ABSTRACT
More than a century has passed since the 1897 Horitz Play thrilled and delighted its first audiences. Since that time, the Bible has become a movie star in its own right, appearing in countless features in numerous genres, from the biblical epic to the apocalyptic disaster movie. It has been drawn into the Cold War and the debates over gender roles, civil rights, and capital punishment. It has pledged its support for America’s role as the champion of freedom and democracy at home and abroad, but also provided a paradigm for critiquing the army bureaucracy and ethos. Above all, it has demonstrated its ongoing relevance to history, culture, and the human experience. The Bible that appears on the silver screen is not the same one that wor-
shippers encounter in synagogues and churches, or that scholars and students grapple with in the classroom or the library. In the first place, Hollywood’s Bible is not nearly as extensive as the Jewish or Christian scriptures. It consists of only a selection of biblical books: Genesis, Exodus, Samuel and Kings, Esther, Ruth and Job, the Gospels, and Revelation, supplemented by snippets from the Psalms, the Prophets, and the Letters of Paul. Second, the cinematic scriptures are clothed in layers of artistic, musical, dramatic, liturgical, and theological reflection and interpretation. Indeed, one may question whether, for example, it is truly the historical, or even the biblical, Jesus that is the subject of the Jesus-movies, or rather, the culturally constructed Jesus that has developed over centuries of representation. Finally, Hollywood’s Bible – in its partial and culturally shaped form – is above all the Christian Bible. Even when it draws on books that are also present in the Jewish Scriptures, Hollywood presents them as “Old Testament” and not as “Hebrew Bible,” that is, as looking ahead to, and completed by, the New Testament and the coming of Christ. Not surprisingly, then, the Hollywood Bible is often used to imply the
normativity of Christian faith in American society. The epics show that the faithful triumph over atheists, and that prayer leads to abundance. Later films often refrain from presenting an explicitly Christian message, but traces can be detected beneath the surface, particularly in films that draw upon the Bible to reflect on the law, ethics, gender, race, politics, and other aspects of American
society. Even films that are entirely free of such biblical undercurrents nevertheless draw upon the Bible to promote personal and social values such as hope, altruism, generosity, tolerance of difference, and responsibility toward the other, and to society as a whole.
