The Savior: The Palestinian Jesus Movie
First Friday of Lent
I realized just yesterday that fully half of the films I’ve chosen for this series are not in English. This is the first one. I came across The Savior years ago, but unlike the other seven films, I had never actually watched it before this past week. Which is a nice change from the others. I have seen them all before at some point, even if it was decades ago, so I have sort of been able to piece ideas for writing reflections together in my head based on what I remember from past viewings. But this one? I had never seen it before. Until I pressed play on my computer screen, this article was a completely blank page. No notes or outlines or anything.
The most obvious difference with this movie are its aesthetics. Most films covering the life of Christ are in English, along with a sprinkling of Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese projects. All European languages. This one is in Arabic. Not exactly the norm for Western Christianity. Aramaic — the everyday language Jesus would have spoken — and Arabic are sister languages. It was the lingua franca of the Levant for centuries before being displaced by Arabic over a thousand years ago. It’s the successor language to Jesus’ native Aramaic. If he had been born in our era instead, his first language would have been Arabic. Not English or any other European language.
There also aren’t really any White people in this movie. At least not White in the Anglo-American-European sense. Some of the actors have lighter complexions than others, but the entire cast is made up of a variety of Levantine ethnicities and Middle Eastern nationalities. Just as with the Palestine of 2,000 years ago, there are no White Europeans. This is a big change from basically every biblical epic produced in Hollywood as well as most smaller film projects created by religious organizations. I remember having this huge illustrated children’s Bible when I was a kid, and the artwork probably dated to the 1960s or 1970s. The Jesus in this book was not only White but Nordic. Taller than any other characters depicted, very light skin, and beached blonde hair and beard. He didn’t really look like anyone else around him. I did a brief online search looking for evidence of this memory, and Google did not disappoint. The illustrations are somehow even more cringe than I remember.
Judging by the few scenes that did include special effects, this film didn’t have the biggest budget in the history of the entertainment industry. This is likely the reason they included relatively few miracles in the script, and the ones there were shown were deliberately kept on the simple side. Healings. An exorcism or two. No big budget nature miracles — like walking on water or calming a storm — were shown on screen. There was much more emphasis on Jesus’ teachings and interactions with everyday people. I noticed a lot of scenes with folks just chilling out in the countryside — eating, drinking, chatting, whatever — and they invite Jesus and his crew over to join them. This happens in the nativity scene too. When all the shepherds and townspeople turn up in the cave to see the newborn messiah, they don’t just stand around and stare blankly like in most nativity scenes or Christmas crèches in the West. They gather round the little family and start playing music. (Traditional Palestinian music; no Little Drummer Boy shit.) It was these little details that gave the film its intimate uniqueness and cultural authenticity that other similar projects don’t have.
It might seem like such a small detail, but it reminded me of when I lived in the predominantly Arab areas of Israel and Palestine about ten years ago. After leaving South Korea in 2014, I planned out a solo backpacking trip that lasted six months. I spent about five weeks of that time in Israel and Palestine going from the tiny hamlet of Ezuz in the south about 60km from the Gaza Strip to Nazareth in the northern region of the Galilee with side quests to Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee), Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, the ancient desert fortress of Masada, and the Dead Sea. But the bulk of my time was spent in Nazareth. I did a work exchange with a hostel in the Old City that was owned and run by an Israeli Arab family. The 300-year-old house had been carved from the stone and later converted into a small hostel. The front courtyard was always open during daylight hours for guests to stop by, have a coffee, visit with the family or guests, play with the new kitten, or exchange gossip. You know, community.
One afternoon around Easter, three of us workers were sitting around the low wooden table sipping some strong Turkish coffee spiced with cardamom pods. The hostel owner, Ramzi, sauntered over and asked if we liked nuts. “Sure,” we all responded. Who doesn’t like nuts? I figured he would bring out a small bag or two of mixed nuts. A tin can of Planters peanuts or something. But no. That would be hospitable in the US, UK, or Australia — the countries we were all from — but not here in Nazareth. No, Ramzi lugged out a huge cloth bag that must have weighed at least ten kilos full of an assortment of nuts. Then he proceeded to pour them all out on the wooden table at our knees. Easier access, I guess. More convenient for the guests. I cannot emphasize this enough: there were SO. MANY. NUTS. Peanuts. Brazil nuts. Cashews. Almonds. Walnuts. Pistachios. You name it, it was there on that table. For just the three of us. Piles and mounds of nuts fully at our disposal. The momentary eye contact between us three foreigners as we tried not to burst into giggles at the absurdity before us. Traditional hospitality met surrealism.
