• BC Christian News • FEBRUARY ISSUE 1999 • VOL. 19 #2 • Formerly "Christian Info News" •

Videos view the story of Jesus with new eyes
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By Peter T. Chattaway

• The Jesus I Never Knew, Zondervan, 1998; 130 minutes.

• Eyewitness to Jesus, Greentree, 1998; 96 minutes.

The Jesus I Never Knew may not be the best book Philip Yancey ever wrote, but it may be his best known. The book was inspired by a course Yancey taught several years ago using clips from films based on the life of Jesus. Now readers can duplicate his course, to some degree, using a Bible-study kit that comes complete with its own video.

The video, like the guidebooks that come with it, is divided into 14 lessons, beginning with 'The Jesus I Thought I Knew' and progressing through the life of Jesus from his birth to his ascension. The final lesson looks beyond to explain 'The Difference He Makes.'

Each lesson includes a couple of clips from films and stage presentations based on the gospels. The selection is, for my tastes, a tad narrow, but this probably reflects marketing considerations more than Yancey's personal preferences. When he taught a variation on his course at Regent College two years ago, Yancey used excerpts from The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal in his class; however, neither film is represented here.

In addition, the video uses clips from relatively uncreative productions such as Campus Crusade's Jesus movie. Yancey did not use that film when he spoke at Regent College because, he said at the time, "It's pretty boring. It's very literalistic, it's very predictable, and it doesn't really add anything to the Bible, so why show it?" He said he preferred to use films that "add different perspectives" to the gospels.

But the video does take some risks. It includes footage from Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and, best of all, three priceless scenes from Dennis Potter's Son of Man (1969), a British teleplay otherwise unavailable on video. In it, Colin Blakely plays Jesus with a rare ferocity, hammering home just how hard it is to love one's enemies and, at one point, telling his opponents to "shut up!"

Yancey himself hosts the video, his smooth, engaging delivery perfectly suited to the charming, anecdotal tenor of his words. One minor nit worth picking: Yancey says the resurrection scene in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927) was the first commercial movie sequence shot in color, but that's not true. Two-strip Technicolor had been around since 1922 -- DeMille himself used it in The Ten Commandments in 1923 -- and some studios were tinting films with stencils long before that.

Yancey's book was written partly in response to the outrageous claims of the so-called Jesus Seminar, which gets a fair deal of attention in the media for its excessively skeptical treatment of the gospels. But shortly after Yancey's book came out, the media was aflutter with news of a quite different sort: in 1996, a scholar named Carsten Thiede made a novel argument for the Bible's authenticity.

Eyewitness

Thiede claimed that he could date three fragments of an ancient manuscript of Matthew's gospel to the AD 60s. He also claims that a fragment of Mark's gospel has been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. If true, these fragments could be evidence that the gospels were written within the lifetime of the disciples and others who had met Jesus personally, and not created decades later as many scholars maintain.

Thiede's ideas -- which have since been rejected by most of his colleagues -- were first published in a newspaper article by Sunday Telegraph deputy editor Matthew d'Ancona. Thiede and d'Ancona then collaborated on a book named Eyewitness to Jesus and a documentary by the same name produced by The Learning Channel.

That documentary, blessed with excellent visuals and appropriately exotic music by David Lowe, criss-crosses the Mediterranean in search of manuscripts, monuments, potsherds and relics of 19th-century tourism that can help to explain what these fragments are and how they came to reside at Magdalen College in Oxford (where, incidentally, C.S. Lewis used to teach).

Eyewitness to Jesus is generally informative when it describes, say, how papyrus is made, sold and preserved in the Middle East. But when it comes to tackling the question of just when these three tiny fragments were written, the film makes too one-sided an argument, giving another scholar, Graham Stanton, only a minute or two to counter Thiede's claims.

Looking for an expert opinion, I called Craig Evans, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University. Evans agrees with most scholars that Thiede's arguments are unpersuasive and that the Magdalen fragments date to about AD 200.

"You don't really have enough of a sampling of the writing to be dogmatic," said Evans. "If it dated to the AD 60s and 70s, that would be thrilling, but the evidence is such that there's no reason to date it earlier than 200. Thiede tends to push the evidence beyond where the evidence would like to go."

Evans added that he appreciates Thiede's attempts to prove the historicity of the gospels, even if he disagrees with Thiede's methods. "I think that's very nice," he said, "but you can't outrun the evidence."

New way

Bible study groups that have given Yancey's series a look may want to follow it up with Jesus: The New Way, a six-part series hosted by N.T. Wright and reviewed in BC Christian News last September.

Unlike Yancey, Wright is a bona fide historian, and he brings a unique perspective to his study of Jesus that pays closer attention to the complexities of Jewish culture at that time. But both studies end on the same note, calling on Christians to learn from the life of Jesus so that we can take his message into the world and be more like him.