An Iranian's vision of Jesus' life stirs debate

[Crvena zvezda]

An Iranian's vision of Jesus' life stirs debate

The new film, based on the Islamic version of Jesus' life, depicts him as a prophet rather than the son of God. Its director says he wants to further understanding.

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 29, 2008

TEHRAN -- A man wrapped in a shawl stood at the door.

"This is Jesus," said another man.

Jesus sat and peeled an orange as his companion, Nader Talebzadeh, began to speak, precisely, so as not to be misunderstood on a matter so sensitive. The Iranian director's new film is based on the Islamic version of the life of Jesus, depicting the man Christians believe to be the messiah and son of God as a tormented Judean prophet foretelling the coming of Muhammad, the founder of the Muslim faith.

One might imagine such a tale may not screen well in the red states of America. The film, nearly 10 years in the making, draws on the Koran and the putative Gospel of Barnabas, considered by many Western scholars a medieval fable. The premise of "Jesus, the Spirit of God" is that Jesus was compassionate and performed miracles, but was not crucified or resurrected from the dead. The message implies that Christianity, a faith of 2 billion people and the core of much Western philosophy, is based on a falsehood.

"I pray for Christians. They've been misled. They will realize one day the true story," said Talebzadeh, whose film has been screened at international film festivals and is being marketed for wider release.

"People might use this film as a strategy to further demonize Iran," he said. "They may succeed. But I hope once you see that the focus of the film is sacred, it will overwhelm. No one would have imagined that an Iranian would make a film to glorify Jesus."

Not to mention an Iranian who supports President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and believes 9/11 was partly a U.S. government conspiracy. "Someone masterminded something," he said. "And this is the cause for a lot of evil America is doing in this part of the world."

There is another irony. The actor who plays Jesus, Ahmad Soleimani-Nia, once was a soldier in the Iranian army and later a welder for Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, which the Bush administration accuses of pursuing nuclear weapons. Such footnotes don't seem odd when talking with Talebzadeh, who has kept Nia in Jesus character -- flowing hair, beard, mystic pose -- for seven years because he never knows when he might shoot new sequences for the film.

"Jesus, the Spirit of God" comes out of Iran at a time of hostile rhetoric between Washington and Tehran and a divide between Islam and the West that has produced jihad websites, DVDs on the apocalypse, editorial cartoons lamp**ning Muhammad and a recent Osama bin Laden tape condemning Pope Benedict XVI for a "new crusade" against Islam.

Religion has long been at the heart of tensions between East and West, but it is being swept into a wider cultural war played out on the Internet, film and satellite TV in which icons and sacred texts have been attacked and manipulated. A new Dutch film by a right-wing politician, who compares the Koran to Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," depicts Islam as a violent faith. In response, a Saudi blogger posted a video suggesting that the Bible could be read as a document for war.

Talebzadeh knows that his Jesus walks on volatile terrain; one wonders, given the tenor of the times, how many fatwas would be issued if a Western director made a film suggesting that Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden under Islamic tradition, was someone other than the prophet.

"There is so much wrong with this man's understanding of Jesus and Christianity," wrote an incensed Christian blogger, referring to Talebzadeh in a conversation about the film that is unfolding in cyberspace. "It's another piece of Satanic propaganda intended to accomplish no meaningful purpose in this world."

The rough, choppily edited $5-million film, condensed from a 1,000-minute-long series that will soon air on Iranian TV, reveres Jesus as a blessed prophet speaking parables and moving through soft light and angelic chants amid a ruckus of zealots and conspiring Pharisees. The narrative and dialogue are attributed to Islamic teachings and Jesus' disciple Barnabas, whose gospel the director said was hidden by church authorities so as not to undermine the established Christian faith.

Scholars believe that the gospel, not included in the canon of the early Catholic Church, was written by others centuries later and ascribed to Barnabas. It overlaps with the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but it does not present Jesus as the son of God. Barnabas' tale resonates with Muslims who believe that it supports the Koran's teaching that Jesus, though born of a virgin, was not divine, but one of the last great prophets. Talebzadeh's film shows Jesus ascending to heaven before Roman soldiers come for him; Judas, the disciple who betrays him, is transformed into the likeness of Jesus and crucified. According to Islamic traditions, Jesus is alive and will return to defeat evil.

"Barnabas is a missing link the world is not ready to accept. It's a piece of literature we should look into," said Talebzadeh, a man with a graying beard who sat in his office the other day before a bowl of fruit.

