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A review by smart_as_paint
Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait by Paul Verhoeven
2.0
It is impossible to review this book without first acknowledging the name on the cover. Paul Verhoeven is a world-renowned director responsible for such children-corrupting films as Robocop and Basic Instinct. He recently made a splash for bemoaning the lack of sex in new James Bond films. He's a horny old bastard, but in an ornery way that is difficult not to love.
Jesus of Nazareth: a Realistic Portrait is a book born out of Vehoeven's personal fascination with the historical Jesus. What started as background research for a future movie, morphed into a lifelong obsession. And because gun-shy Hollywood is scared of religious backlash, that untitled Jesus movie became this academic book.
This is a celebrity book— published with the hope that hapless book buyers will be wooed by a recognizable author and open up their pockets. It's a cynical approach to publishing and it definitely worked on me. I'm approaching this book as a fan or Verhoeven's movies and as a secular patron of the twin churches of Goodreads and Letterboxd. My understanding of Jesus comes from musical theatre. I didn't read this book for Jesus of Nazareth. I read it for Paul of Starship Troopers.
Somewhere between academic history and the first draft of a screenplay, Jesus of Nazareth separates the Myth from the Man. And it does so with a juicy eye for the dramatic. This text isn't just about telling a story, it's here to academically undermine the Sunday School narrative with a messy history. It's 200 pages of Hollywood gossip followed by a 100-page bibliography.
Verhoeven begins by addressing the elephant in the room: there are no primary sources. The New Testament is both written after the fact and a foundational work of religious scripture. It's here to canonize Christian faith not present a historical fact. In order to sieve away the changes, biblical scholars must adopt a longitudinal approach.
What do the changing translations reveal about the structural agenda surrounding Jesus?
And how might one mix that agenda with the lives of historical rebel leaders and work backward to puzzle out a single human life?
It reminds me of high school statistics. With both biblical texts and the translations' trajectory, it's possible to deduce what likely happened before the first source. As an outsider, unfamiliar with the techniques of biblical historians, this is an eye-opening process.
But it's also one that invites skepticism.
As timescales increase, uncertainty balloons. And this type of narrative analysis is an inexact science— especially when trying to gaze through the fog of religious dogma. Verhoeven qualifies his every conclusion with "most likely" and "one possible conclusion." It gets to the point where each story about Jesus starts to feel apocryphal. Not that this is inherently a bad thing— nuance and caution are staples of a balanced academic breakfast. But it's nuance and caution that are so easily undercut by Verhoeven's imagined screenplay.
And what a screenplay it is. Each one provides a snapshot of what a historical Jesus film would look like— objective descriptions to the director. In truth, they should be the most engaging part of the text— who doesn't want the inside scoop on what their favorite artist is thinking? But instead, they're just uncomfortable perspectives from a convention-flaunting old man.
Page 31 is where the problems start. Once Verhoeven abruptly transitions from hermetic descriptions of Roman power structures to the inflammatory screenplay of Jesus' theorized conception, I lose faith in his ability to be an objective writer.
"A Jewish girl, no older than sixteen, hides inside a house. Her family has been brutally slain. A Roman soldier finds her and rapes her. The girl's name is Mary" (31).
Paul… buddy— you can't have it both ways. The truth (which Verhoeven fully endorses) is that there is no truth. There is only evidence and conjecture. But the silver screen doesn't have time for opposing interpretations. It's there to get butts in seats. Verhoeven refuses to settle for ambiguity. He provides lip service to multiple possibilities. But his cinema brain boils it to a single film, a film that takes glee in trampling what you know.
Ultimately, I'm left with a lesson that I probably should have guessed from the Thriftbooks summary. If you want to learn about film, read a book about film. If you want to learn about the historical Jesus, find a book written by a Jesus historian.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
And that is where I could (and probably should) have ended this review— with a neat (if unsatisfying) conclusion. But I still have unfinished business here. And long-winded Goodreads reviews are the closest things I have to therapy.
Hold on to your seamless robes, it's time for a postscript.
Something about Verhoeven's characterization of Jesus bothered me. And the weird thing is, I'm not a religious person, nor do I have any attachment to the divine. "Profane" is one of my top 5 adjectives. And yet… I still can't shake the feeling that some ghosts should not be mocked.
Or at least, should be mocked more carefully.
Jesus is no longer a man. We are too many years and too many translations away from the original Christ for his humanity to persist in anything more than the abstract. And that story has as much to do with the people tell it as it does the figure it is about. Stories are snowballs rolled down freshly powdered hills. They start small but with time grow into unrecognizable behemoths. And no story has rolled quite large as this one. From Handel to Herobrine, Jesus has become a load-bearing component of our modern world.
But precisely, what does Jesus stand for? To return to the snowball metaphor, rampaging snowballs pick up debris— and so has Jesus. In the wake of so many scisms and reformations, the remnants of Jesus's original message are little more than faith is good.
And while that's a noble message, it's not the end of the story. Because The Story is what makes Jesus special. And so when we talk about or pray to or even just acknowledge his presence. We engage with a tradition of a hundred generations of people who have found divinity in Christ before us. And even if we can't find meaning in the life of a 1st-century Jewish preacher, we can find meaning knowing a lot of other people have. The snowball is so massive and so slow that it's easy to forget it's not part of the landscape. But it still feels nice to throw on your best snow pants and give it a push.
Verhoeven almost completely ignores the lived reality of Jesus as a story. Even while using deductive analysis of that story to inform his screenplay. I admit that this narrative angle is perhaps not exactly what the text was about and I am projecting my own thoughts onto a 20-year-old book written by the director of Robocop. But the living story feels too central to the conversation to dismiss. And this is the post-script to my review, so I can write what I want.
