Review: The Bible, Week 3

One sentence summary: It’s so bad it’s entertaining trying to see how many problems can be spotted in a span of each minute.

Notable theme of this week: Giving up any remaining pretense of following the actual biblical text in putting together the scenes and events.

Most memorable commercial moment once again goes to ChristianMingle.com for… Altering one word of a popular praise and worship song to turn it into a romance song.

Granted everyone knows many P&W songs can easily be turned into a generic romance pop song by changing a few words, but I was taken aback that someone would actually do this in an ostensibly “Christian” ad.

There’s really no point in detailing all the problems and issues. The series continues to focus on action, conflict, and violence without actually telling any stories. God continues to be what appears to be an inconvenient sideshow for the most part. It continues to be a historical, cultural, anthropological, literary, and theological farce. And why do the Babylonians and Persians have so much mascara around their eyes that they look like raccoons?

(Notes I took while I watched can be found here. This gives a brief rundown of all the problems and “what the…?!” reactions I had.)

Week 2 had pretty much lowered my expectations to nothing, but I was sadly surprised that week 3 showed things could get worse. I’m not sure what tale it’s trying to tell. On one hand it seems the show is trying to bring in extrabiblical elements that are based on verifiable history. On the other hand it seems that the show is trying to keep an appearance of sticking to the Bible – at least superficially. The result is worse than if the show stuck strictly to secular biblical scholarship, or stuck to the conservative, traditional reading of the Bible. It is a mishmash of haphazard, individual activity that makes no sense from one scene to the next, from one hour to the next, and from one week to the next.

With this week being the halfway point and the transition from the Old Testament to the New, I thought maybe the second hour might start looking up. Alas, it just kept its steady beat of mediocrity and bad storytelling. Oh sure, Jesus is now present, but God still seems to be missing.

Nietzche’s famously oft-misused “God is dead” observation is true, for this show, anyway.