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I've often talked here about the role played by historical consultants in films and documentaries (and I have written a little about my limited experience of the latter). In RogueClassicism David Meadows draws attention to the following delightful piece in today's Times:

Into battle with Alexander
Oliver Stone is turning the deeds of Alexander the Great into a sword and sandals epic. Historian Robin Lane Fox agreed to advise on period detail — just as long as he could lead the cavalry

Big movies are notorious for trampling on history; I have just given the year’s biggest movie the chance of trampling on a historian. In November, Oliver Stone’s film about Alexander the Great will burst on the world. I have been the film’s historical adviser and in September last year I galloped on my stallion across the Moroccan desert at the head of Oliver’s cavalry charge. We were filming the battle of Gaugamela, Alexander’s greatest victory over the Persians . . . . .

. . . . . My colleagues told me that for historians, Stone was supposed to be like Satan, perhaps because they had seen his film of Nixon and I had not. Like the poet John Milton, I have to say I quickly became very fond of Satan. Anyway, the claim that Stone has no historical sense is completely untrue.

I was stretched, as he was, by constant consultations which were concerned to do as much justice as possible to the little evidence which we have . . . .

The full story is apparently to be told in a documentary this week:

Charging for Alexander
BBC Four, Tuesday, 8.30pm.

Historian Robin Lane Fox is one of the world's leading experts on Alexander the Great. His advice has been sought by some of Hollywood's biggest filmmakers as they've looked to bring the life of history's greatest military commander to the big screen.

Now Oliver Stone has succeeded where other directors have failed, with his film Alexander, set to reach cinemas later this year with Colin Farrell in the title role. Naturally, Stone turned to Lane Fox to help him get the film's historical details right, and Lane Fox agreed, on one condition. He wanted Stone to help him fulfil a lifetime ambition: to ride with the Macedonian cavalry.

Charging for Alexander follows the eccentric don from his Oxford home to the film's Moroccan desert set, where he dresses in period armour and encounters a sceptical crew, a foul-mouthed leading man, and a director who insists on making up historically inaccurate names for his soldiers. The experience marks a bizarre change from Lane Fox's usual life as a teacher, but will he make the final cut?

Definitely on the one to watch list.

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Following on from my previous blog entry, the IMDb entry for Kenneth Colley, who plays Jesus in the opening (post-credit) sequence in Life of Brian, lists him as an actor in another New Testament related film after Life of Brian, the TVM Peter and Paul. I can recall seeing this on television over twenty years ago and particularly remember Anthony Hopkins's Paul shouting at Peter at the Antioch incident, "You are like a reed!" I have wanted to get hold of a copy of this for some time, and it seems that it is now available on video, in the USA at least, so that's a must. While looking at the IMDb on Peter and Paul, I noticed that it features José Ferrer (1909-92) as Gamaliel. He played an excellent Herod Antipas in The Greatest Story Ever Told. In fact, the cast of Peter and Paul looks remarkable -- Raymond Burr as Herod Agrippa, Herbert Lom as Barnabas. I am looking forward to seeing it again.

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Good to see reference to the twenty-fifth anniversary release of Life of Brian on Paleojudaica; this is from the Houston Chronicle

'Passion' gives 'Life of Brian' something to celebrate
By ROGER MOORE
The Orlando Sentinel

Pythoner Eric Idle suggested Jesus Christ, Lust for Glory, playing off the British title of Patton: Lust For Glory, Jones recalls.

"The more we worked on it, the more interesting and outrageous it became. We reread the Gospels, changed the story to Brian, a contemporary of Jesus. We realized, very quickly, that the real humor lay not in what Christ said, but in the fact that 2,000 years after Christ, you've got everybody still killing each other because we can't get together on how we should worship and accept his message of peace and love."

In other words, people were misunderstanding the message of Jesus, right from the start. "Blessed are the cheesemakers," one character thinks he hears Jesus say off in the distance during the Sermon on the Mount.

Python and future Brazil director Terry Gilliam did the exceptional biblical production design, "but we lucked out in shooting in Monastir, Tunisia, the same place Franco Zeffirelli made Jesus of Nazareth," Jones says. "A lot of the same sets were still there. Just had to dress them up a bit.

