Film Friday There is a new animated film out at the moment, based on the life of Jesus, it’s called The King of Kings. I haven’t yet seen it but thought I would flag it up. It has quite a cast doing the voices, including
Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate, Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, Uma Thurman as Catherine Dickens, Star Wars ‘Luke Skywalker’ Mark Hamill as King Herod, Ben Kingsley as the High Priest Caiaphas, and Forest Whitaker as Peter. The reason Charles and Catherine Dickens are in it, is because this is based on a story Charles Dickens told to his children about the life of Jesus. And so we see Dickens’ young son Walter walking through the events with his father.
The tradition of telling and retelling the account of Jesus on film is a long one. In the early days of Hollywood the first film about Jesus has the English title of – the Life and Passion of the Christ, it was a 44-minute French silent film produced and released in 1903.
Over the years other films have been made – King of Kings in 1961, Ben Hur in 1959 and the TV series Jesus of Nazareth back in 1977. Currently many people are watching the ongoing series The Chosen, season 5 has been filmed and will be released I think in June. And next year I believe Mel Gibson will be releasing The Resurrection of the Christ – the sequel to 2004’s The Passion of the Christ.
In the days following Jesus’s death, resurrection and ascension to his father, the stories of his life were passed on orally, people told them to each other years before they were ever written down. And this goes on of course. The retelling of the life of Jesus, not only on the big and small screens, but in our lives. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 3 v 2-3 – “You are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You are clearly a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts”.
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