Draped in a shawl and legs crossed as if in meditation, Nia-as-Jesus lingered behind Talebzadeh looking very much like a 1970s rock star. He was quiet, serene, a former welder with a thespian calling drifting between the Koran and the New Testament. He had never acted before, but his light skin and angular features mixed with Middle East repose conjured an aura of Western aesthetics and Eastern spirituality.

"I've never been able to resolve why I am so drawn to Jesus," said Nia, a Muslim born in the western mountains of Iran near Iraqi Kurdistan. "It goes back to when I was a boy of 7 or 8. I saw a painting of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper' and I identified with Jesus. He has always been with me. In my neighborhood, with my long hair and beard, I am known as Jesus."

Talebzadeh grew up in Iran under the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he says he studied at American University in Washington, D.C., and Columbia University in New York. He witnessed a convulsive American decade of antiwar protests over Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon.

For much of that time, Iran was a U.S. ally. That changed in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution that toppled the shah and resulted in 52 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

"I returned to Iran feeling there was a huge misunderstanding in the West about my country," he said. "Iran was being demonized."

Talebzadeh directed a number of documentaries on themes such as the Bosnian conflict and the Iran-Iraq war. In 1999, he began filming "Jesus, the Spirit of God," which grew out of a passion that began decades earlier when he attended a school in Tehran with Christians and continued over his fascination with the purported writings of Barnabas.

"If there's one thing in my life I wanted to do, this film is it," said the director, whose Jesus movie won an interfaith dialogue award at the 2007 Religion Today Film Festival in Italy. "I didn't say Jesus wasn't crucified, God did. It's in the Koran. . . . The film is made with faith. I tried to do it as beautifully as I could."

He added that he hoped his 35-millimeter film would start a conversation between religions: "In the 21st century, the arts and the media have to create an area for more cordial discussions between faiths at a time when information is moving in the blink of an eye. . . . We should be joining people together, not giving distortion and misunderstanding. We have to say, 'Have you looked at this door to know the truth about Jesus?' "

Some Americans have peeked through Talebzadeh's door. He showed the movie to four audiences in the United States, and it was recently screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. He said many people were open-minded and intrigued by the historical and religious questions it raised.

"The truth has a whole, different vibration to it," he said. "If you enhance it with artistry, you can create a discussion."

Not according to the website of the Worldwide Church of God in Fairfield, Calif.: "Attempts by the Iranians or anyone else who try to deny that Jesus Christ is the true messiah will ultimately fail. The Holy Bible confirms the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in numerous ways, and no amount of filmmaking or lecturing or rhetoric to the contrary can defeat that fact."

Nia-as-Jesus finished his orange. Talebzadeh, whose office was warm in the afternoon sun, kept talking about the film, about divinity, about how to capture truth.

He turned in his chair toward Jesus, and was still, after all these years, amazed at the likeness, the highlighted hair, eyes of fervor. He joked that he had been searching for his lead character for a long time when his assistant director spotted Nia on the street one day and said, "I found your Jesus."

Nia-as-Jesus liked this story, happenstance leading, as he sees it, to destiny.

jeffrey.fleishman @latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-jesus29apr29,1,25597.story

[Monolith]

We all saw how they reacted to Danish vision of Muhammad.

[Truth-Finder]

I wish those peoples remained Zoroasthrians...

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by Truth-Finder

I wish those peoples remained Zoroasthrians...

Zoroastrian temple in Yazd


Zoroastrian temple in Baku (Azerbeijan)

[Exeter]

Hardly comparable. This film does not seem to be a ridicule of Jesus. Besides, the main reaction was from the streets of the Arab world.

Originally Posted by Monolith

We all saw how they reacted to Danish vision of Muhammad.

[Ikutiera]

The Gospel of Barnabas is a work purporting to be a depiction of the life of Jesus by his disciple Barnabas. Two known manuscripts have been dated to the late sixteenth century, and are written respectively in Italian and in Spanish; although the Spanish version survives now only in an eighteenth century copy. It is about the same length as the four canonical gospels put together (the Italian manuscript has 222 chapters); with the bulk being devoted to an account of Jesus' ministry, much of it harmonised from accounts also found in the canonical gospels. In some respects, it conforms to the Islamic interpretation of Christian origins.

The Gospel is considered by the majority of academics (including Christians and some Muslims) to be late and pseudepigraphical; however, some academics suggest that it may contain some remnants of an earlier apocryphal work edited to conform to Islam, perhaps Gnostic (Cirillo, Ragg) or Ebionite (Pines) or Diatessaronic (Joosten); and some Muslim scholars consider the surviving versions as transmitting a suppressed apostolic original. Some Islamic organizations cite it in support of the Islamic view of Jesus.