"Of course, it also meant that you could be shooting your version of the Sermon on the Mount, and some elderly Tunisian extra would say, 'Well, that's not the way Zeffirelli did it.'"

I've heard this before, but I love that story. One thing I like to point out when showing students the Sermon on the Mount scene from Life fo Brian is that the Pythons also clearly chose an actor who looked like Robert Powell's Jesus to play Jesus in that opening scene, the only time Jesus appears in the film. The actor is a certain Kenneth Colley, about whom IMDb gives us this trivia, "The only actor to play an Imperial officer in more than one Star Wars film (not including extras)."

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An article on Christian History and Biography discusses "divine purpose" in current popular culture:

The Lord of the Rings, The Passion of the Christ, and the Highway of Holiness
Has God been "re-routing" us through popular movies, books, and cultural events?
By Chris Armstrong

One recent cultural event has come not so much as a push, but as a dynamite blast, helping to clear from the highway's on-ramps a huge, craggy stone of falsehood. This "blast" is Mel Gibson's portrayal of the Passion of Jesus. Not without flaw, this movie nonetheless serves the church in the best possible way: it reminds us that the common portrayal of Jesus as a Nice Man with a moralistic message is a hollow fiction. The Nice-Man Jesus crumbles before the truth of who he actually was and what he did for us. Gibson has dealt a strong blow to the complacency of quasi-Christian moralism, clearing the way to the atonement Christ provided through his sacrifice.

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I have added the following new entry to the NTGateway Scholars: H page:

Harry A. Hahne

Hahne is at Golden Gate Seminary in the USA. It's a homepage with lots of information including full-text articles on Biblical Studies and Computer-Assisted Bible Research.

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One of the new essays on May's SBL Forum is:

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, "A Brewing Thought, a Spot of Tea: Scholarly Writing as Adventure"

This essay considers some of my rubrics of writing in general, and writing a thesis/dissertation in particular, as a creative, fulfilling adventure.

It's a lively and enjoyable piece and ideal for you if you are struggling with writing a dissertation at the moment. The author explains her metaphorical strategy for avoiding writer's block and for enjoying the creative experience of writing. I have one query about the beginning point of the essay, though:

Writing tends to be the bane of existence for many teachers and students in higher education. Put simply, writing is often a necessary, but neither a sufficient nor a satisfying burden.

Is this so? I must admit that writing is pretty much my favourite part of the job; I just wish I could find more time to do it -- that's where my burden lies and I guess that that's the same for many colleagues. Would that we had the more time to indulge in the adventure that Kirk-Duggan describes!

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I commented yesterday on Zeba Crook's homepage. I would now like to draw attention to this element on his homepage:

An English Reader's Synopsis

This is an introduction to a project on which Crook has been working for some years. There are several examples in the PDF file to which the above page links. Crook is attempting a major English language Synopsis in which the use of a "source language translation" (i.e. literal, non-idiomatic) will help the reader to see as many of the actual agreements in the Greek as possible, agreements that are sometimes obscured in "target language translation" Synopses like Throckmorton's Gospel Parallels. Stephen Carlson makes some useful comments on this in Hypotyposeis and asks about the target audience for the proposal. I would say that there is a potential market at least among the growing number of undergraduate Theology students in the UK who do not do Greek. Greek went optional on the Theology BA Honours in 1995 here in Birmingham and most, if not all, other British Universities are the same. When I was in Oxford, Greek was still compulsory for Single Honours Theology BA students but I understand that this is the case no longer. But the students without Greek still want to do courses on Jesus and the Gospels and it will be useful to be able to push them towards a resource like the one proposed by Crook. When I am teaching New Testament courses to our undergraduates, I make use of my own simple English language Synopses, some of which I have made available on-line (I have a lot more, so perhaps I ought to think about making those more broadly available too). We have now moved Greek Synopsis work into the Level 2-3 Greek New Testament courses.

There may be sufficient interest for an English language Synopsis like the one Crook is proposing for a more general audience, but I don't know.

Some further comments on the proposal:

(1) Its essential ethos is right. I recall E. P. Sanders complaining that the Funk Synopsis matches up parallels in the RSV that are not actually present in the Greek. I have not checked up the Funk Synopsis to see if that is right or not. See Robert Walter Funk, New Gospel Parallels: Volume One, The Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985). Even that is not true, the comment points up the potential danger with using "target language translation".

