Biblical Studies Carnival XXX

Photo by Tim Parkinson, used under a Creative Commons Licence

It's very late in coming, but, credit to him, Tyler Williams has finally posted the 30th Biblical Studies Carnival. As someone who has, himself, been struggling of late to keep up with his on-line commitments I can more than sympathise and I'm very pleased he stuck to the task.

The next Biblical Studies Carnival should be along any moment and will be hosted by James R. Getz Jr.'s Ketuvim blog. You can read more details about these carnivals, at Tyler's Biblical Studies Carnival Homepage.

ReJesus Prince Caspian Review

My review of the latest entry in the Chronicles of Narnia series, Prince Caspian, is up at ReJesus. For those of you in North America wondering why it's taken me so long, Caspian only came out in the UK this weekend.

I've been surprised, though, at just how well other people rate this film. I'm not surprised at publications such as Christianity fawning over it ("a cinematic triumph"), but I'm a little surprised that idea's Rich Cline also giving it the thumbs up. Moreover, Empire gave a generally positive 3-star review, as does The Guardian (although elsewhere reviewer Peter Bradshaw is disturbed by it's innovation in the field of "sneaky subliminal corporate branding"). So perhaps it's just me that found the acting so dire that it spoilt the whole film.

Incidentally, my interview with co-producer / Telmarine Crier Douglas Gresham is still up at Ship of Fools.

Son of Morning Comedy About a Man Mistaken for Jesus

A couple of weeks ago I posted a reader query about a film where a man was mistaken for Jesus, and mentioned the 1961 British film Whistle Down the Wind which starred Alan Bates. I've no idea whether that was the title the person who asked the question had in mind, but now it seems like there will be another variation on that theme.

According to Empire, Son of Morning is a comedy about an "ad copywriter who returns home after his parents divorce, only to find that, following a series of environmental disasters, he’s mistaken for Jesus". A number of cast members have already been named including Joseph Cross, Jesse Bradford, Steven Weber, Bob Odenkirk, Bernard Herrman, Heather Graham, Barbara Hershey, Tim Curry, Lorraine Bracco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Stephen Root. Cross will also produce with Yaniv Raz directing his own script.

There's also been an interesting change in the title. Originally this film was due to be called Son of Mourning which has connotations of "Man of Sorrows", but now it seems that the title has changed to Son of Morning - a possible reference to Isaiah 14:12 which many interpret as being about Satan. I'm curious to see how greater shift in the filmmakers' thinking this represents.

New Scripture Index for 'Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination'

I reviewed Staley and Walsh's 'Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination' last year and have found it invaluable ever since. So I was pleased to hear that Jeff Staley has made another resource for the book available on line - a scripture index. I can imagine that this will prove very useful.

There's also a list of humourous Jesus shorts which I've don't recall seeing before.

Coogan as aTeacher as Jesus Hamlet 2

The last ten years have seen an increasing number of films using Jesus, or our culture's image of Jesus, as a source of humour. So, Will Ferrell, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Justin Theroux, have all starred as a character who, in some way represented Jesus, and he was also portrayed in various South Park episodes and, obviously, a glut of amateur films on YouTube.

Of course the film most people think of when discussing Jesus as a figure of fun is Monty Python's Life of Brian, even though the figure of Jesus is the one thing that the movie treats with some respect; the pre- and post-credit sequences both make it clear that the film is not about Jesus and keep him at arms length. There are of course earlier films which are more directly scathing about Jesus such as The Milky Way (1969) and 1972's Greaser's Palace (although, I should add, I've never seen it), but these films are more obscure and less likely to be an influence on this more recent movement than the Pythons.

What's interesting is the way that these films have grown bolder in their depictions. In Superstar (1999) Ferrell's 'Jesus' is clear he's not the real thing, but a product of the heroine's subconscious. Jesus's appearances in South Park are a little more complex, but ultimately this was about mocking the kitsch Christ of (the Christian) faith rather than the Jesus of history who started it.