On the final page of the epilogue, Verhoeven calls the longevity of Jesus's story "a miracle". But Paul, perhaps the real miracle was the story we told along the way.
Jesus of Nazareth: a Realistic Portrait is a book born out of Vehoeven's personal fascination with the historical Jesus. What started as background research for a future movie, morphed into a lifelong obsession. And because gun-shy Hollywood is scared of religious backlash, that untitled Jesus movie became this academic book.
This is a celebrity book— published with the hope that hapless book buyers will be wooed by a recognizable author and open up their pockets. It's a cynical approach to publishing and it definitely worked on me. I'm approaching this book as a fan or Verhoeven's movies and as a secular patron of the twin churches of Goodreads and Letterboxd. My understanding of Jesus comes from musical theatre. I didn't read this book for Jesus of Nazareth. I read it for Paul of Starship Troopers.
Somewhere between academic history and the first draft of a screenplay, Jesus of Nazareth separates the Myth from the Man. And it does so with a juicy eye for the dramatic. This text isn't just about telling a story, it's here to academically undermine the Sunday School narrative with a messy history. It's 200 pages of Hollywood gossip followed by a 100-page bibliography.
Verhoeven begins by addressing the elephant in the room: there are no primary sources. The New Testament is both written after the fact and a foundational work of religious scripture. It's here to canonize Christian faith not present a historical fact. In order to sieve away the changes, biblical scholars must adopt a longitudinal approach.
What do the changing translations reveal about the structural agenda surrounding Jesus?
And how might one mix that agenda with the lives of historical rebel leaders and work backward to puzzle out a single human life?
It reminds me of high school statistics. With both biblical texts and the translations' trajectory, it's possible to deduce what likely happened before the first source. As an outsider, unfamiliar with the techniques of biblical historians, this is an eye-opening process.
But it's also one that invites skepticism.
As timescales increase, uncertainty balloons. And this type of narrative analysis is an inexact science— especially when trying to gaze through the fog of religious dogma. Verhoeven qualifies his every conclusion with "most likely" and "one possible conclusion." It gets to the point where each story about Jesus starts to feel apocryphal. Not that this is inherently a bad thing— nuance and caution are staples of a balanced academic breakfast. But it's nuance and caution that are so easily undercut by Verhoeven's imagined screenplay.
And what a screenplay it is. Each one provides a snapshot of what a historical Jesus film would look like— objective descriptions to the director. In truth, they should be the most engaging part of the text— who doesn't want the inside scoop on what their favorite artist is thinking? But instead, they're just uncomfortable perspectives from a convention-flaunting old man.
Page 31 is where the problems start. Once Verhoeven abruptly transitions from hermetic descriptions of Roman power structures to the inflammatory screenplay of Jesus' theorized conception, I lose faith in his ability to be an objective writer.
"A Jewish girl, no older than sixteen, hides inside a house. Her family has been brutally slain. A Roman soldier finds her and rapes her. The girl's name is Mary" (31).
Paul… buddy— you can't have it both ways. The truth (which Verhoeven fully endorses) is that there is no truth. There is only evidence and conjecture. But the silver screen doesn't have time for opposing interpretations. It's there to get butts in seats. Verhoeven refuses to settle for ambiguity. He provides lip service to multiple possibilities. But his cinema brain boils it to a single film, a film that takes glee in trampling what you know.
Ultimately, I'm left with a lesson that I probably should have guessed from the Thriftbooks summary. If you want to learn about film, read a book about film. If you want to learn about the historical Jesus, find a book written by a Jesus historian.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
And that is where I could (and probably should) have ended this review— with a neat (if unsatisfying) conclusion. But I still have unfinished business here. And long-winded Goodreads reviews are the closest things I have to therapy.
Hold on to your seamless robes, it's time for a postscript.
Something about Verhoeven's characterization of Jesus bothered me. And the weird thing is, I'm not a religious person, nor do I have any attachment to the divine. "Profane" is one of my top 5 adjectives. And yet… I still can't shake the feeling that some ghosts should not be mocked.
Or at least, should be mocked more carefully.
Jesus is no longer a man. We are too many years and too many translations away from the original Christ for his humanity to persist in anything more than the abstract. And that story has as much to do with the people tell it as it does the figure it is about. Stories are snowballs rolled down freshly powdered hills. They start small but with time grow into unrecognizable behemoths. And no story has rolled quite large as this one. From Handel to Herobrine, Jesus has become a load-bearing component of our modern world.
But precisely, what does Jesus stand for? To return to the snowball metaphor, rampaging snowballs pick up debris— and so has Jesus. In the wake of so many scisms and reformations, the remnants of Jesus's original message are little more than faith is good.
And while that's a noble message, it's not the end of the story. Because The Story is what makes Jesus special. And so when we talk about or pray to or even just acknowledge his presence. We engage with a tradition of a hundred generations of people who have found divinity in Christ before us. And even if we can't find meaning in the life of a 1st-century Jewish preacher, we can find meaning knowing a lot of other people have. The snowball is so massive and so slow that it's easy to forget it's not part of the landscape. But it still feels nice to throw on your best snow pants and give it a push.
Verhoeven almost completely ignores the lived reality of Jesus as a story. Even while using deductive analysis of that story to inform his screenplay. I admit that this narrative angle is perhaps not exactly what the text was about and I am projecting my own thoughts onto a 20-year-old book written by the director of Robocop. But the living story feels too central to the conversation to dismiss. And this is the post-script to my review, so I can write what I want.
On the final page of the epilogue, Verhoeven calls the longevity of Jesus's story "a miracle". But Paul, perhaps the real miracle was the story we told along the way.