Miniseries on Jesus includes 'liberties and embellishments' The Layman Online Thursday, May 11, 2000 While a CBS miniseries titled Jesus "renders an important service in presenting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ" to a large audience, the four-hour production does include certain "liberties and embellishments," according to A.L. Barry, president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Barry's comments were reported by Religion Today. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod is a conservative denomination. Barry said the liberties and embellishments "although not Biblical, [are] not necessarily overtly offensive." But two important misimpressions of Jesus are given, he said. The first is that Jesus, after the death of his earthly father Joseph, didn't know what to do with himself, and later is unclear about his mission. "Jesus Christ was never for a moment unsure of his work," Barry said. He understood "full well" what he would one day have to do, "go to the cross as the willing, obedient Lamb of God to take the sin of the world." CBS will televise the miniseries Jesus Sunday, May 14, and Wednesday, May 17, at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times. Producer Lorenzo Minoli spent five years working on Jesus. He took the story line from John's Gospel and tried to balance a human and divine portrait of Jesus, news reports said. Minoli told Religion News Service that he is "a proud believer in Christ" who was raised a Catholic in Italy, moved to the United States 10 years ago, and married a Unitarian. The movie also leaves a faulty impression about the purpose of the crucifixion, Barry said. Jeremy Sisto, as Jesus, says in the movie, "I am in the hearts of men. I will die for the everlasting kindness of the human heart, created by the Father, so that men will make his image shine once again, and those who will want to will find in me the strength to love until the end." This is "exactly the opposite reason why Jesus died on the cross," Barry said. "God did not sacrifice His Son 'for the everlasting kindness of the human heart.' He sacrificed Him because the human heart, since the fall of Adam and Eve, has been darkened with evil and plagued by sin." "A huge amount of theologizing is coming out of Hollywood," Steve Humphries-Brooks, a religious studies professor at Hamilton College, told PR Newswire. Such shows are "very influential," he said. Many viewers who have only a passing knowledge of Scripture base their knowledge of Jesus' life on those films, not on the Bible, he said. "Films show the extent to which the story of Jesus has been freed from specific church dogmatic control."

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