Part of the work exchange included a free place to sleep and two meals per day. This included breakfasts with more of that superb coffee and fresh-baked za’atar mana’eesh from a local bakery. Morning meals were heaven. For lunch, Ramzi’s wife always cooked an elaborate lunch full of exquisitely delicious Palestinian dishes. Lots of fresh veggies, lentils, and lamb. A handful of locals would always stop by and join us in the courtyard — extended family members and local friends — for these communal meals. I remember one of the first times Ramzi’s good friend Mohammed stopped by to join us for some coffee. Mohammed, obviously, was Muslim, and Ramzi’s family was Catholic. As we were chatting, he mentioned that in Nazareth, “Muslims and Christians are friendly.” It was true; I had already noticed this. Every day, I was treated to the sounds of church bells and Islamic calls to prayer blending in the pleasantly humid air as Palestinian Christians and Muslims mixed and mingled throughout Old City Nazareth.
Most of my days in Nazareth were spent hanging out in cafés, parks, streets, restaurants, markets, and various homes. Even the work in the hostel was much more fun and conversational than strenuous. There was never a sense of rush or urgency. The emphasis was much more on everyday human interactions. Community over commerce. One time Ramzi even had me drive us all out into the desert to visit one of his bedouin friends. He didn’t even bother to call them beforehand; after all, we were just going to stop by. We drove out there, but no one was home. It didn’t matter to him though; he showed us inside the extensive tent compound anyway — his friend’s house — while making a couple phone calls to see when they would be back. This was just so utterly foreign to me at the time. This kind of hospitality is just not ingrained in American culture, or really any other culture from the Global North that I’ve experienced. But I ended up loving it. Stopping by (unannounced) to a friend’s house every day or two for a coffee and a chat. Lovely.
I really enjoyed seeing that type of hospitality which is so normal in Levantine and Middle Eastern cultures but so lacking in other Jesus films made in the West. I noticed it again in the Last Supper scenes. The emphasis of the Eucharist seemed to be so much more on sharing with others. Not the mystical theories surrounding transubstantiation or who is allowed to take part and when. It was just sharing food out of love. The Eucharist, or Communion. Communal. Community. My and mine become our and ours. Nothing belongs to me; it belongs to all of us. We’re all equal, and everything is equitable. The rampant individualism of Western Christianity was chipped away so that we could see its more communal Eastern incarnation.
One scene in particular that deeply resonated with me was when Jesus brings back a woman’s son who had died. It’s a very short, simple scene. Not very pivotal to the script at all. Just as in the gospels themselves, the woman doesn’t ask him to give her a miracle. It’s not even clear if she knows who he is; he just doesn’t want her to cry. Her son has just died, and she doesn’t have anyone left. She’s alone. Jesus helps her, performing this miracle, simply because he wants to. Of the three people that Jesus raises from the dead in the four gospels, two of them are children. Jesus tells off his disciples when they try to keep children away from him, thinking that they would be too much of a distraction or that he’s too important to take time out of his day for mere kids. They were wrong.
Under normal circumstances, I might not have taken such note of this scene. However, I have lost count of the number of Palestinian children I’ve seen killed by Israeli forces over the past four months. Every time I open Instagram or TikTok, I’m met by a barrage of updates covering the latest outrages in Gaza and the West Bank. Photos, videos, screenshots of journalists’ tweets, segments of news articles. War crimes. Torture. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Things I never thought I would see outside of a Hollywood war movie. Half the population of Gaza before 07 October were children. As it stands today, over half of the dead that have been counted are children. This is a prolonged attack on a population of children. Brutalized, dismembered, and murdered in some of the most horrific ways imaginable. If Jesus was so upset over one woman’s son who had died, then how would he feel about the thousands of women’s sons and daughters gunned down, blown up, and starved? Or in reverse, the Palestinian children who are now left alone against the world? The acronym WCNSF — Wounded Child, No Surviving Family — originated in Gaza.
Western White evangelicals love to claim that the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. That we are a Christian nation built on the teachings of the Bible. What does it say about their Christianity that the world’s supposed “shining city upon a hill” is arming the country carrying out a genocide against a population predominantly made up of children? Sending them billions in military aid, ammunition, bombs, and other weaponry? Cheering them on as they bomb the remnants of a ghetto? Whatever “Christian values” they think the United States was founded on, they are not the values of Christ. They are the antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. The values of anti-Christ. The values of empire, colonialism, racism, and White supremacy. The values of power.
Although I grew up hearing the whole “America is a Christian nation” spiel at church and in Christian media, I also learned in Honors American History that the United States was founded as a secular state. Plus I watched a lot of history documentaries as a kid when the History Channel was still good. You would think that an actual Christian nation would be all about following the teachings of Jesus Christ and not aiding and abetting a genocide. Politically, the West must do better than this. Western Christianity also has to learn from its elder twin sister, Eastern Christianity, to do better as well.
