Don’t Look Now

He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

(Isaiah 53: 2–3)

To many, this ‘man of sorrows’ spoken of by the prophet Isaiah is an Old Testament prefiguration of Jesus Christ, ‘wounded for our transgressions … bruised for our iniquities … with his stripes we are healed’. Isaiah, interpreted in these terms, prophesies the role Christ is to play as our Saviour, while also stressing his physical lack of appeal. Christ is not to be understood primarily as a man of outer beauty, whose physical presence is desired or desirable. In the later gospels, the crowds and Roman soldiers mock and torture Jesus during the Passion. In other words, lack of true recognition, of a spiritual understanding of Christ’s message and role on earth, is directly linked with his unappealing or grotesque appearance, culminating with his broken body on the cross. Only those who manage to look beyond his physical being are able to see his true beauty, which goes far beyond what one can see with one’s own eyes.

In contrast to Isaiah and the gospels, realist fiction and film are typically driven by a visual desire for Jesus. Faced with the sparse physical description of Christ in the Bible – the Jesus with parted hair, beard, and long, flowing robe is almost entirely a product of centuries of iconography, painting, and fiction, rather than of the gospels – realist fiction and film sought to ‘fill in the gaps’.¹ Often focusing directly on Christ, in lengthy textual descriptions, by frequent camera close-ups or by placing the actor playing him in the central mise-en-scène, contemporary audiences could gain the visual satisfaction that the gospels do not immediately deliver. Indeed, such has been the persuasive and pervasive power of realist representations that many people hold a clear mental picture of what they think Christ looked like.

To Graham Holderness the visualised Jesus gives rise to a need for scholarly investigation, focusing on how he is represented outside the gospels and, furthermore, on what this means for established Christian belief:

If Christian church attendance and traditional religious education are currently in decline in the West, then people are deriving their perceptions of Christianity not from direct acquaintance with the Bible or ecclesiastical dogma, but from the cultural representations that surround them. Most people are more likely to derive impressions of Christianity from fiction, film and visual art than they are from scripture or church teaching.

(pp. 1–2)

As Holderness goes on to ask: what do people believe, if they say they believe in Jesus Christ? Conversely, what version of Christianity do atheists reject? Is belief or unbelief based on close scriptural reading or attentive churchgoing, or instead on an acceptance or rejection of, to name but one example, the way the actor Jim Caviezel portrays Christ in Mel Gibson’s astonishingly successful Hollywood film The Passion of the Christ (2004)?²

In Re-writing Jesus, Holderness explores a small number of high-profile Jesus novels and films. His focus is on Christ in twentieth-century fiction and film (although two of his examples date from the first decade of the twenty-first century). His study is a welcome complement to works such as Jennifer Stevens’s The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920 (2010) and Jefferson Gatrall’s The Real and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2014), which largely focus on the earlier century. Stevens and Gatrall discuss the realist Jesus novel, with Gatrall also analysing the Jesus redivivus tale (in which Christ returns to the medieval or modern world), realist painters’ depictions of Christ, and late nineteenth-century filmed passion plays. An investigation of twentieth and twenty-first-century novels...