I hope y’all had a great Easter/Passover weekend. The actual title of this documentary was Did Jesus Die? The person who posted the video on YouTube was probably consulting the most clickable title, and chose a nicely controversial one. From March through Easter my YouTube feed shows an up-tick of Religion/Christianity documentaries. This was one of the first to pop up and really looked like a silly link-bait video, so I resisted watching it for some time. But it persistently showed up in my feed and eventually I eventually gave in to the algorithm and gave it a watch while doing other work on my computer.

The documentary was produced using classic BBC documentary style with beautiful visuals at the places being described, qualified academic talking heads moving the story along, articulate careful voice-over narration and wonderfully atmospheric musical soundtracks. As someone with a bachelors in Biblical Studies, having studied religious studies at a Jesuit university and studied theology at Fuller Seminary, I greatly appreciate the intelligent approach used in this documentary. They showed the Toronto Blessing pentecostals celebrating their faith with the same demeanor as when they explored the possibility that Jesus may not have “clinically” died and may have married and escaped to either the South of France or Kashmir. 

I watched two more documentaries or episodes of a serial documentary, From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians Parts 1 & 2 by PBS/Frontline, and it had the same respectful academic tone. It reminded me of my first encounters with religious and biblical scholarship at Loyola Marymount University. I should have stopped my documentary exploration here. But I let the YouTube algorithm guide me to one more documentary, Jesus Christ from the Biography Channel. While it noted “differences” between the story of Jesus presented in the four gospels, it resorted to reading the Bible as history and definitely took a Sunday school friendly approach to its subject. I love that Bart Ehrman participated in this documentary, but this documentary really tries to synthesize the different stories presented by the four gospels into one story that confirms the beliefs of the Christian faithful. So, if you are in the mood for putting on Jesus documentaries in the background while you work here are four that you might find interesting. Enjoy.

Jesus was a Buddhist Monk - BBC
Jesus was a Buddhist Monk – BBC