TIMELY RELIGION

In 1861, during the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe gave us a patriotic and political Jesus in the last verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom That transfigures you and me. As he died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

And even earlier, in 1804, Thomas Jefferson offered Jesus the sage, a teacher of moral wisdom. In his Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson “abstracted” what was really Jesus’ “from the rubbish in which it is buried” — where by rubbish he meant whatever lent support to the idea of Christ’s divinity.

There’s something that inevitably brings such depictions to mind in From Jesus to Christ, the four-hour television series to be aired on the PBS program Frontline on Monday, April 6, and Tuesday, April 7, the first days of Holy Week. For what one gets in this series is yet another portrait of Jesus suited to the age in which it is painted. The first clue comes early, when the word “plurality” slips off the tongue of one of the commentators. No matter how deep you dig in the ancient sources, no matter how many layers of interpretation are peeled off, Holland Lee Hendrix, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, tells us, “what you always find is a plurality of Jesuses.”

The Jesus presented in this series is the one fashionable in late-twentieth- century academic culture. All we know, says L. Michael White, director of the religious studies program at the University of Texas, are the different ways Jesus’ followers “told the story.” The most that can be said of the truth behind those stories is that Jesus was a Jew who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago, that he was baptized by John the Baptist and became an apocalyptic preacher of the coming kingdom of God, and that he was publicly executed under Pontius Pilate.

The result of such a view is that Jesus comes across as a rather conventional figure (“miracle workers are a dime a dozen in the ancient world, ” says White), but his preaching of the kingdom of God must have sounded vaguely seditious to the Romans, and he had the bad luck to fall into the hands of the Roman governor of Palestine during Passover. To understand the rise of Christianity we must look to St. Paul and the authors of the Gospels – – those men, the commentators tell us, who turned Jesus into Christ and created the images and stories we have of him.

There is, however, one story from the gospels conspicuously down-played in this new Frontline presentation, and that is the story of the Resurrection — the story without which the emergence of Christianity is inexplicable. The narrator informs us that “the death and resurrection of Jesus lie at the very heart of Paul’s preaching,” but the only person to say anything substantive about the Resurrection is a Jewish scholar, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University. Among the many pictures displayed, none is of the tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the holiest shrine in Christendom. The Jesus whose Resurrection Christians celebrate on Easter stays off screen, with no one ever suggesting that what happened two millennia ago is still a matter of some importance to Christian churches. The one exception is the time chosen to air the show: The producers presumably did not pick Holy Week by accident.

In the first hour we learn that one way of breaking through the veil the early church cast over Jesus is through archaeology. Eric Meyers, professor of religion and archaeology at Duke, introduces us to the spectacular new discoveries at Sepphoris, an ancient city in Israel not too far from Nazareth, where archaeologists have found, for example, the floor of a villa with a mosaic of a beautiful Roman woman. These and other excavations show that Galilee (the scholars pretentiously use the Hebrew idiom and call it “the Galilee”) was not a cultural backwater, a village society as pictured in the Gospels, but a sophisticated urban environment with social and economic ties to the larger Roman world. The narrator informs us that the discoveries at Sepphoris “challenge the conventional picture of Jesus’ life,” but we are never told in what way or why it makes a difference for understanding Jesus.

Then we are reminded that Sepphoris was also a thoroughly Jewish city and we are soon in the midst of a discussion of ancient Judaism. Again the theme of pluralism appears, but now it is the Jews who are pluralistic, and talk of different forms of Judaism leads down through the Judean desert to the Essene community at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. After a few minutes, the narrator recalls that the point of this excursion was to shed light on Jesus’s social environment, and returns to Jesus with the puzzling admission: “History offers no evidence that Jesus was influenced by the Essenes.” We then turn to John the Baptist, unsure whether Jesus was urban or rural and wondering why we made the trek to Qumran.

But, of course, From Jesus to Christ is a television series, not a seminar, designed to entertain as it instructs. The visual and audio impressions sometimes complement one another, and sometimes race off in different directions. First there are the pictorial images: the stark brown cliffs of Masada rising up from the desert on the edge of the Dead Sea, the monumental theater in Ephesus, and ancient manuscripts or mosaics. Then there are the voice-over narrations: one giving chronological and historical information and the other reading passages from the Bible and ancient literature. To these are added the observations of twelve scholars, whose comments are not always related to the narration. And finally there is the music, a beguilingly exotic composition by the English composer Paul Foss adapted for this series.

The pictures are captivating, though they often pass by without comment, and the camera seldom lingers over any one scene. Like the music, they often serve merely to create a mood. There are exceptions — the mosaics at Sepphoris, the outlines of the army camps at Masada — when the commentator actually discusses what is being seen. But more often the camera focuses on a generic scene: an ancient forum or street, or a model of Jerusalem. In this sense the show is surprisingly unhistorical. In the fourth hour, for example, when the script is telling the story of the martyrdom of Perpetua, the camera scans the ruins of two ancient amphitheaters but never tells us which one, if either, is the place where Perpetua was martyred. Instead of giving us the actual Golgotha where Jesus was crucified (which is inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), we get a picture of a large unidentified rock.

