Ever since medieval mystery plays, the Bible has offered a
lucrative playground for show business. The Good Book’s engrossing
stories and a guaranteed audience provide the ingredients of
success for a profession wedded to ratings. Believers rightly
approach these attempts with trepidation. After all, not a little
Christian blood has been spilled over the correctness of artistic
forays into the spiritual. Jews and Muslims, Abraham’s other
children, even ban such projects altogether.
It is sensitivity to these issues that makes the brazen approach
of the History Channel’s mini-series The
Bible so lamentable. Rarely does a program
manage to cheapen its subject matter so effectively without being
intentionally satirical. Replete with summer blockbuster narrator
and scenes, a strung-out one-dimensional narrative, and a
promiscuous use of artistic license, the creators of The
Bible have a lot for which they can be held accountable.
For starters, religious profiteering is crassly on display.
Besides making possible the memorable phrase “The Bible,
brought to you by Walmart,” the show is accompanied by multiple
advertisements with a religious angle: from ChristianMingle.com
(find God’s match for you) and the smartphone Bible App, to Joel
Osteen’s latest book and even a plea spot from
CatholicsComeHome.org. This combines with a pitch for local
churches to purchase The Bible’s accompanying study kits
and books, of course written and produced by the series’
creators.
One could just about ignore the marketing if it weren’t for a
disturbing factor that renders the creation positively dangerous: a
complete disregard for what is actually in the
Bible.
This is a consequence of the show’s scope. Being in an almighty
rush to get through its material, the first episode speeds past the
Pentateuch in a breathless two hours. To accomplish this on budget,
the producers obviously had to be selective regarding the text. To
fit the disparate stories into some kind of narrative, they
obtusely invented scenes and dialogue. Lot’s wife becomes a
contrary nag who doesn’t like Abraham and wants to live in a city
(Sodom will do), so she convinces Lot to leave against Abraham’s
wishes. Later, when the Israelites are slaves, Pharaoh’s son has an
inferiority complex and gets a scar from a tussle with the
adolescent Moses, who didn’t know he was a Hebrew until the peevish
youth blurts it out in anger.
These narrative sandwiches combine with an annoyingly needless
alteration of details. Abraham, who should be Abram to
begin with, actually encourages Lot to go his own way (c.f. Gen.
13:8); Abraham is the one told to name their child Isaac, not
Sarah; the lamb eventually sacrificed in Isaac’s stead should be a
ram caught by its horns (production couldn’t find one for the right
price?); Moses should have a speech impediment and a wife from the
Sinai, to name a few obvious changes. The result amounts to a
streamlined mix of fact and fiction that manages to make the Bible
seem like bad reality television, its characters worthy candidates
for Big Brother or Survivor (all with British accents, to add the
needed exoticism).
This precedent of telling half-truths and stringing along
fairy-tale narrative chains is precisely what makes the television
series so toxic: post-literate society can now glibly say of the
Bible as it has increasingly of literature in general: “I didn’t
read it, but I did watch it on TV.”
Sadly that seems to suit the purposes of producers Mark Burnett
and actor Roma Downey of Touched by An Angel fame. In an
interview on Context with Lorna Dueck, the couple gave
their tell-all concerning this latest project.
Burnett sets the bar: “Many people hear different kinds of
calls. If you’re a believer, it’s a call from God. If you’re a
non-believer, it’s an instinctual call, you know, the question is
who answers that and is willing to go forward and who’s willing to
take the risks. Nobody likes to fail, but I’ve got news for you—if
you’re not willing to fail, you won’t do anything. And that’s all
I’ve done.”
Whether this radical sort of relativism stands up to reason,
Burnett finishes the interview revealing why he felt free to
liberally work over the Bible: “There’s a little difference there
sometimes when there’s different ways to explain the Bible: one’s
kind of like telling you—don’t do this, don’t do that and it’s kind
of threatening. I don’t think it’s the most helpful way. The other
is the more loving way of—here’s why it’s the most important
story.…They’re realizing—we’ve humanized our story. It’s not told
from a distancing, lecturing point of view with one-dimensional
characters. These are real people who really lived this.”
Wife and co-executive producer Roma Downey backs Burnett up:
“We’ve tried to make it gritty and real and authentic and all of
our casting too, and the way that we’ve told the story so that you
can find the place where you can relate to the character, which is
very important that (as Mark says) we weren’t preaching, that it
didn’t come across as something holy and distant, that you could
appreciate the lives. This was a tough place that these people were
living in.”
It’s not surprising that vacuous statements like this make for a
vacuous production. As someone once put it, you can judge the tree
by its fruit. The true misfortune will come when people mistake
this production for the real thing, but that will suit the devil’s
purposes well enough. Why go to the trouble of telling lies when
half-truths work so much better? It breathes new meaning into the
Greek word for “actor.”
Image courtesy Trounce.
