How to adapt the New Testament into really good television
a surprisingly non-blasphemous take on cultural adaptation
There exists a certain genre of film1 which seeks to adapt religious scripture for the screen. Some of it is okay. Some of it takes liberties with the source material. Some of it presents the personal interpretation of the film’s director, to the inevitable consternation of some theologian somewhere.
Obviously, the more interesting bits tend to get adapted more often. Among the Hebrew scriptures, obviously there’s a lot from Exodus that has made it to the silver screen — it seems to be a favorite subject of filmmakers, ever since the days of Cecil B. DeMille.
But even outside the realm of wannabe blockbusters, religious movies tend to gently elide over the sticky parts of the narrative. I don’t just mean the chronological issues; I mean the fact that nobody, to the best of my knowledge, has ever done a real film adaptation of — oh, let’s say, for example — the life of Tamar.
(Her first husband was smote to death for some unspecified crime that incurred divine wrath. Her second husband, a younger brother of the first,2 reportedly committed a sin that now bears his name and was also struck down. Now, her father-in-law Judah was reluctant to marry her to his final son, because she’d already had two husbands die on her and Judah was apparently a superstitious fellow. This wasn’t good for Tamar. So what does she do? She disguises herself, seduces Judah — who thinks she’s some random sex worker — and, after she becomes pregnant, is all like, surprise! That was me! You can’t put me to death for fornication because it was literally you who impregnated me. Here’s the stuff I took from you at the time that proves you are the father. And her plan works.)
Getting back to the point. Religious movies? There are plenty of religious movies! Although, of course, it is more common for them to simply carry religious themes, rather than serving as straight adaptations. What adaptations exist tend to be the grown-up version, essentially, of Bible stories for kids. The highlights reel, not the full unexpurgated picture.
And obviously, it’s hard to adapt all the nuances of a work into another medium, but people have done it before. People will keep doing it. And I’d like to talk about that, but first we need to take another detour, into the wild world of...
Harmonizing the Gospels
It’s a fool’s errand.
Don’t believe me? Ask Bart Ehrman. I’ve read some of his stuff and it’s pretty readable. He addresses the topic in a blog post and also in several books.
As a bit of background, obviously some scriptural sources will seem to contradict each other, and the details become fodder for theological wrangling. The Gospels, however, are a particularly interesting case. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all theoretically writing about the same events — indeed, about the lifespan of a single individual!3 — and yet they differ.
Why do they differ? The answer from believers in Biblical inerrancy is simple: they do not! For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, there is an anecdote where Jesus is petitioned by a Roman centurion whose favorite servant4 has fallen deathly ill. Jesus offers to perform a miracle. ”Lord,” the centurion replies, “I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” Jesus is amazed by the depth of the man’s faith; the servant is healed that very hour, by Jesus’s command.
Matthew isn’t the only source for this particular incident. The event is also described in Luke, which, however, differs somewhat. In Luke, the centurion does not come himself, but sends Jewish elders, and then some of his own friends, to petition Jesus. Also, while Jesus acknowledges the centurion’s great faith, in Luke he doesn’t comment about how there are many foreigners who will be welcomed into Heaven and many Israelites who will be cast into the darkness, which he does in Matthew. Interestingly, the incident does not appear in Mark, which is commonly believed to have been a source for Matthew and Luke.5 It also does not appear in John, but then the Gospel of John is a unique document which differs significantly from the other three.
So what’s up with that? A typical person might shrug and say, well, maybe one of ‘em heard the story differently. Maybe human memory, between an event and its written documentation, is fallible. Maybe a scribe made a really bad error at one point.6
That doesn’t matter to the Biblical inerrancy crowd. Sure, maybe Matthew and Luke are telling different versions of the same story, but they don’t have to conflict. Maybe the centurion sent the Jewish elders, and then his friends, and then he appeared himself!
This gets a bit trickier when you get to the events which differ so much that someone, somewhere, has got to be wrong. Mark says that Jesus healed a blind man named Bartimaeus while leaving Jericho. Matthew has two blind men, whose names are not given. Luke has one blind man, name not given, whom Jesus heals as he is arriving at Jericho. Solution: Jesus healed at least one blind man as he was entering, and at least two blind men as he was leaving (or maybe three, if Bartimaeus was a different guy from the other two).
Or consider the genealogy of Jesus. Both Matthew and Luke take a stab at it, and while they are in agreement from Abraham until David, after that they rapidly diverge, to the point where they don’t even agree on who Jesus’s paternal grandfather was.7
Or the cleansing of the Temple. Did it happen near the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry, as described in the Synoptic Gospels? Or much earlier, as recorded by John? Did Jesus do it twice, for some reason? Or maybe John wrote down his story outside of chronological order, like Quentin Tarantino.