(2) Crook explains that "Each gospel is presented in its own order, indicated when the gospel name and passages appear in bold lettering". This sounds like a good idea for combatting the big problem over how to order a Synopsis. For English-only readers, one should probably be especially conscious of the difficulties they might have in finding parallels and anything that facilitates their easy handling of them should be encouraged. If I understand Crook's proposal correctly, pericopae will be repeated in that particular Gospel's relevant order where that Gospels is out of sync with one or both of the others.

(3) I am fully behind the importance of teaching textual criticism to users of the Synopsis. I wonder, though, if the textual apparatus provided is a bit too detailed for an English language only reader. I am not sure if the target audience is conceptualised clearly here. The list of witnesses in the selected cases where textual apparatus is provided is too terse and focussed for non-Greek readers. I would have thought that something that explains the most important variations is required or the student will ignore it.

(4) My major qualm about the proposal is the use of the reconstructed text of Q in the Synopsis. On one level, this is a useful and interesting way of showing students where the IQP's Reconstructed Q comes from, i.e. from Synoptic comparison between Matthew and Luke. But my concern is that the use of Q limits the usefulness of the Synopsis in a fundamental way by foreclosing one of the key issues in Synoptic Problem research, which is the very reason for looking at a Synopsis. Instead of acting as a tool for students to investigate and test the Q hypothesis, the actual printing of the reconstructed text of Q inevitably gives Q a tangibility, a concrete presence, that makes it harder to encourage students to test the hypothesis. In my experience of teaching the Synoptic Problem, many students have difficulty grasping the Q hypothesis -- it takes a lot of patient explanation -- and they are quickly put off if they hear about its chapter and verse numbers, its reconstructed text and so on. In fact I tend to avoid talking about the properties of reconstructed Q in introductory lectures because it unduly biases the students against the Q hypothesis. I want them to understand the hypothesis and to judge it as fairly as possible and not to be biased against it by leaping ahead too quickly to reconstructed Q. This may just be my experience; it may just be Birmingham students! But I know that I would find it tough to introduce a Gospel Synopsis to undergraduate students that features the text of Q, with verse numbers and the like. I am afraid that many of them would simply refuse to take it seriously, for all my attempts to defend it.

(5) There is a related practical issue. The introduction of Q turns the three-column Synopsis into a four column Synopsis (and more when Thomas and John come in too). I think this is potentially problematic on two fronts. First, it reduces the simplicity of the presentation, thinning out the columns and crowding the page. This is a shame in a Synopsis that is designed to appeal to undergraduate students. Second, it radically alters the opportunity to colour the Synopsis. In my own view, it is greatly fortuitous that there are three Synoptic Gospels and three primary colours and that the combinations between them make colouring both intuitive and fun (see previous blog entry and discussion in my The Synoptic Problem). I'm not sure how one would encourage students to colour a four-column Synopsis. Would one leave Q white? Would one colour in-line with the colouring of Matthew and Luke so that one could see how the wording of Q had been reconstructed? Either way, it seems to me that the problem is that one weakens the gift we have been given of three Synoptic Gospels.

(6) A related problem is that I would find it less straightforward to use a Synopsis like this in teaching the Synoptic Problem. Pure triple tradition is still in three columns, so one has the link there between triple and three columns. But the pure double tradition is in three columns, Matthew, Q and Luke, and so it's less straightforward to explain these "triple" and "double" tradition terms. This might sound like an overly simple point but I reckon that it is a very useful way to begin the discussion of the Synoptic Problem and to go from triple tradition and double tradition to possible explanations of these.

My critical comments should not detract from the fact that, to repeat, I think this a very interesting proposal with some real merit.

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In Bible Software Review Weblog, Rubén Gómez draws attention to the following online Festschrift, quite an unusual phenomenon:

"What Does the Text Actually Say?"
A Festschrift in Honour of Dr Richard K. Moore
with articles by Evelyn Ashley, Michael Bullard, Marc Chan, Tim Finney and Alan Gordon and notes of appreciation from Barbara Aland, Ann Harding, David Neville, Ken Panten, Michael Welte and Geoff Westlake.
Published at http://purl.org/RelTech/books/RKM/, 2002.