For viewers unfamiliar with the techniques of recent biblical scholarship, the third hour will prove the most perplexing. We are given a minicourse on the chief differences among the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. According to current historical scholarship the gospels were written after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and the narrator introduces the segment by explaining how Christians responded to the crisis brought on by the destruction of the city and temple: “The followers of Jesus coped by telling stories about the man they had expected would deliver the new Kingdom on earth.”

If there is any doubt about what is meant by “stories,” the narrator clears it up for us: “These were not historical accounts but shared memories shaped by a common past.” The historical naivete here is breathtaking. By the time the Gospels were written, Christianity already had its first martyrs. When Christians came together, they were not looking back; their eyes were on the future. They listened to the words and recited the deeds of someone they believed was alive, present, and active in their midst. This was no fearful band huddled together in dimly lit rooms spinning tales, it was a people on fire, filled with power, bold, even reckless, bursting with energy, its leaders on a mission. Paul died before the fall of Jerusalem, yet he had already founded churches in Asia Minor, Greece, and Macedonia and made his way to Rome. It is tempting to attribute to the producers this silliness about coping by telling stories, but the experts go along with it and use similar language themselves.

The final segment deals with the development of the early church up to the fourth century, when Christianity was recognized as a legal religion within the Roman Empire. As entertainment it is successful: Persecution, martyrs, and the first Christian emperor make for plenty of action. But as history it is painfully one-sided — driven by the mantra of pluralism, now understood not as different “stories” but as diversity and fragmentation. There were only “Christianities,” says Hendrix. “We can’t really imagine Christianity as a unified coherent religious movement.”

The creedal formulas from the second century that are the basis of the Apostles Creed are ignored, more time is given to Gnosticism than to orthodoxy (Ignatius of Antioch, for example, goes unmentioned), and the role of bishops in leading and uniting the church is slighted. If one has eyes only for the periphery and cannot see the center that holds things together, if orthodoxy has nothing to do with the truth but is just another opinion, then everything is finally reduced to power — and it will never be possible to give a coherent account of the development of Christianity.

Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton also has difficulty imagining what the early church was like. Power is the only category she knows for speaking about the authority of a bishop, whose job she thinks was to keep folks in line. Irenaeus “didn’t want people making choices about what to think,” she tells us. “He wanted them thinking what the bishop told them to think.” The narrator sets her up with the line, “Irenaeus thundered against those he saw as heretics,” but Pagels does not point out that Irenaeus did not “thunder,” he argued. His book on the heretics is a carefully reasoned interpretation of disputed passages from the Bible.

How one interprets Jesus and the early church is less a matter of imagination than of will, the will to understand even when one does not agree. The scholars on the program teach in divinity schools or departments of religious studies. Whatever their personal religious convictions, and despite their presumed scholarly detachment, they belong to an intellectual tradition and a professional guild that is keenly aware how its words will be heard in the churches. The implicit message they present on Frontline is that somewhere along the way something went wrong, and before the institutions, before the creeds and dogmas, before the fixed canon of books that make up the New Testament, before the bishops and priests, there was a truer, more authentic, more diverse, freer, more tolerant form of Christianity and it is not to be identified with the historic church. There is great reluctance to acknowledge that institutional and creedal Christianity has proven more enduring and diverse than its heterodoxies — that the Jesus of the church has outlived his rivals.

For all that, the program, even with its mischief, is worth watching. The pictures, the music, even the academic chatter are all artfully presented. As long as one does not expect “the real story of the rise of Christianity” (as the publicity material from Frontline puts it), From Jesus to Christ is an effortless and entertaining way to pass a pair of evenings. And even if the ideas are trendy, the assembled scholars have interesting and informative things to say.

There are even some poignant and affecting moments. The most moving comes in the story of Perpetua, a young woman, eight-months pregnant, who was executed in Carthage in A.D. 203. Her story is told with grace and simplicity. Her father and the Roman governor plead with her to cooperate, but she says merely, “No, I’m a Christian.” The voice-over reads from the ancient account of the martyrdom of Perpetua and her companion Felicity: “The day of their victory dawned and they marched from the prison to the amphitheater joyfully as if they were going to heaven.” As Perpetua is facing down the wild animals, “a young gladiator is sent into the arena to dispatch her,” says Fredriksen. “His hand is trembling so much he can’t . . . he can’t cut her. And she grabs his hand and guides his sword to her own throat.” She dies, says White, “with authority and stature and serenity.”

Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is Remembering the Christian Past.