life. Looks, personality, character - we know very little. When it comes to the other figures besides Jesus, we are really in the dark. Pilate, curiously, is given touches of character by Matthew and John, but for the most part the other actors are very flat. Peter, we learn, was a little wishy-washy. What was John like? James? We do not know. What about the Pharisees? They appear in a group, denounce Jesus, sometimes are denounced in turn, and disappear. What were they up to? Were they all equally hostile towards Jesus? Where did they go when they disappeared? If they thought that Jesus’ disciples were breaking the sabbath law (Mark 2.24), why did they not lay a charge by reporting them to a priest (who might have fined them by requiring that each bring a sin offering, two birds, when next in Jerusalem)?
Many readers today do not realize how episodic the synoptic gospels are, since Christians have had almost 2000 years to build up a more novelistic view of the events and people in the gospels. Books have been written, movies made, explanations offered. On Sundays numerous priests, pastors and teachers retell some aspect of the gospel account, adding personality and motive. Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, is often depicted as a frustrated zealot who wanted Jesus to lead a revolution, who thought of himself as a great man in Jesus’ kingdom, and who was bitterly angry when he learned that Jesus wanted another sort of kingdom. This gives the story colour and drama. There is nothing in the gospels about Judas’ ambitions at all. Perhaps he realized that Jesus was a marked man and decided to get out when he still could, while also making a profit. One guess is as good as another. Similarly Mary Magdalene has appealed enormously to people who have imagined all sorts of romantic things about her: she had been a prostitute, she was beautiful, she was in love with Jesus, she fled to France carrying his child. For all we know, on the basis of our sources, she was eighty-six, childless, and keen to mother unkempt young men.
BTW I haven’t seen the film. Could you please give the title?