Given my interest in the Synoptic Problem, I was drawn in particular to the following article:

Marc Chan Chim Yuk, "Jesus' Sayings in the Triple Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels"

Essentially, what the author does is to look into the actual degree of verbatim agreement between the Synoptics in triple tradition material, showing that the average is about 26.4%, a figure lower than the 50% figure mentioned by Sanders and Davies in Studying the Synoptic Gospels (see article for reference). But the study also concludes that:

It has revealed quite positively the fact that the correlation of Jesus' sayings in the Triple Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels is twice as high as the correlation for the surrounding narratives.

And it sees this as evidence that:

This indicates that the words of Jesus were treated with very high respect and thus transmitted and reproduced with care.

The last sentence rather took my breath away since it seems to go far further than the evidence allows:

There are still problems that have not been solved but the overall trend in this article points towards the fact that indeed the sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels do represent what Jesus actually spoke during his ministry on earth.

It's a shame that a generally useful essay overreaches itself in the end, not least in that the topic it begins with is the avoidance of claims that are not supported by appropriate evidence. One or two other comments on the essay:

(1) It's a shame that the essay perpetuates the lore that there are essentially two alternative solutions to the Synoptic Problem, the Two-Source Theory and Griesbach, with no mention of Farrer (Marcan Priority without Q). This is particularly disappointing in an essay that begins and ends with E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies's Studying the Synoptic Gospels which not only discusses the Farrer theory at length but also comes down broadly in support of it (see some quotations from it).

(2) The author recommends a colour coding scheme apparently devised by a certain Karawara Gospels Project. The article explains that this system was designed by Richard Moore, in whose honour this Festschrift was produced, in 1987-8. David Neville, author of two books on the Synoptic Problem, mentions this same project in his Thanks to Richard Moore, in the same volume. I am happy to see that the scheme is effectively identical to the one I came up with and recommended in my The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze! It takes advantage of the fact that there are three Synoptics and three primary colours, and works with that. This has always seemed so intuitive to me that I am surprised that more have not tried the same thing, so I am reassured to find someone independently coming to the same conclusion. However, when it comes to computerizing the scheme, they adjust Luke's yellow to grey "since yellow is barely visible when printed", and they make similar adjustments in the various combinations. I understand the problem here because when I went from the manual colouring of my Synopsis to trying to represent it on-line, the first problem was indeed the faintness of the yellow. But the solution I have used in my on-line synopsis examples has been to avoid the problem by simply providing a grey background rather than a white one. Then the yellow shows up better than anything.

Unfortunately, there are no examples of the colouring provided in the article, no doubt because it was originally projected as a print volume (see note 4) rather than an on-line one.

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I have moved my colleague Professor David Parker's homepage to our main Theology web site in Birmingham because its old server had become defunct. I've made the adjustment also on the NT Gateway's Scholars: O, P, Q and at the same time have serviced the other links on that page.

Update (21.40): Thanks to Markus Öhler for a speedy reply to an email I sent earlier. He informs me that his old and extensive homepage has been taken down ("Sie war veraltet und stilistisch auch untragbar") but he has a new, shorter page: Markus Öhler. The pages for AG-ASS are still available.

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The SBL Forum now has its latest content for May uploaded:

SBL Forum: May

From the practices of ancient scribes to the ordeals of the dissertation and latest book, biblical scholars are passionate about writing. This month SBL Forum features articles about writing in the past and in the future, plus insight for students writing dissertations, teachers in community colleges, and selected poems.

On Philo of Alexandria blog, Torrey Seland draws attention to one of the new articles, Ronald Hock, Writing in the Greco-Roman World.

In previous months, the beginning of the month sees the major content getting uploaded and then selected articles will be added as time goes on. I'll keep an eye on it for additional updates and, of course, post here.

