Gospel of John goes celluloid

Christian Century, Oct 4, 2003

Before Mel Gibson's much-anticipated, much-debated and much-unseen movie The Passion, due next year, comes The Gospel of John, a three-hour film from Toronto-based Visual Bible International Inc.

The company, which has produced film adaptations of Matthew and Acts, premiered its grandest project at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11. In what is described as a "slow roll-out," the film was to have its first U.S. showings, starting September 26, in ten theaters, mostly in Texas and North Carolina.

A visually stunning work filmed in Spain and Toronto, The Gospel of John faithfully adapts word-for-word the American Bible Society's plain-language Good News version of the Fourth Gospel. The film, which cost 20 million Canadian dollars, has a cast of 75 principal actors and 2,000 extras. It neither borrows from other Gospels nor shies away from the long monologues in John.

Directed by British director Philip Saville (Metroland, Hamlet), the joint Canada-UK production stars British stage actors Henry Ian Cusick as a pensive but confident Jesus and Scott Handy as the wild-eyed John the Baptist. Christopher Plummer narrated the film. Eventually the movie will be available in DVD format, but backers say they will track its reception in theaters first.

As books of the Bible go, those with strong narratives best lend themselves to the big screen, according to retired University of Toronto professor Peter Richardson, who chairs a nine-member panel of theological and academic advisers to the project. "It's never been turned into a movie," he said. "It was virgin territory." Other advisers include Alan Segal of Barnard College in New York, Carolyn Osiek of Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas, and Charles Hedrick of Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield.

(Asked about the relatively strong passages against first-century Jews in John, Segal told the CENTURY that he has "always found this disturbing in reading the Gospel, and it remains there in the film because the film is a word-for-word portrayal." He said words at the beginning of the movie alert the viewers to this. On the other hand, he said that with excellent casting, directing and filming "there is an unexpected sense of this altercation being a family quarrel rather than a battle between religions."

(Hedrick, a specialist in canonical and apocryphal Gospels, suggested that the film rendition of John may make some theories about the patchwork sources and edited elements in the Gospel "more difficult to hold." Hedrick said he was surprised in watching the finished film that the lengthy speeches by Jesus in John "were making better sense as a unified whole--the speeches really were unified, aid Jesus' answers to his interlocutors really were answers. In the acting, the unity of the 'text' is much better seen.")

The advisory panel is already discussing the production company's next film, on the Gospel of Mark, but the script is still being reworked, sources stud. The company has plans to put all 66 biblical books on film--once the dream of British financier-producer John Heyman, whose Genesis Project in the 1970s began and ended with a film based on Luke (see sidebar) that lost money but was used with evangelistic profit by Campus Crusade.--RNS