ABSTRACT
The early decades of moving pictures offer a wealth of unexplored material pertaining to the popular reception of biblical texts and characters. Jesus, Moses, and other biblical figures were among the first flickering images to captivate spectators gathered in vaudeville and nickelodeon theaters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the cinema industry emerged, film companies quickly recognized the advantage of ready-made audiences who were both eager to see iconic scenes from sacred texts come alive on screen and sufficiently familiar with this subject matter to compensate for the narrative challenges of a developing and more-or-less silent medium.