The envelope was pushed a little further in last year's The Ten where Justin Theroux plays a modern day character called Jesus who has long hair and a beard and the power to walk across water. He also has the gift of seduction and deflowers a librarian. Is this meant to be the real Jesus? In honesty the film is so surreal and absurd that even the question doesn't make sense.

So Steve Coogan's performance as a drama teacher playing Jesus in the forthcoming Hamlet 2 (official site) is part of a long tradition. Yet if anything it's less daring than it's predecessors, even despite the annoyingly catchy song 'Rock me Sexy Jesus'. The Jesus angle has been played up by articles such as the one at Cinematical, but the trailer suggest this aspect is only a fairly small part of the final film. The movie's main story appears to be about the attempts of Coogan's struggling drama teacher to produce a show that can save his department. His solution is 'Hamlet 2' which uses a time machine to get around the problem of all the leading characters dying in the original, and introduces a host of new characters into the mix including Einstein, Jesus, Satan, and Hillary Clinton.In many ways it sounds like it's more similar to Seymour-Hoffman's role in Along Came Polly. There Hoffman plays an ego-maniacal producer who is playing both Jesus and Judas in a production of Godspell. Given that it was released in 2004 I can't help but wonder if this facet was added while speculation was rife that Mel Gibson might be playing Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. In any case the film's target is self-obsessed actor-directors rather than Jesus himself.

It's fairly obvious there is to be a similar dynamic here. It's not Jesus that is being mocked, but his use as a cultural and political football, and his portrayal by our culture. Jesus Christ, Superstar seems very much at the fore here. Aside from the way the original film portrays Jesus as cool and attractive to women, there is also a visual similarity between Coogan's Jesus (pictured above) and Glen Carter's portrayal in the more recent filmed version of the show, where numerous characters wear similarly tight white vests. It's interesting to see how one generation's attempt to present a fresh image of Jesus becomes the next generations satirised cliché.

Others have made the link between the song 'Rock me Sexy Jesus' and Little Shop of Horrors and there's a certain thematic similarity between this film and The Tall Man which also climaxes in a wonderfully naff and pretentious musical (in that film the musical is about The Elephant Man).

There are some other clips of Hamlet 2 available to those in the US, but unfortunately I've not had the chance to see them. The film played at Sundance and so has already been reviewed by Variety and Hollywood Reporter is due for wider release on August 22, 2008. All five reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are positive so far, although it has only got 5.5 at IMdb at present.

Reflections on Ratzinger Conference

Last month I mentioned a conference on the Pope's book 'Jesus of Nazareth', and it took place at the end of last week. I had to work on the Thursday so I missed the opening session, but I did get to go for whole day on the Friday. It was the first real academic Biblical Studies conference I've been to, so I thought I'd discuss some of my thoughts about the day. I should add that as I also moved house this weekend, I hadn't had sufficient time to finish reading the book.

As I believe is reasonably standard, most of the sessions followed the same format with two or three speakers reading a paper, followed by some time for questions, clarification and further discussion. Although there were 3 panel discussions in the afternoon (where we had to choose which of three we would attend) they effectively functioned in the same manner only with smaller audiences and marginally shorter papers.

In the run up to the conference the person I had been most excited about hearing was Geza Vermes. Sadly he had to cancel and his presence was missed in more ways than one. Nevertheless there were a number of other speakers I had heard of including Marcus Bockmuehl who featured in the day's opening session with his paper 'Lessons learned from Reading Scripture with Pope Benedict'. But it was the other two papers in that session that had the greater resonances with the paper from Durham's Walter Moberly provoking the most immediate discussion. Moberly was primarily tackling Benedict's use of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the opening chapter. The Pope links the occurrences of the word "like" in Deut 18:15 and 34:10 and treats it as a specifically messianic prediction about Jesus. Moberly was suggesting that it was more likely that the word "like" had slightly different meanings in each context. This was one of the things I had disagreed with when I'd read the book, so I was surprised to see that many there, including John Millbank, strongly disagreeing with Moberly. Someone remarked that this perhaps highlighted the difference between the Theology types and those from Biblical Studies, an observation that I heard at least once more during the day. Olivier-Thomas Venard gave the session's final paper, and whilst there was little immediate discussion of it, it was referenced a few times throughout the day.

