So you’re a Christian. You take your faith and beliefs very seriously and you read your bible religiously (no pun intended). You’ve heard the stories of Adam and Eve, Moses, Isaac, Jacob, Lot, Joseph, Samson, Noah, and many other heroes since you were in Sunday school and now as an adult, you read them for yourself and managed to decipher the deeper meanings behind them. Then one day you come across a movie retelling one of your favourite bible stories and you decide to turn that evening into movie night with the family. Twenty minutes into it, you and your family members start throwing befuddled looks at each other. Finally, you stand up, retrieve your bible and with intense folds on your forehead you page through the chapters until you find the chapter and figure the movie is based on. With a sigh of relief at the restoration of your confidence in your bible knowledge, you click your tongue and proclaim “No man. This is not how it happens in the bible! Where do they get this stuff?”

In 2019, global box office revenue hit a record US$45.5 Billion with Hollywood still being the granddaddy of this global business. Since the birth of cinema, film makers have been bringing their original ideas to life on the silver screen. When these are in short supply, books, novels, short stories, magazine and newspaper articles have also provided rich material for the movies. Unfortunately, to the irritation of most Christians, the Bible has been frequently used as a source of inspiration as well. This process would not be problematic were it not for Hollywood’s fondness for deviating from the source material and taking artistic freedoms with the stories. So why the inaccuracies? Are they deliberate or just the products of ignorant screen writers?

As Christians, we are understandably protective and prickly about scriptural integrity with regards to entertainment. The Bible, our life manual, is the blueprint of our very existence and any bastardisation of it would be an affront to all we hold dear. However it seems the Hollywood establishment does not share our passion. So, I decided to put my righteous indignation aside for a bit and look deeper into the business of film making being a big movie lover myself. Boiling the issue down to its raw essence, Hollywood, just like any other commercial entity, is a money-making endeavour. When taking the decision to make these movies, they are not driven by their deep love for the Christian faith. They would’ve realised an opportunity to pad their bank accounts by saving on a marketing budget and bringing a familiar story to theatres. When filmmakers look at the bible, all they see is another piece of source material no different from a Stephen King novel or a Clive Barker short story. So, they alter, add, enhance and distort some details that may be cinematically inconvenient to the story they want to tell.

The Bible is terse and minimalist in its story telling. This leaves the door wide open to the reader’s own interpretation and imagination to fill in the gaps.

When film makers realise an opportunity to make some money off a story in the bible with scant details, they fill in the cavities with varying degrees of imagination. The Young Messiah (2016) is a film that revolves around a seven-year-old Jesus Christ and how he discovers his life’s purpose after his family’s return to Nazareth from Egypt. The writers of the New Testament say rather little about this period apart from the reflection that “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” – Luke 2 Vs 52. Hardly enough material to make a 110-minute feature out of. So, the filmmakers based their movie on Anne Rice’s book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt instead. The same person who wrote The Vampire Chronicles by the way. Just saying. The story of Noah only spans Chapters 5 to 9 in the book of Genesis. The majority of which focus on the construction of the ark and the duration of the rain. So, with such little information to work with, the makers of the film Noah (2014) had to add flesh to the story bones by adding imaginary devices such as giant rock people, mining for Zohar, the evil stowaway on the ark and Noah’s baby murdering conviction.

As I stated before, filmmakers are out to make money from their efforts and that comes from ticket sales. To widen their potential audience, they need to appeal to both the Christian crowd and the non-believers alike. To capture those who take a more scientific view of life rather than putting stock in miracles, film producers will water down, bleach or even totally retell a story.  In Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) director Ridley Scott opted to use a messenger of God in the form of a child to speak to Moses as opposed to the Almighty Himself speaking through the burning bush. In the Bible, God uses Aaron to transform the Nile, this is totally omitted in the movie. Instead the Nile turns red after hundreds of crocodiles kill themselves and others in a violent frenzy. Due to this, frogs migrate from the river onto land in search of dwindling food. And that is how the movie explains away the plague of the frogs. After the frogs fail to survive on land, the stench of their rotting corpses attracts an unusual number of flies and soon locusts follow. So, you get the idea.

In all fairness, there are some small deviations from scripture in these bible movies that are used as a device to progress the story and take little to nothing away from the major truth. However, when a movie like Noah replaces the main theme of the story from judgement of sin to “The Creator” (the name God is never mentioned in the movie) punishing man for environmental destruction instead, it’s just heresy. A departure like that and the “scientific” explanation for the plagues in Exodus affect the way non-believers and lukewarm Christians view God’s majesty and omnipotence. A visual interpretation is so powerful to the extent that most people take the themes and ideals therein as fact. Rather than read the bible, most who have questions about the faith will simply watch a movie based on a bible story and be done. Even those who do read the bible may have their recollections altered by watching such retellings. The human mind is like a sponge and is regrettably very inefficient at filtering what to and what not to retain. Whether these creative liberties are the result of spiritual influences by agents of the Devil or simply commercial decisions and narrative conveniences, the effect is the same, diminishing the supremacy and invincibility of GOD.

I will put my head on the block here and say that I am extremely doubtful that there will ever be a movie that will win the universal praise of the Christian audience even if it is indeed scripturally faithful. Debate still rages on about why Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew, is always portrayed as a blue-eyed Caucasian. Was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple, apricot, grape, pomegranate or pear? Was Jonah swallowed by a shark, whale or some sort of now extinct marine reptile? Who was Cain’s wife? And what type of fish was it that Jesus Christ fed the 5 000 with? With these and many other matters not explicitly detailed in The Bible, there is really no way that a film maker can truly create a visual story to please all evangelical critics and the general Christian movie lover. On our end we must never forget that Hollywood and its global cousins are not theological scholars or Evangelists, so we must not hold them to that standard. So next time you come across a “Bible Movie” with a star-studded cast of Oscar winners and a director fresh off a giant alien robot movie, I advise you to give it a hard pass. Unless, of course, you’re willing to tolerate some measure of imagination and fiction mixed in with your favourite bible tale.  Just stick to reading through the paper pages of the Good Book itself. It hasn’t disappointed me yet.