
The Divine Enfant Terrible: On Lofty Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son
A long lineage of Jesus films depicts Christ as almost otherworldly, serene, and calmly removed from the people around him. Movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) depict Jesus as bathed in a soft glow of light, and as he moves through Jerusalem he seems to barely touch the ground. While Christian doctrine professes that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, depictions of him in film almost always place a heavy thumb on the scale of divinity.