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Today's Guardian Online has a nice little feature that attempts to put Google to the test:

On your marks, get set, search ...
Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, is about to offer shares to the public. It has built its reputation on being the fastest and most accurate way to find information. But is the internet really the quickest way to access facts - and get them right? We put Google to the test against more old-fashioned methods.
Ros Taylor, Oliver Burkeman and Stephen Moss

On the whole, Google does pretty well but doesn't always beat the telephone and the library. The article shows that you need both ingenuity and experience to get the best out of Google. And, of course, it does not add on the time for travelling to the library or the cost of making phone-calls. Here I am sitting at my PC and Google is so handy. But here's my concern: we are already getting to the stage where some students think that if Google can't find it, it doesn't exist. This perception might well intensify as the internet gets more comprehensive and as Google continues to find ways to pinpoint its searches. In the main I celebrate the fact that so much information is so straightforwardly accessible, but is it going to lead to more frustration in the future when people then fail to find what they need on the net?

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Back in December on Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson mentioned Zeba Crook's English Reader's Synopsis. I have now added Zeba Crook's homepage to my Scholars: C page:

Zeba A. Crook Homepage

As you will know if you peruse Scholars' Homepages, they vary enormously, from just a page with a paragraph or two prepared by support staff, to entire web sites with variety of useful resources. This is a good one, with CV, list of publications, course materials, some links and an introduction to the project mentioned above, on which more anon.

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Following on from my previous blog entry, a quick look around that Spirit of Things web site shows up some other interesting things too. You can read presenter Rachel Kohn's essay Who is a Fundamentalist? And why does it Matter?, which features some critical comments on The Passion of the Christ, and there is the entire transcript, again, for this episode of the programme:

The Suppressed Christian Tradition

In the late 1970s Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels, putting into the public domain a suppressed Christian tradition, which the church regarded as 'heretical'. They were the Gospels of Mary, Philip and Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Now a world-famous scholar, Pagels argues against the term "Gnostic," which was a term of reproach, and reflects on the gospels' similarities to Kabbalistic and Buddhist thought.

Like the Lüdemann programme, it is very interesting reading. Just one excerpt touching on her recent work on the Gospel of Thomas and its relationship to John:

what I realised as I was reading the Gospel of Thomas, is that there is teaching there, that is shared with the author of the Gospel of John. Other scholars have pointed out the strong similarities between John and Thomas. They’re both written for someone who already knows the basic story, they’re both written as supplemental and advanced teaching, they’re both written speaking about the Kingdom of God not as something coming at the end of time, but as the present spiritual reality, and they both have what you might call mystical elements to them.

But as I read that, and looked at the work of those scholars who’ve observed the enormous similarities between the two, I came to the conclusion, and to me it was a surprise, and it was unwelcome and it seemed very strange, but I realised that the only way one can make sense of the relationship between these Gospels is to see that whoever wrote the Gospel of John knows the kind of teaching you find in Thomas, and thinks that it’s been taken there in the wrong direction.

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Thanks to Gerd Lüdemann for sending over this link. It is an Australian radio programme called The Spirit of Things and this episode from 4 April 2004 is an interview with Gerd Lüdemann:

A Letter to Jesus

Gerd Ludemann is a world-renowned New Testament scholar at the University of Gottingen in Germany. After publishing 'A Letter to Jesus' declaring his loss of faith, the University of Gottingen, removed his courses from the theological faculty. A cause celebre among biblical scholars, Ludemann's predicament raises issues about the relationship between scholarship and personal faith. In this special interview Ludemann bares his soul and his thoughts about who Jesus really was.

There is a full programme transcript available from the link above -- would that more radio programmes would provide this! This excerpt shows Lüdemann summarising his journey away from Jesus:

First I examined the Resurrection of Jesus, because I was told by my church, and by the confession of the church, that the risen Lord is the Lord of the universe, and I wrote a book about the Resurrection, had to conclude that Jesus didn’t rise, that his body rotted away and that Resurrection meant the vision of the risen one, that is a vision, a dream. And nobody will trust his or her dream, so I had to abandon that approach of theology to trust in the risen one, and I turned to Jesus, and thought, Well, if he didn’t rise, there’s a possibility that the authority of Jesus’ words and deeds might be the basis of future faith.

So I was looking for a new way of believing or remaining a believer. And I had to conclude that roughly 85% of the words of Jesus actually go back to the community that made these words up and don’t go back to Jesus, which created another crisis. I had to ask Who was Jesus? Why should Jesus be the basis for my own religion? Because historical investigation showed that Jesus was a Jew and did not go to the Gentiles. So basically I had to decide either to follow Jesus and become a Jew or to respect Jesus as a Jew of his days and abandon Christianity, or at least traditional Christianity, and that’s what I did.

