Christian Films and the Gospel Truth: A Critique of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, Roger Young’s the Bible and Martin Scorsese’s the Last Temptation of Christ
Endong Floribert Patrick Calvain
Issue:
Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2017
Pages:
1-9
Received:
12 March 2017
Accepted:
31 March 2017
Published:
26 April 2017
Abstract: Being invested with Christian and evangelical themes, Christian films are likely to seriously impact the spiritual being of audiences. They are generally conceived as having a direct or indirect link with the Bible, even when they include disdainers warning viewers on their directors’ departure from the Holy Scriptures. In tandem with this, a fair critique of this category of films will inevitably consider the biblical perspective. Following such a logic/premise, this paper presents a critique of three famous Christian films (The Last temptation of Christ, The Passion of the Christ and The Bible: Joseph), principally from a biblical perspective. Hinging on the autheurist, structuralist and encoding/decoding theories, the paper shows to what extent these three Bible films artfully interpret and deconstruct the Holy Scriptures. It argues that the two first films present contradictory versions of the life and mission of Jesus Christ on earth and contain a high deal of ideological and doctrinal coloration. This coloration tends, at a relatively high degree, to obscure or totally distort the evangelical message of the films. The paper also argues that the third film (Roger Young’s The Bible: Joseph) is highly sexualized, contrarily to the Bible which depicts sex in a mostly implicit way. From these observations, the paper concludes that, at varying degrees, the various directors are mainly non-scripturalist filmmakers. They seem bent on deconstructing biblical realities.
Abstract: Being invested with Christian and evangelical themes, Christian films are likely to seriously impact the spiritual being of audiences. They are generally conceived as having a direct or indirect link with the Bible, even when they include disdainers warning viewers on their directors’ departure from the Holy Scriptures. In tandem with this, a fair ...
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