Given the predominance of religion in American public discourse, film-makers often have looked to Judaeo-Christian narratives to inspire products for revival tents and Hollywood glory Indeed, by the silent era, film-makers discovered that religious stories could cloak multiple and explicit sins—luxuriant orgies, scantily clad but sometimes repentant heroines and beefcake actors called to divine sacrifice. In the 1950s, the dialectic of sin and morality underpinned epics such as Cecil B. De Mille’s second Ten Commandments (1956, after his silent 1923 version) that meshed lust, spectacle and barely clad hunks (Yul Brynner (Pharoah) and Charlton Heston (Moses)) with specialeffect miracles and redemption. Other films also fleshed out the Old Testament “where needed,” whether Samson and Delilah (1950) or David and Bathsheeba (1951).

Stories of Jesus and early Christianity received similar star treatment. The martyrs and revelation of Quo Vadis (1951), The Silver Chalice (1954), with Paul Newman’s debut, and Ben-Hur (1959), again with Heston, justified visions of delectable decadence and cinematic miracles in pagan Rome. The Christ narrative itself also reflects changing concerns over generations, from Jeffrey Hunter’s blueeyed Jesus in Kïng of Kïngs (1961) to the 1973 hippie savior of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar to the tortured but still Anglo-Saxon Jesus of Martin Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which drew protest from religious groups.