Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Fine; let’s make that part of our scenario. We document on film everything that happened from the time Jesus left his parents’ house until he was laid in his tomb—not only what happened to Jesus himself, but also among his friends and foes. That would mean that a lot of films would have to be running on a lot of screens alongside one another—and for about a year and a half. It would be an enormous burden of work just to watch it! We would not be able to hold out.

But suppose we did. Then the question would still remain: did this mega-documentation really help us? Could we, for example, even remotely grasp Jesus’ claim without knowing the Old Testament? Can Jesus be understood without the Torah and the prophets, without Israel’s experiences and hopes? Can Israel’s hopes be understood outside the history of the faith of that people? And can Jesus be understood if we look at his life without having as our perspective the fact that here the history that has taken place between God and Israel has reached its last and decisive phase? But how can this dimension of the event be made visible by merely piling up facts, by a simple summary of external events? Here every medium that only shows us a series of external facts will fail us.

Documentary Films

Let us remain for a moment with the case of film, because we can learn a great deal from it. Every documentary filmmaker who understands her or his art would make a radical and decisive selection from the enormous quantity of filmed material we would have produced in our scenario and bring that selection into a carefully constructed composition—and so interpret it already. Perhaps she would interrupt the chronological sequence with flashbacks. Perhaps he would even build in visual allusions to the Old Testament to clarify events. In any case we can be sure that she would constantly introduce pieces of film that create connections by means of “quotations.” In addition, he would hint at things in the background and give symbolic dimensions to individual events.

In other words: every good filmmaker would choose only a little from the overflowing mass of material available, bring that little into a coherent context, and create a great many semantic relationships between the individual parts of the film, and would do exactly the same with the available sound material. And in this way the filmmaker would interpret the whole event, perhaps without inserting a single word of commentary from anyone off screen or providing a single interpretive title. In any case, if no interpretation is given to an external event it cannot tell us anything.

And now comes the crucial question: did the authors of the gospels do anything different? Did they not cut, recombine, quote, allude, comment, interpret? Of course they did! And they did so using all the tools of a true narrative craft, because they knew that without interpretation there can be no understanding. Even the most accurate and strictly factual depiction of history cannot do without constant interpretation.

On 25 February 2004 a highly honored film on Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his attempt to assassinate Hitler was shown on German television.⁵ A commentator in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote of this film:

This is the most accurate film about Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt that has yet been produced, and it is the least complete. Those who view it this evening on television can rely on the correctness of the scenery, the uniforms, and the chronology. The director, Jo Baier, not only reproduced exactly the events of 20 July already researched by the Gestapo and found in their detailed files. He has precisely reconstructed Hitler’s barrack and the whole of the Führer’s headquarters in the East Prussian swamps, down to the mosquitoes. We cannot say in the strict sense that Baier has forgotten anything.… Anyone who wants to know what a German officer named Stauffenberg did throughout the day of 20 July 1944 will be well served here.

But anyone who wants to know what the last day in the life of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg meant will feel lost. This has to do with the fact that this film is remarkably lacking in any kind of larger meaning. We could even say that it is a narrative without a context, a historical film with no history in it—and one that de-dramatizes history in the same remarkable way that dramas nowadays are de-historicized. We learn nothing of who Stauffenberg was or even who he might have been.

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