The Gospel of John...The Movie

Browsing through Netflix over J-term I came across this movie, The Gospel of John. The title caught my eye for two reasons. First, John is my favorite out of the gospels. There is a strong relationship between Jesus and John ("the disciple whom Jesus loved") and John is often capable of providing more detail as to why Jesus did some of the things he did.  Furthermore most Bible narrations seem to prefer the other three gospels for their content, so a narration of the Gospel of John is quite a special gem.

Second, Jesus is no longer whitewashed nor are any of the characters. The actor that plays Jesus, Selva Rasalingam (pictured to the right), is clearly arabic. Such a movie confronts the notion that Jesus was white head on. 

Jesus from The Walking Dead

Such whitewashing of Jesus seems absurd. We clearly know that with his descent, Jesus could not have the pale complexion and blue eyes we so often attribute to him.  I like to believe this Caucasian image of Jesus speaks to two things: 1. How ignorant most people are. 2. How art is often taken literarly.  To demonstrate that our culture has truly whitewashed the image of Jesus, I'll provide you with an example from pop-culture: The Walking Dead.  With the mid-season startup of season 6 a new character is introduced.  This character refers to himself as Jesus.  The show quickly eludes to how Jesus acts like the Biblical Jesus, by performing "miracles" (such as quickly escaping from his bindings) and seeking peace among the other characters. It is obvious how Jesus earned his name because he has long brown hair and a trimmed thick beard.

Now back to the movie. The movie narrates the entire book of John (NIV), so it is a little less than three hours long.  That may seem like a bore, but I would recommend watching it on a lazy Sunday nevertheless.  The narration is the only words spoken in English.  In order to make the scenes in the movie more authentic all the characters speak Aramaic.  Thus the director was able to provide the audience with a raw and realistic image of the stories in the gospel with Arabs speaking in Aramaic. Now this may not be the only Biblical narration that tried to accurately portray the setting of the Bible, but it is the best narration that I have watched thus far.

Now the text of the movie is a simple, but awesome idea: just read from the Bible and don't leave anything out.  The problem is there is some sneaky subtext hidden into the scenes. Perhaps I am being a bit nit-picky or am looking into the details too much, but I noticed there are two characters in the entire movie that have a dental plan: John the Baptist and Jesus. In fact not only do these characters have remarkably white and straight teeth for anyone in the first century, but they also have quite a charming image to them. I can most certainly argue John did not have pearly white teeth because his diet consisted of wild honey and locust, but perhaps Jesus did.  Nevertheless it disappointed me that the movie didn't portray Jesus with broken or missing teeth like all the other characters.

If anyone else has watched this movie I would love to hear your thoughts. If you have not (and have three hours to invest into Netflix) I recommend this movie over any other Biblical narration.