Adaptations: The Gospel According to St. Matthew

There is a teacherly tendency among film adaptations of the Gospels, in their conscientious efforts to sugar the bitter pill of Scripture and make the ancient stories more accessible and engaging. Dispensing with the spareness of the Biblical text, filmmakers recast the life of Jesus into a more expansive and emotionally involving realist form. And the severity of Christian judgment is softened with a kindly, relatable Christ, whose benevolence and all-too-human frailties are foregrounded. Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, portrays, in the words of its director Franco Zeffirelli, “an ordinary man—gentle, fragile, simple,” whose power consists in a humble moral gravitas, an unblinking blue-eyed gaze which can awe an angry mob into dropping its condemnatory stones. Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ casts Jesus as a struggling human beset by fear, depression, and lust, and dramatizes spiritual themes with a self-questioning Christ engaged in profuse philosophical dialogue with other characters. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ makes explicit the brutal suffering Jesus underwent in carrying out his sacrificial mission, dying for all mankind because he loved us so much. What is striking about Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew is its complete lack of interest in this conventional mission of humanization and relatability: his Jesus is strange, angry, and otherworldly, and his film bereft of dramatic elements of identification, conflict, and suspense which typically engage viewers. But somehow, by insisting on the remoteness of the story and the foreignness of the figure, Pasolini’s film conveys a more powerful experience of “faith” than its peers.