Philosophy of the Mind

Son Of God

"Son Of God" is a biblical movie written and produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, and directed by Christopher Spencer that focuses on parts of each book of the three synoptic gospels and the gospel of John. This film is a continuation of from the previous movie miniseries called "The Bible" that was produced in 2013, and is the predecessor of "A.D. The Bible Continues" miniseries. The influence and the inspiration behind this work of art comes mostly from the book of John with little bits of usage from the synoptic gospels.

This producers and director constantly stayed in the book of John yet in the very beginning of the movie they open with John being excommunicated on the island of Patmos who quotes the opening of John 1:1-2, and then takes the audience back to the beginning of the birth of Jesus Christ coming from the book of Matthew chapters 1 and 2. After encountering the birth of Jesus Christ the writers skip towards the ministry of Jesus Christ in Mark chapter 1. The Jesus from "Son Of God" is showed forth as a weak savior and does not reflect any of the biblical Jesus' in the synoptic gospels, and actually there are very little evidence of the synoptic passages of Jesus displayed in this movie. In the movie, the writers of this movie briefly spotlight pieces of Mark's Jesus as the Son of God (hint the title), but mostly puts emphasis on Luke's gospel calling him a prophet, and the religious leaders calling him a false prophet. There isn't any real focus on Matthew's Jesus, yet it comes into play only when he feeds the four thousand hungry people, it is only then and there that he openly rejects being the Messiah which even then the Christian following would have a complete problem with the structure and form of how Jesus is displayed.

With every movie there are unfortunately going to be a lot things omitted especially with a subject such as Jesus and one that has a huge following. Due to the four different versions of the telling of his story and ministry there are a lot things that were cut out such as the mighty wonderful display of miracles and casting out of devils from Mark except for the multiplying the two loaves of fish and five loaves of bread hungry crowd that followed him. All the teachings and parables from the gospel of Mark are omitted except for Jesus telling the story of the mustard seed and even then, that is not put in the right context. All of Matthew's teachings and parables are omitted from the movie, and the only miracle that is performed in this movie is the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (just like in Mark). All of Luke's gospel is completely omitted from this movie and there is no infancy narrative which one can only find in the "Bible" miniseries. There is only one thing that is implied in the movie and it is the highlighted, and that is the arrest, trials crucifixion, and ascension form John's account of Jesus.

Now the reason being that this is so is because the writers probably wanted to keep the focus on the loving Jesus, but most of all they wanted to have Jesus displayed on the big screen since they read in a poll that a lot of children in the United Kingdom were being asked where Jesus came from which they could not answer. So the entire inspiration for the movie is that they wanted to give him a platform where he could be introduced to people who never heard of him. The writers (like I said in the beginning) stayed in the gospel of John for majority of this movie so there wasn't a lot of Jesus rebuking and exposing the evilness and hardness of the religious leaders and their hearts. Christians already have a hard timer allowing anyone depict who Jesus is on the big screen, and they especially do not like it when someone outside of the Christian faith decides to do a movie about their savior, but there are some that would take this movie and display it to others who do not know about Jesus so there are a lot of mixed views of this movie from the Christians. In today's society, a lot of Christians would approve of this kind of Jesus, and would completely praise the writers of this movie since they see this man as one who was a savior of love and acceptance, and not a savior of rebuking "hatred".