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This chapter looks closely at the various techniques by which the Jesus movies stake their claim to historicity. These techniques include introductory scrolled texts, voice-over narration, and, more subtly, details of setting, costuming, music, and the physical appearance of the characters. The chapter then outlines the ways in which the Jesus biopics undermine their own stated claims to historicity and studies in detail two movies that self-consciously negate the claim to historicity, The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal.

This chapter looks at the ways in which the Gospels, on the one hand, and the movies on the other, handle the embarrassment of Mary's pregnancy out of wedlock. Whereas Joseph has only a minor role in the Gospels and in most Jesus biopics, some films explore the relationship between Joseph and Jesus in great detail, and attribute to Joseph a formative role in Jesus' development into adulthood and into a mature understanding of his own mission.

This chapter examines the identity of the historical Jesus, that is, Jesus of Nazareth, with special emphasis on his Jewishness and on the social and political context in which he lived. In both cases, the ways in which these themes are portrayed in the Gospels are first considered, followed by examples of their portrayal in the Jesus movies, including the appearance of the actors who play Jesus, the use of language, the depiction of Jewish traditions and customs, and the representation of the Roman presence in Galilee and Judea.

This chapter reexamines New Testament traditions concerning the Last Supper and Jesus’ overturning the tables in the Jerusalem temple. It argues that the last supper can be understood as a symbolic act seeking to emulate the temple, affirming its efficacy and meaning. The temple incident is understood as a development of earlier prophetic notions concerning the rejection of stolen sacrifices. In his concern for the poor — and in line with his communitarian social message — Jesus overturned the tables in the temple because he rejected the idea that the poor should be charged at all for their sacrifices. The differing rabbinic perspective on this question is also explored. The chapter concludes with brief survey of anti-temple polemics found in Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation.

There has often been an adversarial relationship between the “search for the historical Jesus” and the Church. But Christian belief and practice must be correctly related to Jesus, so the search is important to Christianity. It is argued that the New Testament picture of Jesus is basically accurate and reliable. Paul’s statements about Jesus are examined. It is significant that Mark’s picture of Jesus was convincing to Matthew and Luke. Jesus’ self-understanding in the Gospels is examined, and it is argued that he implicitly claimed to be divine.

This chapter describes the progression from “Jesus of Nazareth” to “Jesus of Hollywood”, and summarizes the main conclusions of the previous chapters. If the historical Jesus of Nazareth was the unique and only Son of God as the Gospels proclaim, then Jesus of Hollywood is his opposite — multiple, diverse, and born of many parents. These include not only the directors of the Jesus biopics over the course of a century, but the numerous others professionals, including screenwriters, producers, camera operators, and costume and set designers, whose creative and technical work is essential for the production of any film. As the products of multiple authors, the biopic Jesuses have more in common with the main character of the Gospel narratives, who varies somewhat from text to text. Yet while some of the movie Saviors' actions and words resemble those attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, it is unlikely that the Evangelists would recognize their own particular Jesus in any of the films that have been discussed.

While many of George Washington’s contemporaries portrayed him as a devout Christian, Thomas Jefferson’s foes depicted him as an infidel and an atheist. Given how similar their religious views and practices were, these radically different appraisals of Washington and Jefferson are ironic. Religion mesmerized, tantalized, alarmed, and sometimes inspired Jefferson, and he discussed religious issues, movements, and leaders often in his conversation and correspondence and occasionally in his addresses and published writings. Religious issues played a major role in Jefferson’s life and presidency. He wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) that disestablished the Episcopal Church, enshrined the principle of freedom of conscience, and helped prepare the way for the First Amendment. Since 1947 his metaphor of a “wall of separation” between church and state has dominated constitutional debate over the proper place of religion in public life and policy. Although he repudiated much of orthodox Christianity, the Virginian was a deeply religious man. Jefferson’s alleged lack of faith was a major issue in the hotly contested election of 1800. In an effort to discover the historical Jesus, he devised two different editions of the Gospels for his own use that eliminated all miraculous elements and focused on Christ’s ethical teachings. Although his supporters, his opponents, and academicians have, for the past two centuries, debated the nature of his faith and whether he should be labeled an Episcopalian, a deist, or a Unitarian, many scholars do not recognize how important Jefferson’s religious convictions were to his philosophy of government and career. Jefferson’s character and views of slavery are also examined.

This chapter opens the dossiers on Jesus and Muhammad. The sources on each are, as it turns out, essentially literary: historical biographies composed by the followers of the two holy men, principally the four canonical Gospels for Jesus and the Sira or Life by Ibn Ishaq for Muhammad. But there is more. In Jesus’ case, there are, possibly, the non-canonical Gospels, and the era of his lifetime in Palestine is covered by the near-contemporary writings of Josephus and the Essenes of Qumran who provide essential background. For Muhammad, there are his own words in the Quran and the thousands of “reports” of his words and deeds that lie embedded in later Muslim writings.

This chapter explores the aspects of Christian attitudes toward the body that non-believers usually find most difficult — the exaltation of the body as ‘ugly and wasted’. Most of the chapter is concerned with a selective historical survey that seeks to interpret sympathetically some of the stranger aspects of Christian history, beginning with an examination of the types of changes that were made to the telling of the crucifixion story in order to make affective appropriation easier. A comparison is then made between one of the Gospels and the response of the 15th-century English mystic Margery Kempe in her own distinctive gift of tears. Thereafter, two more extreme types of reaction are explored: the asceticism of those, such as Catherine of Siena, who sought to live on virtually nothing; and the way in which the classical legend of the flaying of Marsyas was adapted to Christian ideals in normally quite restrained artists such as Michelangelo and Titian. In pursuing this more sympathetic analysis, the intention is not to declare right and proper such extremes. Rather, it is to call into question blanket condemnations and to raise the question of whether the modern world is really necessarily any better in its approach.

