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REVIEW: The Movie The Gospel of John

I’ll admit that I saw The Passion of the Christ before seeing this movie. So going in, I expected to be disappointed - The Passion raised my expectations for religious movies and I doubted whether The Gospel of John would be satisfactory.

That being said, it was more obvious that this movie was made on a budget. A few early camera tricks are almost nauseating and the acting is okay, rather than great. But on the whole, the movie was much more fulfilling than I expected. Basically, this movie is almost a word for word recreation of the Gospel of John. There were a few oddities; the one that drove me nuts was the translation of “Amen, Amen” or “Truly, truly” as “I am telling you the truth.” Jesus says “I am telling you the truth” probably over 100 times in the movie! But the story line was very close to the Gospel (I kept the Bible beside me) and it was nice to “watch” the situations unfold.

My favorite scene (I’m biased) was the second half of John 6 when Jesus insisted, “You must eat my flesh and drink my blood or you have no life in you.” The movie faithfully depicts Jesus losing all of His disciples except for the twelve. I also enjoyed their depiction of the Last Supper and the events from the Last Supper to the arrest of Jesus.

In the end, the movie was pretty good – it was very faithful to the text and did a watchable interpretation of events in the Gospels. If you could only see one religious movie, I would have to recommend The Passion of the Christ, of course. But thankfully in America we can watch as many as we want. And this was a worthwhile three hours of time (it is long), especially now that the movie is available on DVD. Recommended.

God bless,
Jay