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.
