In the beginning were the Bible movies. As with films in any genre, their popularity has ebbed and flowed, but right now, it’s a flood.
Some are what you probably expect: tales for the faithful. Animated films about the life of Jesus, like “The King of Kings” and “Light of the World,” performed well at the box office this year, while “David” will open just before Christmas. This fall, Netflix premiered the Tyler Perry Studios-produced “Ruth & Boaz,” a steamy modern-day retelling of the Old Testament story. And the star-studded “Zero A.D.,” a thriller about Mary fleeing Bethlehem with the infant Jesus, is due next year.
Streaming shows like “House of David” and the wildly popular “The Chosen” (both available on most major platforms) have also won fans with their lush historical storytelling; a “Joseph in Egypt” show was recently ordered to series, too. And in December, Kevin Costner will host an ABC special exploring “the extraordinary journey of Mary and Joseph.”
It’s tempting to attribute this abundance to a single cause: a Trump-era tilt toward a religious and conservative audience, for instance. But taking that position requires some blinders. The truth is: Bible movies are more diverse and weirder than ever. These productions are just one facet of the genre. And when you look at how the Bible has shown up at the movies for the last century, it’s obvious that this is not new at all.
Take one recent big-screen biblical tale: “The Carpenter’s Son,” a properly creepy horror film in which Noah Jupe stars as a teenage Jesus, with Nicolas Cage and FKA Twigs as Joseph and Mary. Teenage Jesus battles Satan and more adolescent frustrations in a tale based on the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which is not recognized by any major Christian denomination). “The Carpenter’s Son” is certainly not made for the churchgoing crowd.
Or consider last year’s “The Book of Clarence,” a Jesus movie starring LaKeith Stanfield that was both devout and impertinent and had an atheist stoner for a protagonist. Or “Judas’ Gospel,” starring Giancarlo Giannini, Rupert Everett and Abel Ferrara, which explores Judas Iscariot’s side of the story and premiered at the Locarno Film Festival over the summer. Or coming films from Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese, both religious men who regardless rarely color within the lines.
None of these fit the family-friendly inspirational mold. Nor, for that matter, does a movie like “Ruth & Boaz,” which Netflix advertised with a thirsty clip of women commenting on a shirtless, tattooed Tyler Lepley repairing a roof. They are not, you might say, your grandma’s Bible movies.
Or are they?
TO THOSE VERSED in the history of Hollywood, the current state of the biblical flick might ring a bell. A casual viewer may associate the genre with Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 drama, “The Ten Commandments,” or William Wyler’s 1959 epic, “Ben-Hur,” or perhaps George Stevens’s 1965 film, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” But the history of Bible films is surprisingly complex, even controversial, and it often reveals something about the culture in which the movie was made.
From the moment movies were invented, they were used to tell Bible stories. Films made as early as 1898 replicated the passion plays that took place annually across Europe, created initially to teach the story of Jesus’ life.
That might be expected. But strangely, we also got the Production Code — the Hollywood self-censorship rules developed by a priest and a religious publisher — in large part because of a nude scene in a Bible movie. An empress played by Claudette Colbert bathed naked in a pool of donkey’s milk in the 1932 DeMille epic “The Sign of the Cross,” about early Christians.
In fact, racy scenes and Bible movies have often gone hand in hand — even after the Code was adopted. Yes, some of the Bible films made during the Code era, which lasted from 1934 to 1968, were meant to be innocent, moral entertainment. Movies like “The Ten Commandments” or “The Robe” (1953) could practically double as sermons, and it was a bonus that they had fine actors, beautiful sets and cool effects, too.
But people also go to the movies for titillation, and some filmmakers realized the Bible gave them cover to show audiences what they wanted. Spicy films like DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah” (1949) didn’t hold back. “I am sometimes accused of gingering up the Bible with large and lavish infusions of sex and violence,” the director wrote in his autobiography. “I can only wonder if my accusers have ever read certain parts of the Bible.”
These epics fell out of favor in midcentury America, as studios faced more competition from television and a rising generation viewed them as relics. But that didn’t mean movies with biblical roots went away. The 1970s brought the Orson Welles-narrated “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which advanced wild conspiratorial views of contemporary geopolitical events, mapped onto prophetic biblical texts. There was the horror-inflected “Thief in the Night” series, which became cult classics by using the Book of Revelation as a starting point to suggest the bloody end of the world was just around the corner.
By the 1980s, a famous Bible movie got caught up in the culture wars that were raging offscreen. Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” based on a novel exploring the life of Jesus, was the subject of intense criticism and debate, and was denounced by religious organizations before it had been screened. The controversy culminated in the firebombing of a Parisian theater, resulting in a number of severe injuries.
Some movies broke out in the intervening years, like the animated hit “The Prince of Egypt,” but Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” heralded a new era in 2004. Despite being exceptionally violent and not strictly faithful to the biblical text, it became a megahit, largely because churches bought out theaters on opening weekend. It reigned as the highest-earning R-rated film of all time in the United States and Canada for a whopping 20 years, superseded finally in 2024 by “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
The “Passion” phenomenon set a template for marketing movies to the faithful. And it ushered in a new wave of biblical blockbusters in an age of megabudget films, like Ridley Scott’s expensive flop “Exodus: Gods and Kings” (2014). We’ll soon see if those tricks still work, because in 2027, Gibson has a two-part sequel on the way: “The Resurrection of the Christ.”
SO THE HISTORY OF BIBLE FILMS is complex. They’ve never just been innocent tales for churchgoers, and they’ve often reflected the tenor of the times, serving all kinds of functions. What’s going on, then, with the influx of Bible movies now?
Perhaps unsurprisingly in an age of reboots, all the old trends are being made new again. In TV shows like “The Chosen,” you can spot the big-budget, high-production-value conservatism of the Code-era biblical epics. “Ruth & Boaz” has the winking sexiness of that era’s workaround Bible pictures. Some are keyed to the horror register, like the apocalyptic 1970s films; others lean more on irreverence and comedy. The steady stream of animated children’s movies that recount the life of Jesus recall those earliest filmed passion plays, created for educational purposes. And I’ve no doubt that some of the more unconventional films may result in their own culture war cancellations.
In the past a Bible movie (or any movie) might have been intended to reach a wide audience, but now there’s no such thing as “the audience.” There are only audiences, siloed in their own landscapes. There’s a good chance the viewers of one slice of these Bible films have no idea the other movies even exist, and they’d never even consider watching them.
But that gives storytellers an opportunity to play, and the Bible — an ancient text that means many things to many people, containing all kinds of narratives — gives them a lot of material to work with. Thousands of years of history, and countless readers and translators, have proven that there is no one way to read a biblical text. There’s an audience for each kind of Bible movie, too. And there always has been.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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