Or the sayings of Jesus on the cross! According to Matthew and Mark, Jesus cried out, “why hast thou forsaken me?”8 According to Luke, Jesus forgave his killers, promised salvation to the Penitent Thief, and then said, before dying, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” According to John, Jesus entrusted his mother to the care of the disciple whom he loved (John himself), said “I thirst,” and then before dying simply said, “it is finished.”
Obviously, this last bit has been subject to harmonization since antiquity. Many Christians will tell you that Jesus made all seven of those statements in a specific order. The Stations of the Cross, and all that.
Still, though, it’s incredibly hard to harmonize everything. And even if it were possible to do so easily, it would hardly be worth the trouble. What Bart Ehrman and other scholars have argued is this: why bother? Because the whole point is that we have at least four authors, four separate sources, which each have their own perspective (perhaps even an agenda) on the life of Jesus. It is important to acknowledge them all, with each of the things that make them unique, to have the fullest picture of what was going on.
To combine four Gospels into one is to create something which does not exist. The Bible was not revealed in a single volume but in multiple installments. And anyone is allowed to summarize the Bible at their leisure, of course — this is not a theocratic country in which we live. But people who look at the four Gospels and mash them up into one are substituting their own judgment for that which they claim is a message straight from the divine, and consequently place themselves in an unfortunate theological position.9
Which, incidentally, leads us to...
Adapting the Gospels for the screen
Not many people have got this one right.
I mean, obviously when you adapt a book (or books) into a filmed version, things will be changed. Things omitted, things added, things switched around. Just about every adaptation of the Gospels has done the same.
That being said, c’mon, guys. If there’s one text where you probably want to err on the side of accuracy...
I dunno. I mean, if you want to write historical fiction flavored by scripture, do it. If you want to write historical fiction that directly contradicts scripture, do it.10 It’s just that some part of me still favors honesty, as a matter of general principle, and if you’re setting out to create an adaptation of the Gospels, you had better be honest about the veracity of your adaptation. There are some stories where authors have, I believe, a moral imperative to act honestly, where taking too many liberties is not merely lazy but dangerous.
The only other example that comes immediately to mind is that of Civil War movies. The tendency to romanticize the antebellum South, the myth of the Lost Cause, all of that mixed together can be seen in films like Gettysburg (to some extent) and its prequel Gods and Generals (to even greater extent). They pretend to tell the story “how it is,” but in actuality, a lot of film in this space perpetuates dangerous falsehoods. It’s a free country, but if you’re going to lean into the Lost Cause, fuck you.11
Anyways, the Gospels. Hollywood doesn’t have a very good record there. We’ve got Mel Gibson’s bloody epic, The Passion of the Christ, which put great effort into the languages and scenery — an exercise in verisimilitude — but which polarized critics for its gruesome violence. And besides, Gibson’s plot made extensive use of Gospel harmony, squishing things together into one convenient bloody package (which, incidentally, offended Jewish groups, who worried about the whole “blood curse” thing). Or maybe you’ve heard of the British-Italian production Jesus of Nazareth, which aired on ITV in the 1970s? Anthony Burgess was involved with the writing, so it couldn’t have been all bad, and its cast was practically a who’s who of Academy Award winners. Again, they ended up harmonizing the events of the Gospels, and a remarkable casting choice: a blue-eyed Jesus. Speaking of the 1970s, the Campus Crusade for Christ ended up producing their own film about the life of Jesus. They seem to have put in marginally more effort to find a Jesus who looked authentic (including fitting their actor with a prosthetic nose — I am not joking, that is actually what they did). When it came to the question of coherently adapting the Gospels, they chose a simpler route: they simply based the whole thing on the Gospel of Luke. Sorry Matthew, Mark, and John, but we’re going with Luke.12
Hopefully I haven’t lost your attention by now. Thank you for bearing with me.
Here’s my proposal:
Jesus miniseries. But not like ITV’s Jesus of Nazareth which harmonized the whole thing. No, I want a miniseries where each episode is a single Gospel. The same actors in each one, unless it’s for a minor character who changes significantly between Gospels, in which case they should obviously be changed. Four episodes, at least, or perhaps a multiple of four, if proves impossible to fit a whole book into a single episode.
We begin with Mark, whose narrator is possibly a pious Gentile, a story which begins, as it were, in medias res. Jesus is baptized by John, and subsequently is recognized as the Messiah; he gathers his disciples and begins working wonders, but tells people to keep it a secret. (They don’t.) It is important that he communicates that a great disaster is soon to occur, yea, within the very lifetime of some of his followers. Eventually he is betrayed and tells his captors that he is the Son of G-d and will return as the Son of Man.13 He is crucified, and as he is dying, cries out, “why hast thou forsaken me?” Some days after his death, some of his women followers come to his tomb but find it empty, save for a young man who tells them to go tell people that Jesus has risen. They flee in fear.
