Bartchy had his survey course, “History of Early Christians,” watch a section of a documentary film on Christianity to review. I thought I would share my own thoughts here. Part One of the film “Two Thousand Years: The History of Christianity” (1999), a section entitled “The Birth of a New Religion: 1st and 2nd Centuries,” gives a standard outline of the first two centuries of the movement later called Christianity. Interviewing many respected scholars, including Jim Charlesworth, N.T. Wright, Henry Chadwick, Paula Frederickson, and Elaine Pagels, the documentary does have its foundation in solid scholarship on the early Christian movement. The film briefly mentions the person of Jesus, while especially highlighting the event of the crucifixion and how this might have affected his followers. Though it is not thoroughly examined (and there is a humorous moment when Jim Charlesworth seems to represent the resurrected Christ), the resurrection is discussed as a defining moment for the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ disciples are surprised by both the crucifixion and resurrection, after which they reinterpret the meaning of Jesus’ messiahship. At this point, the documentary outlines the Book of Acts (particularly the issue of Gentile inclusion) in an uncritical manner, moves into the challenges of Roman suspicion of their movement and their subsequent martyrdom in the second century, while finally ending on the crisis of Gnosticism which is quashed by Irenaeus (who is depicted as the sole canonizer of the New Testament and the original author of orthodox Christian doctrine) [catch a free preview of the bit on Irenaeus here].

We can hardly blame the filmmakers for a simplistic presentation of facts that one finds in standard introductions to Christian origins. They cannot solve in 40 minutes all of the conundrums that have confounded New Testament scholars throughout modernity. In fact, there are several quite strong points that should be highlighted, especially comments from N.T. Wright on the influence of Paul within the early movement. In perhaps the strongest articulation of the content of this movement’s ideology, Wright acknowledges that Paul established a “counter empire, a rival empire, with little cells of people giving allegiance to Jesus rather than Caesar.” Wright notes that, while this counter empire is not quite like the Roman Empire, it is “sufficiently subversive to be dangerous.”

Elsewhere in the film, however, we have little discussion of the counter-cultural nature of the Jesus movement and hardly any mention of Jesus’ actual teachings themselves. Though Wright mentions that the new movement is a “new family” created by God, we have no explanation of how this idea challenges conventional understandings of the patriarchal family within the Greco-Roman world. Even with Wright’s comment that the Jesus followers are considered subversive and dangerous, we have no explanation of how this movement is subversive or why it would be considered dangerous.

Further, Jim Charlesworth’s necessary caution that the early Jesus followers are not “Christians” and did not have “churches” is muted by the narrator’s comment that by the end of the first century, “Christianity” is born–implying that a whole monolithic and organized religion already developed within decades. This is paired with the comments of Fr. Paul Lawlor, who suggests that eucharistic meals in the second century would have looked similar to what goes on in small parish churches today. The film has some strange shots in its take on second century Christianity. With mysterious music, images of catacombs, and three people in matching robes around a table, we have the picture of a strange secretive cult (perhaps bolstering certain Roman texts against the Christians cited in the film). Such moves in the documentary are overly simplistic and somewhat careless. In sum, the film does a decent job of surveying a few of the key issues at stake in the Jesus movement, but does a poor job of giving the viewer a reliable picture of “on the ground” social realities. This, however, is a broader symptom of surveys in Christian origins more generally.