Two quick newsbites: Clarence! Jesus actors!

A Bible movie gets a release date, and yours truly gets a soundbite.

Nicholas Pinnock as Arik in A.D. The Bible Continues (2015), and David Oyelowo as Joseph of Arimathea in The Passion (2008). Both actors are in The Book of Clarence.

The Book of Clarence gets a release date

Sony Pictures has announced a release date for The Book of Clarence: it’s coming to theatres just six and a half months from now, on September 22. The film reunites The Harder They Fall director Jeymes Samuel with actor LaKeith Stanfield, who plays “a down on his luck denizen of Jerusalem embarking on a misguided attempt to capitalize on the rise of celebrity and influence of the Messiah for his own personal gain”. Interestingly, Sony has another Bible movie coming out this year, in the form of a currently untitled musical about the Nativity that is coming out November 10. The musical will be promoted under Sony’s “faith-based” Affirm Films label, but so far there is no indication that The Book of Clarence will be promoted that way.

I’m quoted in a news article

Religion News Service has a pretty nifty story up now about The Chosen’s Jonathan Roumie and other actors who have played Jesus—such as The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel and Jesus Christ Superstar’s Ted Neeley—and how they sometimes, but not always, parlay their celebrity into religious and political causes. The article has a quote from me (hello to everyone who found this Substack through that article!), and it also has some good quotes from Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, my former editor at the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (she also edited The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film, to which I contributed an essay on movies about the patriarchs of Genesis: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.).