Italy/UK, 1977
Joseph: "Once you have mastered the craft, you will be free. Always remember, only those who know how to use their hands are free. Only they are not dependent on anyone else."
Part Two
Joseph delivers this bit of dialogue, among the first lines spoken in the film, to his young apprentices, whom he is training in the art of carpentry. That these lines have no real connection to the narrative or action of the film makes them all the more intriguing. What are Burgess and Zeffirelli saying here?
If you're like me, you believe the entire Bible can be understood within the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis - everything proceeding is just reiteration. One of the themes established in those first chapters, a theme continued throughout the Biblical texts, concerns God's relationship to men who work with their hands. These men are like Cain (whose name means "to possess" or "to create"), or the builders of Babel. They are farmers and not shepherds. They struggle against the earth, and rely more on the strength of their arms than God. Between Law and freedom, they always choose freedom - they are Samson. They do not accept God's point of view, because they find it absurd. Like Jonah and Qoheleth, they accuse God of being both too harsh and too merciful.
Most traditional interpretations of the Bible paint these men in a harsh light. After all, these are men who bend the rules and defy God. They often commit sins against their neighbors - they are murderers and warlords. Moses killed an Egyptian to save his "one of his brethren" - these men would kill the Egyptian because he is their enemy. Many teachers portray Jonah as a coward, or a whiner. They will attribute "Ecclesiastes" to Solomon, a sinful king whose heart was often far from God, and refer to it as the summation of a sinful life - or else they will overemphasize the book's "uplifting" ending (as if the last verses provide refutation to everything stated previously…they don't, they only reestablish it).
The Bible's attitude toward these men is hardly so negative - vague at the least. God rebukes Cain for killing Abel, and then protects Cain for the rest of his life, promising to punish sevenfold anyone who harms him. Why wasn't similar provision given to the innocent Abel? God is in constant conflict with Moses (a man of the Law if ever there was one), but calls David (a man of action if ever there was one) a man after His own heart.
Pious thinkers claim to understand the strange alliances God makes in the Hebrew Bible. They provide rationale for the brutal murder of the Amalekite women and children (a massacre unparalleled in the Qu'ran). They explain in academic terms why Abel (whose name means "vanity" or "vapor") was killed, and Cain was spared. Their reasoning satisfies nothing of the blood spilled, and their rationality is "the way to dusty death."
The teachings of Christ come in direct conflict with traditional interpretations of scripture - nothing he could have said or done would have convinced the Pharisees of his legitimacy. When the Hebrews, both in the Gospels and in Zeffirelli's film, refer to the Law, they call it "the Law of Moses." It is painfully apparent throughout both the film and the Gospels that Christ has not been sent by Moses' Law, anymore than he was sent by "the Word of God" (as most contemporary conservatives understand it). He was the Law, the Word, "I Am" (eh-yeh asher ey-yeh*), embodied in flesh.
The Bible is a strange, complicated book with a strange, complicated God - if Jesus is the Son of God, he must be a strange, complicated man. He must oppose the simplified, crude misunderstandings held by teachers of the Law and yet reflect its subtlest truths. Christ's genius is his ability to do this - if his words, claims, and actions are largely the creation of early Christian tradition, then the Gospel writers must have been the most brilliant Bible scholars ever to walk the earth. Throughout both the Gospels and Zeffirelli's film, Christ maintains with perfection the balancing act that God Himself maintains throughout the Hebrew Bible, the balancing act that so infuriated Jonah and Job. He sits with the sinners, and refuses to rebuke the most obvious violations of the Law. When he does get around to rebuking, he chooses the pious as his target. When questioned about his dinner dates with sinners, he replies, "It is the sick who need a doctor." But if we examine his life carefully, it seems that "the sick," more often than not, are those the world presumes to be healthy.
Does God really sympathize more with Cain than Abel? Is this the esoteric lesson of the scriptures? I don't know. I don't think there's an easy answer. I have yet to meet a Bible student who can satisfactorily explain why the same God who saved Nineveh because her animals were innocent (read Jonah 4:11, and keep in mind that Nineveh never actually changed her ways...Jonah was right after all) was the same God who refused mercy to the Amalekites. Is God merciful or vengeful? Does He advocate both self-reliance and reliance on Him? Why does the Law teach one thing while God, and those whom He loves, do another?
