The New Downey Version

I joined 9.5 million viewers watching A.D. The Bible Continues last week and again last night. Producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett have crafted a passable story line that draws on Scripture, but it has a few features that bother me slightly. It is not surprising that the story would be juiced up a bit, given Burnett’s filmography. The creator of such big reality shows as Survivor and Apprentice can’t be expected to simply stage what really happened according to the Bible. No one believes his other shows are not somewhat inventive when it comes to the “reality” part of reality TV.

In principle I have no quarrel with adding imaginative features to a Bible record to make it come alive. I did exactly that in my novel, Wings of Mentridar (out of print but available digitally on Amazon). The difference between my inventions and Burnett’s may be minor, but I find them significant. I took what little we know about the biblical account of Noah and added details that seemed plausible without contradicting the Scriptural facts. Even though I invented an entire angelic universe to go along with Noah, I strove to keep it aligned with what we know from Scripture.

Downey and Burnett have taken a half a step away from that position, in my opinion. There are three features of A.D. that bother me. First is making Pilate and Caiaphas central to the story. I did not put a stopwatch on it, but I would estimate that the political interplay of those two leaders filled far more screen time than the acts of the Apostles. I understand the need to fill a back story, but if screen time is money, too much was spent on fictional background and too much left out of the true story. Some vitally important biblical facts were omitted: for example, one would assume that Jesus only appeared after his resurrection twice briefly to the Apostles in the upper room. No mention is made of his dozens of appearances to a total of hundreds of people.

The second feature of the film with which I take issue is the prominent place given to women in every relationship. Outside of the biblical record, history teaches that women were not regularly involved in the political and religious decisions of the day, Cleopatra and a few others excepted. Pilate and Caiaphas are both badgered by intrusive wives. Given either Jewish or Roman culture of the day, this seems unlikely. Even Peter is strongly influenced by an imagined daughter, his wife having died, according to the script of A.D. There is nothing wrong with thinking women were players in a patriarchal society on some level, but the prominence given by Downey/Burnett smacks of feminist revisionism.

Another interesting bit of possible revisioning is making the Apostle John a black man. It is not impossible that Jesus could have found dark skinned men in Palestine to form part of his original twelve. There are specific instances of black men mentioned in Acts, most notably in 13:1 where a disciple named Simeon was “called Niger” which is Latin slang for black man. Also, the regions from which people gathered for the Passover as listed in Acts 2 include areas that could well have had blacks among the population. My difficulty with a black Apostle is only that I believe for theological reasons Jesus would have specifically called sons of Abraham and not sons of Ishmael (assume if you like that Hagar was a black woman). There is really no need to “color” the players in the Bible; truth be told, they would all be people of color by today’s standards, Jesus included.

There are those who will say I am picking at nits. They may be right. If Downey and Burnett were not cutting out so much we know is true and replacing it with things that are pure speculation, I would be less uncomfortable. The teller of any story presumes to share only that which supports the theme; the Bible itself is like that. The apostle John admits that endless books could have been written about Jesus; he made editorial choices to limit his tome. My beef with A.D. is that it left too much meat on the bone and served up too much fluff.