{"id":83232,"date":"2016-04-02T03:44:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T07:44:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=83232"},"modified":"2016-04-02T05:14:40","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T09:14:40","slug":"cinemapocrypha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/cinemapocrypha\/","title":{"rendered":"CINEMapocrypha"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am thrilled to greet the arrival of several new movies that celebrate my faith! You may have viewed some of them and may be eagerly anticipating others: Batman Versus Superman<\/em>, Deadpool<\/em>, Captain America: Civil War<\/em> and X-Men: Apocalypse<\/em>. But there are other flicks which I am planning to avoid like the plague: Killing Jesus<\/em>, Risen<\/em>, The Young Messiah<\/em>, Miracles from Heaven<\/em>, and God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Not Dead 2<\/em>. I am about to do what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re never supposed to do: comment on these flicks without having seen \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem. Well, not exactly<\/em>, because I intend only to make a few<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>broad remarks based on what the commercials reveal about them. If I am somehow misrepresenting them it is because the commercials are misrepresenting them, and I doubt that. But please feel free to correct, chide, and excoriate me if I get any of them wrong.<\/p>\n

You probably know what I think of Bill O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Reilly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book Killing Jesus<\/em>. I wrote a detailed refutation of it, a book called Killing History: Jesus in the No Spin Zone<\/em>. I very much doubt the movie version is any better. The book lent itself to easy adaptation because it was already fictional in form, though it loudly claimed to be pure history. It was anything but. By the way, unless I am mistaken, O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Reilly sneeringly dismissed my book without profaning his lips with my name or the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s title, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty sure mine was the only book he could have been referring to.<\/p>\n

Risen<\/em> looks to be a fictional apologetic (is there any other kind?) meant to buttress the faith of fundamentalist viewers in precisely the same way that End-Times movies (Left Butt-cheek<\/em>, er, I mean, Left Behind<\/em>, Distant Thunder<\/em>, etc.) do. The Rapture flicks (one can hardly dignify them with the term \u00e2\u20ac\u0153films,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and many are so amateurish that I even hesitate to call them \u00e2\u20ac\u0153movies.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) try to reinforce the ever-disappointed expectation of the Second Coming by seeming to depict the eschatological events in a contemporary setting, so the viewer may think, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yes! This is what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to happen! It looks so real, not just some fantasy!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all an ad hoc<\/em> stop-gap that encourages the drooping faith of the faithful. Well, Risen<\/em> does the same thing with the resurrection of Jesus. This drama of a Roman soldier being dragged kicking and screaming to faith in the resurrection substitutes for the sketchy, fragmentary, and contradictory Easter accounts of the gospels. A connected narrative with well-delineated characters like us, people who might be convinced that Jesus rose from the dead if there were any real reason to think so. Apologists ask, rhetorically, how the skeptic can explain the origin of the gospels\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153eyewitness reports\u00e2\u20ac\u009d if there was no event to give rise to them. But none of the gospel resurrection stories read like anyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s memories. Instead, they closely resemble myths of Pythagoras, Asclepius, and Apollonius of Tyana. Some are cobbled together from out-of-context and unacknowledged quotations from Daniel. Several quite different Easter tales claim to represent the very first appearance of the risen Jesus. Some include important features (e.g., guards posted at the tomb) that no other gospel has but must<\/em> have had if they were facts. What the gospels offer us is not convincing, so why not pretend we are looking over the shoulder of someone who might have been present on the hypothetical scene? It is, in fact, all pretend, faith based on fiction.<\/p>\n

The Young Messiah<\/em> might as well have been called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jesus in Smallville.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This Jesus must have arrived on earth in a rocket launched from heaven before it exploded. In one scene, it has Mary tell the boy Jesus not to display his super powers till he is grown and embarking on his ministry\u00e2\u20ac\u201djust like Pa Kent tells young Clark in Man of Steel<\/em>. Of course, parallels with Superman are unavoidable since the Man of Tomorrow was obviously a Christ analog to begin with (though created by two Jewish lads, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster). But the point is that Superman becomes a mirror in which we see what Jesus really is: a mythic superhero.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 legend, like Superman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, developed back-to-front (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The first shall be last,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I guess). Superman debuted in 1938 as an adult hero, but he sold so many comics that his publishers decided to create Superboy<\/em>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the Adventures of Superman when he was a boy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Again, enormously popular, so next we read the exploits of (ready?) Superbaby<\/em>! The same thing happened with Jesus Christ. In Mark, Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 miracle-working ministry and divine Sonship began when he was an adult (Luke estimates Jesus was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153about thirty\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). But Christian imagination started filling in the gap of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the missing years.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d So Luke tells a story of Jesus at 12 years old, confounding the Temple scribes with his prodigious wisdom. Several Apocryphal Infancy Gospels depict Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 boyhood adventures, e.g., striking dead a playground bully. And Jesus becomes Superbaby in Matthew\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s and Luke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nativity stories, where the Wise Men and the Shepherds visit Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 rocketship, er, manger. The Young Messiah<\/em> is a cinematic Infancy Gospel.<\/p>\n

Miracles from Heaven<\/em> is based on a medical anomaly that, however, would not even command Fox Mulder\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention: some kid with neurological problems falls out of a window (or something) and is not only unhurt, but cured. I am not convinced this is other than a pious fraud, but if it really happened\u00e2\u20ac\u201dgreat! But isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it jumping the gun to declare it a miracle? Believers constantly turn ignorance into faith (which is why they turn out to be the same thing): \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t explain how this happened, so it must have been an invisible deity at work!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like concluding that space aliens must have built the pyramids since we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite figure how the Egyptians could have done it. Similar ancient engineering feats, once baffling, have since been cracked, so it seems worth waiting to see if there is after all some mundane reaction. After all, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no reason to attribute epilepsy to demons anymore.<\/p>\n