Gospel of Barnabas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Monolith]

Originally Posted by Exeter

Hardly comparable. This film does not seem to be a ridicule of Jesus. Besides, the main reaction was from the streets of the Arab world.

I wonder how would they react if we made a film in which Muhammad is portrayed as a liar.

[Vincent]

Jesus from this movie, played by the Iranian actor Ahmad Soleimani

[Llywarch Hen]

Originally Posted by Vincent

Jesus from this movie, played by the Iranian actor Ahmad Soleimani

I'm rather disappointed in the Iranians for this one. Billy Connolly + Turin Shroud?

[wilpuri]

Originally Posted by Monolith

I wonder how would they react if we made a film in which Muhammad is portrayed as a liar.

But surely, if this is the Islamic interpretation of Jesus, then they have a right to make movies about it, without Christians taking offense? I mean, from what I gather, most Christians are ok with Muslims having their own faith. They have a different faith and also therefore a different interpretation of Jesus, what's wrong with that?

From the article:

The message implies that Christianity, a faith of 2 billion people and the core of much Western philosophy, is based on a falsehood.

Well does not every religionist believe their own faith to be the right one, I mean that is sort of the point, right? Jews don't accept Jesus as the messiah either. Does Jeffrey Fleishman think they're negating the core Western philosophy?

Or perhaps Christendom should join in on a crusade against Iran...? Some sure wouldn't mind...

I'm just thinking that this article is perhaps aimed at awakening 'the wrath of God' against stubborn Iran.

[Monolith]

Originally Posted by wilpuri

But surely, if this is the Islamic interpretation of Jesus, then they have a right to make movies about it, without Christians taking offense? I mean, from what I gather, most Christians are ok with Muslims having their own faith. They have a different faith and also therefore a different interpretation of Jesus, what's wrong with that?

You are right of course. It was just a comparison.

[Marulus]

Originally Posted by wilpuri

But surely, if this is the Islamic interpretation of Jesus, then they have a right to make movies about it, without Christians taking offense?
I mean, from what I gather, most Christians are ok with Muslims having their own faith. They have a different faith and also therefore a different interpretation of Jesus, what's wrong with that?
Well does not every religionist believe their own faith to be the right one, I mean that is sort of the point, right? Jews don't accept Jesus as the messiah either. Does Jeffrey Fleishman think they're negating the core Western philosophy?
Or perhaps Christendom should join in on a crusade against Iran...? Some sure wouldn't mind...
I'm just thinking that this article is perhaps aimed at awakening 'the wrath of God' against stubborn Iran.

Yes, some might interpret this article in that manner. I just say: God save us from neoconnish Christianity (or "Judaeo-Christianity", or "Judaeo-Christian values", or what other rhetorical monstrosities they devise to describe their misuse of religious identity of the so-called "West", as they perceive it). The author of this article is probably no Christian at all, just someone who takes into account the so-called "Christian roots" of what he calls West, with some clearly political implications. In this way he is Islamic of the kind because in Islam religion is tightly connected with politics.

And what is even more disturbing is that nowadays you find many self-professed Catholic traditionalists whose writings reek of the stench of neoconnism. It is the phenomenon of the so-called theoconism. for the matter of fact, it became quite wide-spread in many Traditionalist circles (though not in all).

[Wladyslaw Warnenczyk]

What i particurally don't like about muslims (besides many other things) is how violently they react to the smallest criticism of Islam and Muhhamad,making mass demostrations with slogans like "Death to all who slander Islam","Islam will conquer the world" and so on,but in the same time they criticise and offend other religions (christianity ussualy).They want everybody to be tollerant to their religion nad culture and to respect it,but in the same time they aren't doing the same thing.Personally i would like to see a movie about Muhhamed,showing what he truelly was - a pedophyle,a murdered,a bandit,a thief.....

[Exeter]

Jews are much more cunning in promoting themselves through the use of comedy.

Originally Posted by Wladyslaw Warnenczyk

What i particurally don't like about muslims (besides many other things) is how violently they react to the smallest criticism of Islam and Muhhamad,making mass demostrations with slogans like "Death to all who slander Islam","Islam will conquer the world" and so on,but in the same time they criticise and offend other religions (christianity ussualy).They want everybody to be tollerant to their religion nad culture and to respect it,but in the same time they aren't doing the same thing.Personally i would like to see a movie about Muhhamed,showing what he truelly was - a pedophyle,a murdered,a bandit,a thief.....

[Wladyslaw Warnenczyk]

Originally Posted by Exeter

Jews are much more cunning in promoting themselves through the use of comedy.

Who talks about jews in this thread and what do you mean by t