His success in this regard was considerable, if less than complete. The youthful zeitgeist-oriented approach that had served him well with Romeo and Juliet (1968) failed with Brother Sun, and a chastened Zeffirelli approached Jesus of Nazareth determined to make a film, not of the moment, but for the ages.
#JESUS OF NAZARETH MOVIE#
Francis movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972).
#JESUS OF NAZARETH PROFESSIONAL#
If Jesus of Nazareth was an opportunity for Zeffirelli to serve his Church and his faith with his talents, it was also an opportunity for professional redemption after the critical and box-office failure of his prior religious project, the St. A wayward but loyal and even conservative son of the Church, Zeffirelli reportedly put his theatrical design and staging talents at the Church’s service for a number of papal ceremonies and has more than once expressed concern for the Church’s image in the modern media era. (Zeffirelli has also claimed that Paul VI separately suggested to him that he make a Jesus movie, and even that the Pope lobbied for him with Grade’s team.)įor Zeffirelli, Jesus of Nazareth was an important project for a number of reasons. On the small screen, producer Lew Grade’s Moses the Lawgiver (1973), forgotten now, was well received at the time, paving the way for Jesus of Nazareth - at the suggestion of Pope Paul VI, according to Grade. Some of the best moments are fictional episodes, while some crucial Gospel stories have inexplicably been omitted.īy the 1970s the big-screen Bible epic was dead, killed by the box-office failure of George Stevens’ earnest, ultra-serious Gospel film The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and John Huston’s Genesis epic The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966).
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#JESUS OF NAZARETH TRIAL#
Key moments like Peter’s great confession of Jesus and the Last Supper are reverentially staged, while other moments like the Parable of the Prodigal Son and Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin are dramatically reimagined - and not infrequently the latter are far more interesting and valuable than the former. Jesus of Nazareth’s best sequences are brilliant, but they alternate with middling or indifferent material. It’s also because of the work’s unevenness. It’s also because the first and last acts particularly lend themselves to seasonal viewing at, respectively, Christmas and Easter time. That’s not just because it’s nearly six and a half hours long and often broadcast in two parts.
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So the yesterday is just as important as the today and forever.In the four decades since it made its debut on Palm Sunday and Easter of 1977, I’ve watched Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth in bits and pieces far more often than I’ve watched the whole thing. The Jesus who actually was shows us who the transcendent Lord actually is because Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That happened while many German theologians were saying they couldn't know much about Jesus historically. The most obvious recent example is how Hitler's theologians made a Christ who legitimated Nazi ideology. When Christians allow "the Christ of faith" to float free, they reinvent him to suit particular ideologies. If we believe as traditional Christianity always has that God became truly human in Jesus of Nazareth, then he was an actual person who worked and spoke in this world. If Christians believe in a resurrected Lord who transcends history, why should we even bother with the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth? We posed this and other questions to Tom Wright, whom Time magazine called "one of the most formidable of the traditionalist Bible scholars." He is author of several influential books on the Jesus of history, most notably Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1996).
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So why should Christians who believe in a Jesus available to all people of all times even care about what historians say about Jesus' life on earth? The quests' latest manifestation, the Jesus Seminar, has voted out almost every Gospel saying of Jesus as unhistorical. Lewis was skeptical of searches for the "historical Jesus." And why not? Even before Albert Schweitzer published his The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906, many Christians bemoaned such searches because they usually denied the claims of the Gospels.