We follow with Matthew, whose narrator is perhaps a heterodox Jew, a story which begins with a genealogy then the birth of Jesus, the star, the magi, the flight to Egypt, the Massacre of the Innocents. Then his adult life, and we are back on familiar ground with the baptism again, followed by many of the events from Mark. It is important that we understand that the narrator takes great care to emphasize that Jesus is also the Son of David and that he fulfills all of the old Messianic prophecies. Then, of course, he is crucified, and although his death is little changed, afterwards we explicitly see him rise, and he commissions his apostles to go tell the world about what has happened.
We continue with Luke, whose narrator is probably a very learned Greek, a story which begins with the birth of John the Baptist and also with the angel appearing to Mary and all which follows. There is a belated genealogy and, once again, a selection of sermons and miracles, a blend between Jewish scriptural references and Hellenistic miracle-working. It is important that we understand that Jesus, in consequence of his words and deeds, is quietly renowned. He goes so far as to heal the ear of the man whom his disciples had injured in the garden. His fame is such that Herod Antipas is eager to meet him, although their meeting is anticlimactic. Also, in this Gospel it is interesting that Jesus is apparently not mistreated by soldiers prior to being crucified. Anyways, he comforts the Penitent Thief, dies, is resurrected, reappears before his disciples, and then after a while ascends into Heaven.
We conclude with John, whose narrator is indeterminate, save that he was (reportedly) the one whom Jesus loved; I am uncertain whether he should be the naked young man found in Mark,14 or perhaps simply an older version of the apostle John, who is traditionally held to be the author of this Gospel.15 It is important that we understand that this Gospel is different, that Jesus existed before he was incarnated, and then the narrative swings to his adult life and career. Many of the parables here are unique to John. Anyways, arrest, crucifixion, and return, except Jesus actually hangs out with his disciples for just a little while longer. No wondrous events follow his death, no earthquakes or risen saints. And then, after the story of doubting Thomas, and Jesus actually forgiving Peter, and the disciples catching a very specific number of fish, the book ends. “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
I cannot be convinced that such a project would be a bad idea. In the first place, HBO has made its mark on the industry by turning out some truly excellent historical drama miniseries (e.g. Chernobyl). The WGA and AMPTP have struck a deal. The source material is even in the public domain. (“Render unto Caesar’s...)
But maybe the whole thing would implode. In that case, I guess I’d just have to wait until I’m Jeff Bezos rich, when I’d be able to fund the whole thing myself.
And television, and entertainment options available through online streaming services, the last of which has been rapidly growing in prominence over the last decade.
The custom here was one of levirate marriage, or more specifically yibbum.
I use the term “individual” in the colloquial sense. This is not a discussion on the intricate details of Christology, though I should note that I tend towards Miaphysitism for purely sentimental reasons.
I am unsure if this was a genuine hired laborer or whether “servant” is a euphemism for “slave.” While today, working for a wage is extremely common, during antiquity being so destitute as to hire oneself out was seen as highly disgraceful; it is more likely, in my estimation, that the servant actually is a household slave. There is much debate on the topic: the centurion’s language describing his servant is notably affectionate, leading some to argue that this was actually his (male) lover. But I digress.
Although this is not the only plausible hypothesis that has been suggested, and others believe that Matthew and Luke came first. There is also disagreement over whether Matthew and Luke consulted Mark and other sources or whether one of Matthew or Luke referred to the other. Marcan priority seems to be the current consensus, but it was relatively recently in history that the traditional ordering of the Gospels was questioned.
We have documented evidence of this happening; a “missing” verse from the book of Samuel was rediscovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, providing important context for an event concerning Nahash of Ammon. Further, the last chapter of Mark abruptly ends in the oldest surviving manuscripts, yet various later traditions invented longer endings to wrap things up more neatly.
Insert footnote on Christian doctrine concerning the Immaculate Conception, Joseph not technically being Jesus’s biological father, et cetera. Also note that some people think that Matthew was recording Joseph’s lineage and Luke was recording Mary’s, for some reason (and contradicting the apparent plain-language meaning of Luke).
An expression of very human despair, and also a quote from a psalm.
My own religious views are well-known to my friends. That being said, with respect to my belief in the Abrahamic deity, I consider myself to be a “modernist.”
I particularly respect the work of Saramago and of Kazantzakis, the latter of whom got a blockbuster adaptation out of it.
As I was revising this article for publication, I suddenly also remembered George R. R. Martin and his books, which portray the obviously fantastical setting of Westeros but which have repeatedly been promoted as more “realistic” because of the violence. This is false; Martin’s characters are unrealistic in many ways, but I think the worst example was his stereotyped, plainly offensive depction of the Dothraki, which Martin himself claimed were inspired by Eurasian steppe nomads and Plains Indians — a comparison which does not bear out upon examination.
To be fair, Luke does have most of the really memorable parables and about half of the canonical infancy narrative, the other half of which is in Matthew.
This is not a phrase typical of the Jewish Messiah.
There are other candidates for the identity of this mysterious figure, including Mark himself.
Scholarly opinion thinks otherwise. “John” was not an uncommon name back then.