The Life of Jesus in 830 Languages

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

For all the good Franklin Graham did in 1990 when he distributed aid at a Jordanian refugee camp during Gulf War I, he still drew fire from the International Red Cross. It objected, he has written, to his mixing relief with religion by passing out a copy of something he called the Jesus film. The movie popped up in the news again in 2001 when aid workers Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were arrested by the Taliban after Mercer showed an Afghan family what she later described as "a film about the life of Jesus."

To say that the 117-min., reverently competent Jesus is, after the Bible, among the foremost Christian evangelistic tools in Muslim countries is to downplay its reach. Considered something of a pious oddity at its 1979 commercial release in the U.S., the celluloid adaptation of Luke's Gospel has been translated into more than 830 languages and screened in every country on Earth.

The film has an interestingly hybrid pedigree. Its producer was John Heyman, who helped arrange financing for Chinatown and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Heyman took the project to Bill Bright, founder of the Evangelical ministry Campus Crusade, who obtained a $3.5 million loan guarantee from Texas oil baron Nelson Bunker Hunt. (The film eventually cost $6 million.) Campus Crusade says it consulted with hundreds of scholars and Christian leaders before the movie was made and cast it with Yemenite Jews--except for Jesus, who is played by British actor Brian Deacon.

The New York Times called Jesus "little more than an illustrated Gospel." But Bright saw it as a sturdy evangelistic aid for people whose illiteracy ruled out the written word and--in some remote outposts--might never have seen a film before. The efforts to dub the film, syllable by syllable, into languages from Adangme (spoken in Ghana) to Zhuang (spoken in China) are legendary, as are the heroics of three-person teams that took it to five continents, running projectors with old car batteries or screening it on bedsheets--and the miraculous healings that, by team members' accounts, attended some showings.

Campus Crusade has since boiled the movie down to an 83-min. video that has been sent, unsolicited, to millions of U.S. households. But the original, now in CD and DVD formats, continues to be deployed abroad. The film's distributors proudly illustrate its power by recounting on its website an incident that occurred in 2000 when 400,000 copies were being distributed at 14 Mediterranean ports to Muslim guest workers on their way home. "I will not take it," a man reportedly exclaimed. "It is making too many people Christian!" --By David Van Biema