"The Bible" - Episode I

Last night, I watched the first installment of the History Channel’s special series, “The Bible,” produced by Mark Burnett, who has already brought us two blockbuster reality shows, “Survivor” and “The Voice.”  Burnett is married to Roma Downey, star of “Touched By An Angel.”  The two of them collaborated closely on this project.  I watched partly out of curiosity, and partly because I knew people would be asking me this week what I thought of it.  So here’s my spot review.

First, let’s stipulate that reducing the entire Bible to a ten-hour miniseries requires a lot of selectivity.  I knew from the outset that the writers and producers would have to pick and choose what parts of the Bible to highlight.  (For that reason, the rather presumptuous title for the series, “The Bible,” isn’t really accurate.  It’s more like “And Extremely Brief Introduction to the Biblical Narrative.”  But no TV network is going to buy that title.)  I have to say, I think they made the right choices in focusing on Noah, Abraham, and Moses for the first episode.  These are the three figures most central to the covenantal history of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Oddly enough, however, dramatic depiction of their lives had little to do with the covenants themselves. 

We never saw Noah and his family leave the ark and start life again, so we never were introduced to the universal covenant God made with Noah.  (It was only subtlety suggested by the appearance of a rainbow over the waters.)  The story of Abraham climaxed with his near-sacrifice of Isaac.  (I thought this part of the story was handled well.  The writing and acting were sensitive to the agony that Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah all must have felt.)  Once Isaac was spared, the narrator told us that Abraham had passed the test to become the father of a great nation.  This felt odd to me.  Hadn’t God already given him this role?  And hadn’t it already been secured by the birth of Isaac?  And why did Abraham need to prove himself to God in order to be the father of a nation, if all that meant was to be a biological ancestor?  With so little attention to the covenant God made with Abraham, it felt to me like Abraham’s story didn’t make a lot of sense.  If you already knew the whole story, of couse, you could fill in the blanks.  But if this was your introduction to the Bible, you might be scratching your head.

In the case of Moses, the necessity of telescoping his story not only deprived us of all the interesting contours that make it interesting, but also led to some whopping liberties with the book of Exodus.  For instance, in the TV show, Moses saw the burning bush at the foot of Mt. Sinai, so that the narrator could later tell us that Moses led the children of Israel back to the same mountain, where he received the Ten Commandments.  I guess that’s a good story line, but the burning bush was at the foot of Mount Horeb, not Mt. Sinai. On TV, Moses does not learn of his Hebrew identity until he is a grown man.  In the Bible, his natural mother helps to riase him.  In addition, the TV Moses apparently left Egypt and spent 40 years as a hermit in the wilderness before coming back to demand the freedom of the Hebrew slaves.  In the Bible, Moses got married, had children, and worked as a shepherd for his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.  The fact that he had to leave a settled existence in order to be a prophet of God is pivotal to the biblical narrative.  And for some reason, the band of Israelites who escaped Egypt looked on the TV screen like only a few hundred people, when Exodus 12:37-38 indicates that they were 600,000 strong, not including children, and were joined by a “mixed multitude.”  I was also disappointed that no attention was given to the wilderness wanderings, even in the narration.  We were taken directly from Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to Joshua preparing to take the city of Jericho.  We never got a whiff of trouble in the wilderness – no golden calf, no snakes, no complaining, no hunger or thirst, no explanation of why the people were meandering aimlessly around the Sinai wilderness for 40 years, when it should have taken them a few weeks.  How do you tell the exodus story without any of that?

But then, you can’t really do any of these stories justice if you only have ten hours to get through both Testaments.  The focus was on those portions of Genesis and Exodus that made for good TV: the ark precariously floating over stormy seas; Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac; Moses parting of the Red Sea, and so on.  As a result, the story appears much smoother than it does in the Scriptures.  The Abraham narrative alone needs a 10-hour mini-series.  The entire story of Moses could fill another ten hours.  But, as I said earlier, I actually think the selection of material, given the time constraints, was pretty reasonable.

The only aspect of last night’s installment that truly bothered me was the depiction of God.  God had a voice and also had a form that became most visible when three strangers came to visit Abraham and Sarah.  We see the faces of only two of those strangers, but we see just enough of the third figure to know (from all the promotional previews) that he is Jesus.  And by that time, you realize that whenever God speaks – to Abraham or to Moses – you are hearing the voice of Diogo Morgado, the actor who will play Jesus in later episodes. 

This is troubling to me for two reasons.  First, I had hoped that this representation of the Bible would be more sensitive to our religiously pluralistic society.  (I appreciated how sympathetically the movie portrayed Hagar and Ishmael, the ancestors of Mohammed.) Instead, it is already clear from the first episode that the writers are equating Jesus and God so thoroughly as to eliminate the possibility that Judaism and Islam worship the same God as Christians.  Second, to say that Jesus appeared to Abraham the same way he would have appeared to his disciples 1800 years later is to deprive Jesus of his humanity.  If the historical Jesus was consciously present as a 30-something-year-old throughout all eternity, then he was God, but he was not human – he only appeared to be human.  Jesus’ full humanity, including his birth, his maturation, his gradual self-awareness, and his obedience to God, was essential to his ability to be our Savior.  To depict God as one and the same with the physical Jesus of history also denies the Trinity (God as Three Persons in One) in favor of “Christomonism” – the reduction of the entire Godhead to only one Person.  (It also begs the question of why Jesus ever needed to pray!)

If “The Bible” prompts people of faith and no faith to ask more questions or read the Bible more closely, then it is for the good.  Of course, it may also serve as a substitute for actually reading the Bible, in which case it already leaves a lot to be desired.

Copyright 2013 by J. Mark Lawson

Comments

[Jennifer Radcliffe]

I actually did notice some of that. I'm happy about it too- I've learned so much about the Bible since we started coming to UCC! You know what else bothered me? It's silly, it has nothing to do with what you mentioned. It bothered me that they still have Jesus looking like he came from Eastern Europe. I think he would have had shorter, darker, and curlier hair and beard.