Sticks and Stones: Watching The Jesus Film with Muslims

Abstract

Sticks and Stones: Watching The Jesus Film with Muslims S. Brent Plate It's late at night and I'm standing in a dimly lit concrete room with six other people: five black African men and one other white American like me. Blood drips down my face as this bodily semicircle engulfs me, teeth bright with large smiles. I'm not sure whether to be grateful for the smiles or concerned for their seeming lack of concern about my bleeding head. As is customary throughout Kenya, and many other parts of the world, before any business takes place one must offer salutations to everyone in the room. In spite of my bloody face, the blood on my shirt, my obvious need for some medical attention, it was necessary to greet all the people with a handshake, to talk for a few moments before getting to the business of healing my wound. They were there to help, to restore me to good health, but relationships must be established first. An hour earlier I had been standing next to a 16‐mm film projector and generator in a dirt field in Wajir, a town in northeastern Kenya, not far from the border of Somalia. “Out in the sticks,” one might say, though the trees were few and far between. I was part of a team showing a film called Jesus to a mostly Somali, and hence also Muslim, community. This was the summer of 1987, and I had volunteered along with a few dozen other college students for an Africa Field Summer Project, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ International (now known as “Cru”). The motive was to “share Christ” with the masses who had not heard the message of Christ's saving power, and thus fulfill the “Great Commission,” Jesus's command to make disciples in all nations (Matthew 28:16–20). Click for larger view View full resolution Setting up projector and screen to show Jesus film in Wajir, Kenya, 1987. Photo by author. In recent years, a number of Muslim groups have taken offense at filmic representations of Noah, Moses, and Jesus, and felt that certain films do not do justice to these great prophets. Here, in rural East Africa, the complaint was not that the prophet Jesus was disparaged, but that he was so exalted. Jesus is a great and very revered prophet in Islam. Only, he is not the Son of God, part divine himself and resurrected from the dead, as our projected film portrayed him. Young boys in Wajir, madrasa‐trained, knew who we were and what we were about, at least, I imagine, as much as they were told by their teachers. We only knew they were in need of salvation, and little else, as told to us by our teachers. By day they challenged our thinking when we visited them in town, asking us pointedly about the resurrection and what proof we had of this. To which we abashedly said something like, “Well, there are no bones, are there?!” We tried to polish up on our apologetics, but the intellectualist approach seldom moves many. By night they heckled us, whistling over parts of the movie that showed Jesus in supernatural light, and then throwing stones at the screen, projector, and ultimately, me. Which is how I ended up with a bloody head in a room filled with friendly but seemingly negligent interlocutors. The Jesus Film, as it has come to be called, was a 1979 production, originally titled Jesus, produced by John Heyman, and directed by John Krish and Peter Sykes. The film was populated with an almost entirely Yemenite Jewish cast, save the British actor who played Jesus, Brian Deacon. I mention these facts not merely from my academic compulsion to cite proper references, but because the “authorship” here is muddled, and I think there is something intentional in that. There were, and are, many people involved with the film's creation and distribution, but not in the way most films are created, produced, and distributed. The film had a short run in theaters in 1979 (distributed by Warner Brothers), but where it failed at the box office, it more than made up...