Testament: The Parables Retold – first thoughts

This modernized riff on the gospels and the book of Acts – which Angel Studios is planning to turn into a series – is hosting a watch party today.

I finally got around to watching Testament: The Parables Retold, a film that has been on the Angel Studios app since October. (Angel Studios is the outfit that produces The Chosen, and they’ve got plans to turn this film into a multi-season series too.)

I’ve got a lot of other things on my plate right now, so I won’t be writing about this film in any detail for a while yet (I actually watched the film now partly because I needed to for one of my other projects...), but I did want to mention a couple things, if they pique anyone’s interest.

First, the film basically sets the New Testament in the present day, and it’s an interesting fusion of the gospels and the book of Acts. The film began as five short films based on the parables, and the feature film basically creates a framing narrative in which a guy named Luke meets various members of The Way—Mary Magdalene, Barnabas, Jesus’ brother James, etc.—and they tell him some of the parables that Jesus once told. So the film focuses on how these stories were transmitted within the early Christian community... and, by layering some 21st-century interpretive elements onto the parables, the film inadvertently hints at how the parables as we have them in the gospels may reflect layers of interpretation that were added between Jesus telling them and Matthew, Mark, and Luke writing them down. (John’s gospel doesn’t have any parables.)

Second, it’s interesting to see how the film reflects an awareness of some of the scholarly debates that people have had about the New Testament. Someone remarks that Paul doesn’t talk about “the Kingdom” like Jesus did—it’s a major theme in the Synoptic gospels but not in Paul’s epistles—but then that person remarks that Paul is too busy growing the Kingdom to talk about it. Later, Mark gives Luke a “copy” of his account of Jesus’ life, and he says Matthew will be getting a copy too—which ties into scholarly theories about the gospels of Matthew and Luke being based, in part, on Mark’s gospel. (The Chosen has never gotten into that.)

I hope to get around to writing about this film in a few weeks, once I’ve got some other imminent releases out of my way. In the meantime, Angel Studios is hosting another watch party today (at 4pm PST / 7pm EST). The link is below.