Mark Boyce

If you are looking for an accurate biblical rendering this isn’t the movie for it. Many of the main ideas depicted in these stories generally try to stay faithful. If the movie makers don’t try to stick to one gospel they typically try to cobble together the Synoptic storylines, which has its own set of problems. But this was so unlike any biblical text I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing/hearing. I had read the Killing book several years ago and don’t remember thinking so poorly of it, but I can’t get behind the movie at all. I realize it may have gotten the “Hollywood” treatment, but boy this one had some serious problems almost from the start. Perhaps I need to get back to the book and see how it sits with me now. Perhaps my understanding of the biblical text has changed so much from when I read the Killing book that I didn’t notice all the problems then. It was just weird plain and simple and I think it may have been the worst depiction of the life of Jesus I’ve ever seen. I don’t know which gospel(s) Bill and Martin were referencing but there seemed to me a gnostic slant about it. In the end I felt it was a very poor effort, if there was any at all, at fidelity to the canonical gospels. As to whether or not Mr O’Reilly was attempting to be provocative, it’s a very slippery slope to do something like that and if that is the intention it ought to be noted in the script somehow. It wasn’t. At least not prominently so. My advice…stay away, you won’t miss anything but you’ll save yourself 2 hours and a lot of confusion.