House of David - House of Cards

My wife and I started watching the television series House of David. The producers show a disclaimer before each episode. It says that the writers attempted to remain true to the Bible record of David’s life although they admit to having taken literary license to enhance the drama. This is to be expected whenever we moderns turn the bare bones of the biblical record into a fuller portrayal of life in Bible times. This tactic was present in King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, The Passion of the Christ, The Chosen, and every popular Bible-based drama. These presentations and many more like them have their place in helping us see Bible characters as real people.

I mention King of Kings because it was that movie that made ten-year-old me realize that the Bible was about men and women who actually lived long ago, and they were not just paper cut-outs on a Sunday school flannelgraph. It wasn’t long after seeing that movie that I gave my life to Christ. Many years later, it was that same realization that motivated me to write a bible-based novel about Noah’s life. (Wings of Mentridar) There is very little in Scripture about Noah’s life, especially prior to God’s call to build the Ark. I researched ancient Mesopotamian culture and overlaid what we have in the Genesis record to imagine the daily life of Noah. Then I went way out on a limb and tried to imagine what it would have been like if God enlisted the aid of His angels to get the ark built and everyone safely on board. What I wrote was fantasy, but I tried to write only what I thought could be supported by biblical truth.

Presentations like House of David and The Chosen are doing something similar. A friend of mine once said he couldn’t watch shows like that because they weren’t “biblical.” I understand what he means. We certainly should not build any theology on the musings of Hollywood. The value of historical fiction, even when it verges into fantasy, is that it may help us get a grip on what it means to live for God in the real world. The imaginative portrayal of the struggles of David or Jesus’ disciples can encourage us to live like we really believe God exists.

I must say that some of the liberties taken by the writers of biblical fiction are troubling. In House of David, for example, the writers chose to portray David as an illegitimate child of Jesse. There is a hint in the biblical record that Jesse may have taken a second wife who brought two daughters from another man into his household. However, nowhere does Scripture suggest that David was not the biological son of Jesse. This is important to me because the prophets and the writers of the New Testament say that David was Jesse’s son and Jesus’ legal ancestor. I know there are some curious wiggles in the line of the Messiah (Rahab, Ruth, Perez), but I don’t see the point in inventing a cause to doubt David’s legitimacy.

I can put up with minor inconsistencies like that as long as they don’t contradict what we know from Scripture. The Christian faith is a propositional faith, meaning that there are facts, propositions, that form the basis of our belief. It is a fact that David is a historical character. It is a fact that Jesus descended from David’s line. It is also a fact that David was far from perfect; remember Bathsheba and all the trouble that followed. Watching dramatic presentations of historical figures should remind us of their humanity – their reality. Taken correctly, the stories of biblical people can bolster our faith.

House of David, like many similar productions, can build faith. This is valuable because too many Christians live in a fictional house of cards instead of a real house of faith. A.W. Tozer laments that, “It can hardly be denied that the average Christian thinks of God as being at a safe distance, looking the other way!”^[1] If we think like that, thinking God is “in Heaven,” and we are somewhere out of His sight, we are too likely to behave inappropriately. The truth is that God is not at a distance; He lives in us if we are in Christ. The Bible calls a believer’s body a tabernacle, a temple – the house of God. If a fictional drama can help me grasp that reality, I’m all for it.

  ^[1] A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2015), 70. 

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.

A Flood of Questions

I haven't seen the movie Noah, and I doubt I will see it for quite a while. I gave up first run movies in theaters in protest of the price long ago. You can judge how long by the fact that I think I paid the princely sum of $5.00 for the last ticket. My children, who did not inherit the frugality gene, tell me it now costs north of $10.00 for the ticket and the typical drink and popcorn adds another ten-spot. No thanks. As much as I would like to see the flick, it's not worth $40.00 to take my wife and I when it will be $2.00 at Family Video soon, and free later on Netflix if it isn't too big at the box office.

But I do feel compelled to write about Noah, if only because I am hurt that it means I have probably lost my chance to write a screenplay for the novel I have been waiting to have discovered. You may not be aware that I have been peddling my own historical fiction, fantasy adventure romance novel about the life and times of Noah and his angelic helpers. The Kindle version is still available on Amazon, but I think it can be considered "out of print" as my on-demand publisher, Xulon Press, has not received my annual &*@#$24.99 maintenance fee for several years now. (That seems like a scam to me; can it really cost twenty-five bucks per year to keep a digital file available?) Maybe if enough people try to order it, they will "find" the file in some archive. Who knows?

Back to the movie. I did read some reviews. Sophia Lee of World Magazine calls Noah "a dark psychological thriller wrapped up in a horror film."  She remarks that, "Noah makes serious attempts at grappling with deep theological questions.... But Christians shouldn't be surprised that a secular production would miss the most important and critical element of this Genesis story—the gospel of Christ." Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian says the film is "a big muscular movie" that is "bombastic and redundant and subtly disappointing." Bradshaw also says that writer/director Darren Aronofsky has pretty well expunged God from the story line. What a surprise: Hollywood ignores the elementary role of God in a biblical story. Who would have guessed that?

I will wait to see the movie for my final judgment, but I have to give Aronofsky credit for seeing what I saw in the story of the biblical Noah (Great minds...). My motivation for writing a Bible-based fiction/fantasy was the realization that all the characters in the Bible were real human beings with real human foibles and they struggled with real human (and demonic) enemies. Even though Aronofsky is an avowed atheist, he does invest what he calls "personal passion" in the Genesis story (according to Lee). He also claims to have done 10 years of research, which may explain how he ended up with a story idea so similar to mine.

Maybe the best thing about all the fuss over Noah, the movie is the fuss itself. As a wise woman in my Sunday School class said, it opens the door to spiritual conversations. Anything that turns that knob is at least partly a good thing. Maybe I should stop sulking and take advantage of the moment. Maybe I just did.