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I'm still here. I've just hit one of those periods where work is so ovewhelming that I've not had time to blog. Where I did manage to get some time at the weekend, you may have noticed that I added some more reflections on The Passion of the Christ. This is not because I had nothing else to blog about or nothing else to say but because I have been working on an article on this with a tight deadline, now past. Now that I'm all Passion-ed out, what next? One thing to look forward to is the Visual Bible International's Gospel of Mark film. I have mentioned this before (Three Other Jesus films), but here is a little more news from a Globe and Mail article by James Adams called The Gospel's second coming:

In the meantime, Drabinsky is continuing with plans to start shooting The Gospel of Mark in late August or early September, using Toronto and Spain as locations. Jeff Sackman said he's "open to the idea of Mark in theatres for 2005," but "it will depend on what transpires in the market between now and then. I assume there are dozens of Christian-themed movies in various stages of production and there could be a glut." At the same time, "I think this experience proved there is a theatrical market" for high-calibre Christian fare.

No more news yet on Regardt van den Bergh's The Lamb.

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Jack Kilmon on Xtalk mentions the sad news of the death of Hyam Maccoby. This obituary is from The Independent:

Professor Hyam Maccoby
Stormy petrel of biblical scholarship and author of books on Jesus, St Paul and Judas Iscariot
Albert H. Friedlander

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In comments on my post about the harmonizing tradition in the Jesus films, Bill points out that the reaction people are making to The Passion of the Christ relates to the explicit claim that this film was historically accurate. I think that this is a useful corrective to my post. I would add a couple of points by way of response, however. First, I've seen a toning down of the claims about historical accuracy in this film as time has gone on. Have a look at the official Passion of the Christ web site, for example. There are no claims here, in the film's official publicity, of historical accuracy. Indeed in "Background Information", it writes under "Sources" that:

It was adapted from a composite account of The Passion assembled from the four Biblical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (My emphasis)

This actually comes pretty close to describing the work of harmonizing. Gibson himself writes, in the "Foreword" to The Passion (Tyndale House, 2004):

There is a classical Greek word which best defines what "truth" guided my work, and that of everyone else involved in the project: aletheia. It simply means "unforgetting" . . . . It has unfortunately become part of the ritual of our modern secular existence to forget. The film, in this sense, is not meant as a historical documentary nor does it claim to have assembled all the facts. But it does enumerate those described in relevant Holy Scripture. It is not merely representative or merely expressive. I think of it as contemplative in the sense that one is compelled to remember (unforget) in a spiritual way which cannot be articulated, only experienced.

And from the Diane Sawyer interview on February 17:

Asked whether he considers his film the definitive depiction of the passion, Gibson said: "This is my version of what happened, according to the gospels and what I wanted to show — the aspects of it I wanted to show."

And from the Christianity Today interview with Gibson:

Struck: How did you find the balance between staying true to the Scripture and your creative interpretation?

Wow, the Scriptures are the Scriptures—I mean they're unchangeable, although many people try to change them. And I think that my first duty is to be as faithful as possible in telling the story so that it doesn't contradict the Scriptures.

Now, so long as it didn't do that, I felt that I had a pretty wide berth for artistic interpretation, and to fill in some of the spaces with logic, with imagination, with various other readings. ('Dude, That Was Graphic')

But second, the claim about historical accuracy is one that has a familiar ring to it when it comes to Jesus films. Consider, for example, the Jesus film:

The attention to biblical accuracy catapults you back into the life and time of Jesus Christ. You walk the same historical streets, you experience the same wonderful miracles, and you are touched by the power of God as you relive the most important events in the history of mankind.

Or consider the publicity for Jesus of Nazareth:

This epic production is acclaimed for its thorough Biblical and historical accuracy, with six hours of superb acting, beautiful music, and outstanding cinematography. (DVD publicity, e.g. here)

Or consider most recently The Miracle Maker:

Extensive historical and geographical research and the advice of leading biblical experts have ensured the greatest accuracy. (Official website)

I am not trying to claim that Icon Productions have not made inflated claims for their own film, but my point is that the claims of historical accuracy are pretty common in the publicity for Jesus films.

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