Over a decade ago, megachurch celebrity pastor Joel Osteen was determined to make a movie: “Mary, Mother of the Christ.”
Years passed, writers wrote, casts were announced and walked back, publicists publicized, but by 2015, it was clear nothing would happen and eventually the film’s IMDB page went full 404.
Good news: It’s 2024, and Osteen has finally got his movie: “Mary,” being streamed by Netflix beginning on Dec. 6, directed by D.J. Caruso, written by Timothy Michael Hayes, and executive produced by, yes, Joel Osteen.
Starring, controversially to some, Israeli actress Noa Cohen as Mary, Ido Tako as Joseph, and a bearded, staggering, menacing Anthony Hopkins as Herod, the film’s marketing materials tell us:
“…Mary is shunned following a miraculous conception and forced into hiding. When King Herod orders a murderous hunt for her newborn baby, Mary and Joseph go on the run — bound by faith and driven by courage — to save his life at all costs.”
Or, as another of the film’s producers describes it: “a survival thriller.”
Imaginative retellings of Scripture are nothing new from “Dear and Glorious Physician” to “Jesus of Nazareth” to “The Chosen.” Indeed, every painting of a nativity or crucifixion involves the use of the imagination.
The discerning reader or viewer will bring two related questions to these works: What is the intent of the imaginative aspects and what is the relationship of these aspects to the acknowledged source material?
With “Mary,” the team’s stated intentions, both in interviews and through the script itself, are to “tell the story” of Mary. As her voiceover in the opening scene says: “...you may think you know my story … trust me … you don’t.”
Well, apparently not, especially if Mary’s story is a highly selective mashup of the Gospels, the noncanonical “Protoevangelium of James,” that survival thriller, and a Joel Osteen sermon.
So, for example, while many were offended by the novel and by the 1988 Martin Scorsese film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” one cannot judge them on the basis of “inaccuracy,” since fidelity to the Gospel record was not the point. On the other hand, perhaps the most moving moment in “The Passion of the Christ,” a film intent on faithfulness in both letter and spirit, was the fruit of imagination: Mary’s memory of her toddler son’s fall as she watched him stumble under the weight of the cross.
The noncanonical “Protoevangelium of James,” valued in the Early Church and a source for various beliefs about Mary, but declared apocryphal in the 6th century, is used, but selectively. “James” provides the story of Mary’s miraculous origins as the daughter of Joachim and Anna — perhaps the most moving element of the film — and her time in the Temple.
That’s it for “James,” though, as less attractive elements of that text are shifted and dropped, like the part where Temple authorities decide, because of the onset of the defilement of menarche, it’s time to find Mary a husband.
In the text, that’s an older widower named Joseph. In “Mary,” it’s a hunky young builder who is instantly smitten when he spies Mary doing laundry in a river, is encouraged by the Angel in Blue, aka Gabriel, to head to her father’s house — the journey from Jerusalem to Nazareth takes just a hot minute, it seems — to request her hand.
What else? Oh, a few things: The Annunciation takes place in the Temple, not in Nazareth. Joachim is murdered by Herod’s forces. In Bethlehem, Joseph is told by an innkeeper that Bethlehem is crowded because “A child will be born in Bethlehem … the Messiah.”
That child is born. Herod hears the news right away from a shepherd, then immediately orders the massacre of all of Bethlehem’s infants — even though we then see a scene of a couple of hundred folks gathered around the family, complete with Magi presenting gifts. Not exactly hard to find, you’d think.
All of this is interesting and yes, completely out of whack with the biblical chronology. But it’s this last part of the film that is, as we say today, definitely a choice.
The family heads to Egypt. They stop at a house. Herod’s minions attack. Mary tosses Jesus in a basket down to Joseph then jumps down, robes rippling in the air. She leaps on a horse with the baby. Joseph, defending them, tosses the net and leaves the man burning. Pause, reverse, rewatch: Joseph kills a guy.
Survival thriller, indeed!
The family moves on — not to Egypt, but Jerusalem. OK, but why? Herod is still on the hunt brandishing a sword and seething about the Messiah in a great hall, surrounded by baskets of babies. Mary and Joseph approach Jerusalem’s gates. Super dangerous for sure, but Mary is determined and confident. “We are blessed,” she asserts, and in they march to the Temple, where the prophetess Anna awaits. Love will save the world.
Well, sure it will, but wait, what? Setting aside Avenger Joseph, this is all wrong. The Gospels tell us that the Presentation of Jesus occurred 40 days after his birth, coinciding with Mary’s ritual purification. And yes, Mary and Joseph did make it to Egypt, but that journey, along with Herod’s massacre and even the visit of the Magi, occurred when he was a toddler.
Does it really matter?
Yes it does, especially when, no matter how well intentioned, you are presenting your work as the “story” that the rest of us never knew before.
Not only does all of this — especially the last part — do violence to the sources we have and the creators say they used, it also creates a picture of Mary that is inconsistent, to say the least, with her actual role in the Christian story.
In focusing on Mary’s personal courage and tenacity, as well as centering the story on the arc of Herod’s terror and rage, the film removes Mary from the deeper, more foundational story of God’s people and indeed, salvation history. We know a lot about Herod’s megalomania but hear little about Israel’s suffering. Love will save the world, but from what? The brokenness of sin that has shattered all of creation or mean people?
No, Mary does not exactly girlboss her way through this survival thriller because she does, indeed, rely on God. But the nature of her reliance is succinctly expressed in her response to Gabriel’s news.
“Let it be me.”
What a difference one word makes. Not a fiat, a let it be rooted in her historic faith’s actual spirituality and practice, but a me centered on a vague trust in a vague self-empowering promise, a spiritually selective, self-referential framework that just might, circling back to the beginning of this piece and this project, sound familiar.
