Review of Risen (2016) by Peter H — 02 Mar 2016

Interesting take, worth watching with an awareness of the comments below. Positively, the film looks deeper into the post-Resurrection story through the eyes of the Roman Tribune "Clavius" played very well by Fiennes.

Ironically, I thought Fiennes was a Jewish actor, which would have made an imaginative sub-text in the film, a Roman-Jewish Centurion, but apparently he's descended from English nobility. Even so, Fiennes would be a good candidate to cast in the role of Timothy, one of the leading proteges of Rabbi Shaul (Paul the Apostle) in a film that tells the story of Rabbi Shaul/Paul the Apostle as we read in the New Testament.

Negatively, the film lost a lot of points for its anti-Semitic depiction of Caiaphas the High Priest, and the complete and total absence of any Jewish characters who were skeptics, that is, neither for or against the resurrection of Yeshua, but curious, albeit doubtful.

The depiction of the Jewish disciples of Yeshua was interesting. The film could have benefited from a deep saturation in the academic literature that examines Yeshua (Jesus) in his Jewish context, especially, the work of Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin.

The innovative idea of the film telling the story through the eyes of a Roman Tribune could have been taken to an even deeper and imaginative level by doing what I thought it was doing, creating a character that never could have existed, that is, a Clavius who was a Roman Centurion born to a Roman (gentile) father and (secretly) Jewish mother who hid her identity as did her son.

The Roman-Jewish Clavius could then have come face-to-face with both his own Jewish identity and the claims of Yeshua as the Jewish Messiah and the complex web of cognitive dissonance as both his Roman and Jewish identity oscillated between skepticism and belief.

Oh well, next time. Still worth checking out.