This chapter assesses the importance of the Johannine passage in Old Latin and Byzantine texts, with particular attention to paratextual notes, chapter headings, and annotations. Some Old Latin Gospels retain traces of the pericope adulterae's earlier absence, but most include it, highlighting it in capitula—the chapter summaries and lists that also accompanied Vulgate Gospels—often preserving Old Latin forms. By contrast, the story remained comparably marginal in Greek contexts, as scholars have frequently noted. Even so, the story was popular enough to provoke an exceptional event: at some point in late antiquity, the passage was interpolated in some manuscripts into the kephalaia—a set of chapter headings with titles that prefaced most Byzantine copies of the Gospels. This manuscript evidence challenges the impression that the story was marginal, even in Greek.

This chapter explores a sharply contrasting response to the cognitive dissonance engendered by the incongruity between biblical and classical notions of divine law. This response distinguished biblical divine law from classical divine law. Far from bridging the gap between the universal law grounded in reason and the particular Mosaic Law grounded in will, this response chose to emphasize it, attributing few or none of the features of classical divine law to biblical Law. Versions of this response in the period under study are found in the Gospels and other New Testament books, especially the letters of Paul, and in subsequent Christian writings. The chapter examines select passages touching on the Law in the writings of Paul as but one example of this response.

This chapter focuses upon conceptions of written and oral tradition ascribed to the Pharisees, an important group in Second Temple Judean society. It surveys the key sources of knowledge about Pharisees: some scattered references in the pesher literature of the Dead Sea scrolls, complex narratives found in the historical writings of Flavius Josephus, the writings of the Apostle Paul, Gospel narratives of Jewish opposition to Jesus, and the classical rabbinic writings from the Mishnah to the Babylonian Talmud. The chapter concludes that Pharisees of the first century c.e. almost certainly believed themselves to possess an ancient “ancestral tradition” of a text‐interpretive character. But there is no evidence that they linked the authority of this tradition to exclusively oral forms of transmission.

Chapter 2 centers on the stories of Jesus preserved in the Gospels and their influence on the doctrine of his agency in creation. After a defense of using the canonical Gospels in this way, numerous examples are cited from the texts where Jesus' mighty works are treated as instances of the eschatological restoration of creation. These radical works of re-creation are not explicitly linked with primal creation in the Gospels (save for the opening chapter of John's Gospel). Thus it is exceedingly unlikely that they were fabricated by the Church to bolster an existing affirmation of Christ's work in creation. At the same time, they press the reader to consider with the disciples ‘Who is this man?’.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the pericope adulterae—the episode involving Jesus and a woman caught in adultery. The pericope adulterae boasts a long, complex history of reception and transmission, which, at least early on, placed it on the margins of Christian interpretation. Today the story is so widely known, so widely quoted, and so often alluded to in art, literature, film, and public discourse of all sorts that “throwing stones” serves as a cliché. Even so, the textual instability of the episode has not been forgotten, especially by biblical scholars, who continue to debate the implications of its unusual past. By now, most scholars have concluded that the pericope was not original to the Gospel; rather, it was added by a well-meaning interpolator at some later date, after the Gospel of John was already circulating.

This chapter evaluates the modern scholarship on the pericope adulterae. Debates about the pericope adulterae have been central to the development of both modern textual criticism and historical-critical approaches to the Gospels, as these disciplines emerged in the nineteenth century. When nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars advocated for the necessity of correcting ancient scribal error, they did so in part on the basis of this pericope, which was relegated to brackets or margins and thereby effectively removed from the canonical Gospel of John. The displacement of this story, as well as a few other passages, was inextricably linked to a new scientific approach to textual editing that finally overturned the Textus Receptus, the Greek text that had been employed in Europe since the Renaissance.

This chapter studies a climate of Gospel production and interpretation that could lead to the pericope adulterae's incorporation within an already published Gospel of John. While it is true that the pericope was not likely to have been materially present in the earliest copies of John, its absence from the fourfold Gospels would not have prevented interpreters from highly regarding the story. Moreover, with books produced by hand and distributed within circles of affinity groups, it would have been difficult for even the staunchest editor to prevent an interpolator from going about his or her work. Once placed within some copies of John, few would dare to remove it.

This chapter looks at editorial work, Gospel translation, traditions for reception, and attitudes toward the fourfold Gospels among late ancient scribes and scholars to illuminate the evidence of the pericope adulterae appearing only “in certain Gospels.” After nearly two centuries of spirited defense of the fourfold Gospels, as well as an uptick in biblical scholarship, the difficulty presented by the omission of the pericope adulterae from the four acknowledged Gospels had finally emerged as a worthy topic, at least in some quarters. Among Latin-speaking Christians, the story found a safe home and was incorporated in Jerome's new translation. In exclusively Greek contexts, however, the story was initially ignored, probably because it was omitted from many of the available copies of the Gospel of John.

This chapter discusses the divergent liturgical history of the pericope adulterae. Assigned to the third Saturday of Lent in Rome, the story gained even greater prominence in Latin contexts, particularly during the Carolingian and Ottonian periods. Carolingian biblical reform preserved and promulgated the Roman stational liturgy, Jerome's Vulgate, and also the pericope adulterae, which was featured in an imperial-sponsored homiliary and depicted in luxurious copies of the Gospels. The story was comparatively peripheral in Byzantine contexts, yet it was incorporated in this context as well. Featured as a lection on the feast days of female sinner saints and read in penitential contexts, the story was readily accepted within earlier traditions about repentant prostitutes and the mercy Christ extends. Liturgical reading guaranteed that the pericope would be remembered in both contexts, albeit differently.