BBC's Passion

If the history of film teaches us anything, it’s that Jesus Christ makes good box office. Or, at least, moviemakers love to put him on celluloid. Everyone from Cecil B. DeMille to Martin Scorsese has had a shot at the Jesus story, and they came late to the table: the first Passion adaptation was in 1898.

The 1960s gave us The Gospel According to St. Matthew by Pier Paolo Pasolini (a Marxist atheist). The 1970s offered up a curious string of musical movies, such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. Most recently, Mel Gibson had cinemagoers spluttering into their popcorn with his visceral take on the last 24 hours of Jesus’s life.

And yet, for all the major cinema versions of the gospel stories, television shows about Jesus are rarer than hen’s teeth. You have to go back three decades for the last major TV adaptation of the Passion — Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 series Jesus of Nazareth — and, at six-and-a-half hours, that rarely gets repeated on BBC1.

New series

All that changed this Easter week, however, with the screening of The Passion, a new four-part mini-series going out primetime on BBC1. It was big-budget, and had an impressive cast list (including Jimmy Nesbitt as Pontius Pilate) and it was serious about revisiting the message — in fact the 30-year time lapse was partly the reason for resurrecting it now, in 2008. ‘This is a story that needs to be told to each new generation’, said the show’s award-winning producer, Nigel Stafford-Clark, the man who first brought the idea to the BBC.

But just what was the drama’s message? Can Christians welcome this new portrayal of Jesus with open arms?

Central role

There’s no doubt that Joseph Mawle — a little-known British actor — makes an impressive stab at the central role. With the pre-requisite neck-length hair and an aquiline nose, he could just about be a Jewish Rabbi from first-century Judea. In fact, he’s ordinary-looking rather than Hollywood-beautiful, which might put the discerning viewer in mind of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53: ‘He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him…’ (v.2).

What Mawle does have is genuine charisma, and a look that occasionally seems to pierce the camera lens (there are some lovely moments when Caiaphas and Pilate, both highly charismatic men, have to glance away from his gaze). Said Stafford-Clark: ‘When we cast Jesus, we knew that he’d be in the middle of these tough, good-looking men, and yet your eye needed to be drawn to him. That was the quality Joe had. When he’s on screen, you’ll see it — your eyes are drawn to him. I can’t explain why.’

Son of Man and . . .

So much for Jesus the man: what about Jesus as God? And this is where it got trickier. Jesus’s reputation as a miracle worker is referenced by the dramatisation, but never explicitly shown. In one early scene, for instance, Christ comforts the sick outside the Temple, but there is no suggestion that he will tell them to get up and walk. There are two reasons for this absence of miracles, according to the producers: 1) the gospels don’t refer to any during the last week of Jesus’s life; and 2) as dramatic devices go, they are very open-and-shut: once you’ve shown a miracle, you’ve told the audience who Jesus was.

Viewers’ interpretation

What the makers attempted to do instead was to present Christ (accurately and powerfully, they say, and always based on the gospel accounts) and let the viewers do the interpreting: ‘Was Jesus merely a man?’ they were saying. ‘Watch — and make up your own mind.’

How they handled the resurrection sequence, the subject of the final episode on Easter Sunday, was, of course, key — and the cast and crew studiously avoided talking about its content. But, as Stafford-Clark pointed out, there are really only two explanations for what happened post-crucifixion, when the disciples went from terrified stowaways to gospel martyrs: ‘One explanation is that everything Jesus said was true and he came back to them. The other is that [the resurrection] was a psychological manifestation of pain and grief: that, in a sense, they recreated him among themselves’, he says. ‘But we have been completely faithful to the gospel accounts, and I do think it will reinforce the belief of people who believe…’

David Oyelowo — the actor playing Joseph of Arimathea, and himself a believer — agreed. He was sceptical at first, he admitted, because he doubted the BBC’s ability to do the piece justice. ‘I wondered, is it going to be the PC, watered-down, keep-everyone-happy version, or are we going to genuinely tell the story from the Bible?’ he said.

‘I read the script with a sceptical eye, but to my delight I recognised it as the story and events that have shaped my life for the last 15 years.’

Likely quibbles

There will probably be quibbles over how some of the main characters have been interpreted. High Priest Caiaphas (Ben Daniels) is cast in an unusually sympathetic light — an honest man trying to protect his people from Roman reprisals: ‘Jesus isn’t a bad man’, he says at one point, ‘but if Judeans turn away from the law we’ll be no better than the Romans — we’ll be devoured...’. Charges of anti-Semitism, which plagued Gibson’s Passion, are unlikely to stick to this production. Judas (ex-East Enders actor Paul Nicholls), meanwhile, is shown as na•ve and easily-manipulated, rather than cartoonishly evil.

Whatever the final analysis, said Oyelowo, The Passion has brought Christ before new audiences. ‘I think this series will create an opportunity for conversation’, he said. ‘So many people have a prefabricated idea about what the church in Britain is — all the bells and smells and regalia. But that is nothing to do with the essence of Christianity.

‘The story we depict is all about that essence. It’s about a personal relationship with God. You’ll see what the disciples went through, what Jesus went through, what Caiaphas went through — and hopefully it will make the story profoundly meaningful to audiences.’

The latest TV dramatisation for Easter

New series

Central role

Son of Man and . . .

Viewers’ interpretation

Likely quibbles

Olly Grant

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