Review of The God Who Wasn't There (2005) by John P — 16 Dec 2008

It is, I think, difficult to discuss any documentary about God without one's own personal religious beliefs getting in the way, but we're going to try to do that here. I was raised Catholic, myself. It had a lot of influence on my way of thinking about things. However, I try to understand where everyone is coming from in their faith. Sometimes, it's harder than others--I could list, but I'll refrain from doing so--but I can understand most stripes of both religion and non-religion. I don't have sympathy for all of them--my biggest problem is the unexamined spirituality--but I can understand how people got there. I came into this film expecting a certain viewpoint, and I wasn't disappointed. I came into it expecting a certain level of scholarship, and I was [i]very[/i] disappointed.

Brian Flemming went looking for a historical Jesus, and he didn't find one. I'm certainly not disputing that such evidence is hardly thick on the ground. He interviews many people of various stripes. It is notable, I think, that mostly he interviews experts who side with him and random people on the street who do not. He also limits himself to having interviewed people outside a Billy Graham revival at the Rose Bowl, hardly a hotbed of Biblical scholarship. This is not intended as a slight at the reverend himself; it is intended to say that he's going to get a very specific view of Christianity from the people there, just as he would get a specific view of Christianity in the Vatican or at St. Paul's in London. It's hardly a sweeping overview of the faith.

However, the greatest failing of the work is his misdirected focus. He spends a lot of time comparing Jesus with various other Gods, such as Osiris and Mithras. It's true that the Biblical tellings of the Jesus story do share a lot of elements with those and other mythological figures. It is certainly possible for any non-Christian (and, contrary to a lot of beliefs on both sides, it's possible to be non-Christian without also being atheistic) to point out those other myths to suggest that the divinity of the man called Jesus is doubtful at best. It is possible to look at those stories and suggest that a nautilus shell of myth encased a real person. That is just as possible as Flemming's assertion that it proves Jesus to be a fictional character.

Somewhat more compelling is his detailing of the lack of historical detail, the decades-long gap between the alleged life of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels. However, he himself discusses the letters of Paul, which were written during that gap. Paul, based on my former weekly reading of the same, was equally likely to refer to Jesus as spirit or man. However, Flemming chooses to stick pretty much exclusively to the verses that refer to Jesus as spirit. Further, one of the verses he cites as showing Paul's view is accepted by modern Biblical scholarship to not have been written by Paul in the first place. And one cannot suggest that the Pauline and other epistles were altered without also admitting that views not belonging to Jesus were inserted into the Gospels, possibly including several of the verses with which he takes exception.

I dislike fundamentalists of any stripe, and I feel that Flemming falls into fundamentalist atheism. This is most notable in his various demonstrations of evil acts by Christians. It's certainly true that they exist. However, Flemming seems to show either malign intent or blind ignorance; his technique does not allow for thoughtful, schooled Christians performing good acts every day. It bothers me, because it's the same but opposite view that, no doubt, most of the Christians he chooses to interview would have of him for being an atheist. I suspect that interviews with the atheist on the street would show them to be just as ignorant about religion as the average Christian, but Flemming isn't going to let us find out. It's among the great failings of his film.