"Jesus of Nazareth" makes no attempt to answer these questions. What makes the film remarkable is that it refuses to gloss over the strangeness of God. It understands the eccentricity and contradiction of God's character, and it portrays Jesus with similar eccentricity and contradiction. When Joseph is teaching his apprentices about using their hands, we know that he has understood something in the Bible that most Pharisees (or modern-day preachers) have missed. He is teaching them that there's more to the world, and the Bible, than their Sabbath school teachers will tell them.
The Pharisees in "Jesus of Nazareth" monopolize scriptural interpretation the way Fundamentalists and Evangelicals do today. (The film is actually more generous to the Pharisees than the Gospels themselves, giving pivotal roles to Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, pro-Jesus Pharisees who attempt to sway the Sanhedrin in his favor). These narrow-minded interpreters are like spectators who see only one color on the spectrum - Christ is the prism that breaks the spectrum into its myriad. When this happens, they choose to deny the prism because they cannot admit the existence of multiple colors. This raises the troubling question of who the prism (Christ) belongs to. What tradition can claim him? In "Jesus of Nazareth," when Pontius Pilate (played by the incomparable Rod Steiger) says, "All right, all right…I'll talk to your Jesus," the Pharisees deny him - "Not ours, sir." "Then whose?" retorts Pilate. "Whose?"
This is a point upon which the Biblical writers themselves differ. The author of Matthew places Jesus firmly within Hebraic tradition of the Messiah. Meanwhile, The Hebraic tradition (particularly Isaiah) stresses the universality of the Messiah and, ultimately, Judaism itself. For Luke, the answer is obvious - he belongs to all mankind. The author of John is more elusive - in John, Christ belongs to everyone and no one at once.
Films about Christ usually stress his universality, because films about Christ are made for Gentile audiences. Nevertheless, they never ignore his Hebraic roots. This is what makes E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten" so unique - it gives the Christ story a pagan backdrop. Zeffirelli's film is more open-ended, and yet more straightforward, very much like the Gospel of John. Christ is obviously of another world - if he is God, then he is no more Jewish than God would be.
One of the most interesting aspects of "Jesus of Nazareth" concerns the thirty years before Christ began his ministry. The Gospels are vague about this period. We know he lived with his parents as a boy, but that leaves at least a decade, if not seventeen years, unaccounted for. There are ancient traditions that claim Christ traveled the world with Joseph of Arimathea (most notably England, which was frequented by Jewish merchants in the first century), and visited adherents of many religions. Incidentally, tales of Jesus (or a man very much like him) exist in Buddhist texts from India and Tibet†, claiming that that he came from Israel with teachings remarkably similar to those found in the Gospels.
Does Zeffirelli advocate this view? No explicitly. But when the Magi come, it is to see a king foretold by their own religions‡. And when Christ begins his mission, he has been gone for many years.
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*It is a tragically little-known fact that "I Am that I Am" is a mistranslation, and is more accurately translated as, "I Shall Be with them in this sorrow, as I Shall Be with them in other sorrows," or more simply, "I Shall Be as I Shall Be."
†Information on the legends concerning Joseph of Arimathea's travels to Britain can be found here and here. Information on the Buddhist texts that supposedly refer to Christ can be found here, with refutations here. (Note: both the pro-Buddhist site and the anti-Buddhist site are written with obvious bias. Most mainstream historians don't accept these texts as being accurate, and most conservative Christians make this claim when trying to refute the texts. However, mainstream historians generally don't accept the Gospels, either.)
‡Many Bible scholars claim that Messianic prophecies entered other religions via Judaism; e.g., the Jews in Babylon might have passed their scriptures to the Zoroastrian priests, who incorporated Jewish prophecy into Zoroastrianism. However, such assertions are pure speculation, based on guesswork - there has yet to be a conclusive explaination as to why the Magi followed the star, and how they knew about the star's significance and relation to Israel.
Continue to Part Three
Return to Part One
