Telford Reviews Passion Books

Durham University's William Telford is someone who's been studying the Bible and film for a long, long time. He first published on the subject as long ago as 1995 when his essay "The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar's Perspective" was included in Words Remembered, Texts Renewed. Essays in Honour of J. F. A. Sawyer and the text of his lecture on Jesus films - Images of Christ in the Cinema - has been around in one form or another for practically as long as I can remember.

So I was interested to see that the recent Review of Biblical Literature carried his reviews of not one, but two of the books that were written about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - "Mel Gibson's Passion: The Film, the Controversy, and Its Implications" edited by Zev Garber and "Mel Gibson's Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The Passion of the Christ by editors Timothy K. Beal and Tod Linafelt. Garber's book has been reviewed at SBL twice before, (first by Mark Goodacre and then by Timothy D. Finlay) and I think it's fair to say that Telford's review falls somewhere between the two.

Incidentally, Telford's staff pages at Durham reveal that he has just signed a book contract with Blackwell's to combine edited versions of his "published and unpublished work on Jesus in film".