Holey Bible…by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

April 1, 2013 Whitney Farmer 0 Comments

Whitney ran a rock music club on the beach in L.A.. She has an MBA, and is currently reading Hosea. Again.

The Bible is a huge disappointment.

Not the one that holds treasures for me each time I turn a page.

I am referring to the History Channel mini-series from actress Roma Downey of “Touched by an Angel” and her husband, mega producer Mark Burnett.

I was wired for favorable bias on this one. It takes violent errors to turn someone like me into a Not A Fan.

If you are going to adapt a story from an original work, I believe there better be a good reason for changes that you make. Bible? More so. Recalling when I first read Exodus and the story of Moses after seeing Cecil B. de Mille’s film The Ten Commandments (each Easter for ten straight Easters), I was surprised to see the narrative differences.

Moses wasn’t always the barrel chested bare-chested hero depicted by Charlton Heston. In the original text, he killed a guy when he lost his temper. Then he ran away to the desert because he was scared about what would happen to him. There was no discernible uncompromised dignity. He displayed a lack of courage in numerous places of the original text. There was no public confrontation with his royal surrogate father who ordered that his name be stricken from all records. ‘So let it be written / So let it be done…’ is still a part of our family vernacular. And I do a spot-on impression of Memnet the maidservant moments before her death, if I have a kitchen towel to use as a costume.

“…He was born the son of Hebrew slaves…”

I think I know why these changes were made. In 1956, heroes of the Bible couldn’t have flaws in Hollywood. Like Lassie and Superman, movie stars and politicians gave a sense of security if they were better than everyone else.  Heston’s Moses needed to be admired to be emulated.

The real Moses is the one that I need now. The one who was called a friend of God, despite his failures. The one who would later write Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He wrote the books that described his weaknesses for all to read. The coward had become a hero.

In The Bible, the casting and depictions seemed gritty and realistic, appropriate from Burnett, the innovator of the reality series genre. But uncomfortable narrative whitewashing happened with the casting of Jesus. This actor is gorgeous. He is light skinned. He isn’t biblical.

Why not cast Him as the Messiah was described in Isaiah 53:2…?

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him…”

And if the Messiah, then Jew. Yes, each ethnic group has variations that differ from what could be described as a standard which can become a stereotype. Maybe Jesus had amber eyes and silky Anglo hair extensions

Wack job that he is, Mel Gibson made an interesting choice that I would declare ‘GOOD’ when he changed Jim Caveizel’s appearance for his depiction in The Passion. He gave him brown eyes, thick wavy hair, and a less delicate nose. A plainer face. I liked this. So let it be done…unless you actually don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah and Jewish, and then by all means make him a Caucasian hunk like Downey and Burnett have.

And why not say that it was Darius that put Daniel in the lion’s den? Why change it to Cyrus? And why discard the interesting part of the relationship story between Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar? This exiled slave spoke not just with fear but with earnest compassion to this most dangerous ruler the world has yet seen. He told him that he wished that difficulties wouldn’t come to him. But they did. And after the fall into madness and then healing, Nebuchadnezzar gives one of the most thorough accounts of a life transformed into light that has ever been written. THAT is good story. Or should have been to the History Channel.

So inaccuracies bugged me. Perhaps I could have forgiven the production if it had demonstrated the skill of almost any Bible movie that was made before I was born, all the way back to the silent “King of Kings” which still astounds me.

Perhaps I would have been kinder to this version if they hadn’t fallen into the…sin?…that plagues my Christian tribe:

They didn’t do a good job. It was clumsy. It seemed lazy. They took shortcuts. It wasn’t interesting. They managed to wreck what is reportedly the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Sometimes my tribe gives ourselves a pass when we should be asking for forgiveness.

Quote of the Blog, from Jesus in Matthew 13:46: “…When a man found a pearl of great value, he went out and sold everything he had and bought it….”

Image of Diogo Morgado, actor who played Jesus on The Bible, courtesy of Mail & Guardian Online.