ABSTRACT
The Philadelphians who went to the first performance of the Horitz Passion Play, the crowds who flocked to DeMille’s epic renditions of The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings, the hordes who thronged to the opening night of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: these moviegoers expected to see the Bible on film, and the Bible is what they saw. No matter that the Bible they saw on the silver screen was not exactly what they read in church or at home, that it was filtered through centuries of visual and other media, and that it said more about modern America than about ancient Israel. It was, nevertheless, the Holy Scriptures, the Word of God. Since the birth of cinema, however, countless moviegoers have walked into
a theater and seen or heard the Bible without expecting it in the least. Throughout the period of the epic Bible movies, from the early twentieth century until the mid-1960s, other films were being made that quoted the Bible or otherwise made use of biblical passages, motifs, stories, and characters. Even after the decline of the epic genre, the Bible continued to be evoked in countless films of all sorts, and was therefore encountered by an incalculable number of viewers, the majority of whom did not expect it in the least. Only those moviegoers who were knowledgeable in matters biblical would have realized that in “consuming” these films they were “consuming” the Bible at the same time.