The second session featured papers from Simon Oliver, co-organiser Angus Paddison and Henri-Jérôme Gagey. Oliver and Paddison's papers were very much from the systemmatic theology side of things, and so didn't hugely appeal to me. Gagey's paper took a closer look at Ratzinger's attempt to stand in the gap between faith and historical criticism. Gagey was broadly supportive of the Pope's position, and I was surprised (again) that no-one really seemed to challenge it. Whilst Ratzinger is, in my view, broadly correct that it's a mistake to act solely from either extreme, his approach does seem to be very much more towards the faith end of the spectrum. At the time I had thought that one of the later speakers would perhaps offer a robust challenge to this position, and I imagine that this is very much the role that Vermes would have fulfilled had he been in attendance. Unfortunately no really did. Speaking in the afternoon James Crossley admitted that he had a number of quibbles with it, but deferred us to Gerd Ludemann. All this left things feeling somewhat unbalanced. Prior to the conference I had imagined that many of the papers would criticise Ratzinger on precisely this point. For me, it seems Ratzinger wants to have his cake and eat it. I was reminded of Marcus Borg's question to Tom Wright in 'The Meaning of Jesus' along the lines of "which parts of the gospels would you say were invented by the early church"? In a similar vein, it's difficult to see where he considers the results of historical criticism to challenge the orthodox "faith" position. He's fully entitled to take a literal position on the Transfiguration, but surely he should at least acknowledge, or even refute those who question its historicity.

The afternoon featured the aforementioned panel discussions, and I'd been looking forward to the one featuring James Crossley. I've not read much by Crossley, but know of him from his blog (which had also discussed the conference in advance), his dialogue with Tom Wright and his appearance in Channel 4's Secrets of the 12 Disciples at Easter. His main focus was on the way that Ratzinger, like many of the lives of Jesus since Vermes's 'Jesus the Jew' have presented a Jesus who is "Jewish, but not that Jewish". Unfortunately there was almost no time for questions, and those that were raised largely seemed to have misunderstood what was being said. Crossley gave an abrupt response, but then it was time to rush off. Jane Heath's paper in this session was also interesting. (Edit - Incidentally, Crossley has posted his own review of the day).

Once that session had overrun, we had to creep into the back of Roland Deines's paper 'Can the "Real" Jesus be Identified with the Historical Jesus?' This may have covered more of the material I felt was lacking overall, but we missed the start of it, and then spent the next minutes trying to work out where he was on his notes, and by that time it was largely over. Deines was followed by Mona Siddiqui who discussed the book from an Islamic position. I had hoped to ask her whether she felt its historical criticism / faith position could work as an approach to the Qu'ran, but there were too many questions. That left a final coffee break (with some delicious cake) before Fergus Kerr wrapped things up with a final paper on 'Reckoning with the Originality of Jesus: Where Did Christology Come from?'

Unfortunately, it then took me three and a half hours to get home for what is normally a 15 minute train ride. On the bright side it did mean that I got to spend over an hour chatting it all over with my friend Stu who is doing his PhD at Nottingham.

Overall, I very much enjoyed the occasion, but was surprised at how conservative the discussion was in general. Perhaps this is inevitable for a conference based on a book; generally very few people are prepared to invest the time and/or fork out the money to discuss something they hate. That said, it would have been good if one or two such people had turned up just to spice things up a bit.

A Couple of Pieces Elsewhere

I have a couple of articles out elsewhere at the moment. Firstly, I've just finished a piece for the rejesus blog on the anime Jesus film. It mainly covers material from my earlier post here.

Secondly, my review of Juno has been printed in the current issue of The Reader magazine. I also note from their website that the two previous issues that I had pieces in are now available to download - Jesus at the Cinema (Winter 2007 - p.16) and The Passion (Spring 2008 - p.13).