Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This won’t be your typical review, but hopefully it’ll be useful. Here’s the deal: I happen to love this show, but it isn’t perfect. Its flaws need acknowledged as well as its virtues, so I’m going to cover both AND give you a parental guide in case you’re wondering if the tots ought to watch it. BASIC PLOT: Pontius Pilate makes the lives of everyone in Jerusalem a living inferno while the events of the first 10 chapters of Acts play out in the background. It opens with Jesus’ trial before Pilate and ends in chaos after the baptism of the first Roman convert. Roughly half of each episode revolves around a Biblical storyline and the remaining twenty-three minutes are fictional interactions with other characters involving political intrigue and family dynamics. I actually like this formula, and it is so fast-paced that 43 minutes fly by. THE GOOD: God nailed me with this series. Every week, every episode, hit me hard in some way. I felt convicted A LOT. It wasn’t just me, either – not only did I see radical growth in my spiritual life coincide with watching this series (which inspired me to dig into my Bible), I saw it happen in my friends’ lives as well. We would all commiserate together on Monday morning and say, “Man, I want to be more like Peter!” Love is a huge part of this story. It is blatantly contrasted with the bigotry, hatred, back-stabbing, brutality, and scheming that goes on in the Temple and the Palace of Justice. When you watch Mary Magdalene embrace a weeping man, who just confessed to murdering one of her closest friends, and she tells him that all is forgiven because he is a new man in Christ… well, it makes being angry about the neighbor’s dog peeing on your lawn ornaments seem downright childish. If that’s not enough, twice Peter is told that he must forgive, or he is not “practicing what he preaches.” He has to forgive Saul, and then he has to forgive Caiaphas, the High Priest. The writing, the acting, the music, everything is top quality, and SOME of the characters are incredible. They have done a particularly masterful job with Peter and Saul; the former is a man of incredible passion, warmth and love, whose face illuminates with joyful wonder whenever the Holy Spirit permits him to heal in the name of Jesus. The scene when he called forth Tabitha from the dead actually brought me to tears. In that moment, it resonated with me how much Jesus represents LIFE. Peter is … delightful. I will never look at him the same way again. Saul’s shift is also powerful. His transformation is massive, from a bitter, angry, self-righteous “Temple thumper” into someone so full of love and honest truth that it just blew me away. I actually started missing him when he walked out of the narrative. The secondary characters range from wonderful (such as Barnabaus, who is often the comic relief, but in a non-offensive way) to tragic (Claudia, who is stuck in a marriage on the fast track to total despair). Caiaphas is also a powerful figure. One moment, you empathize with him – the next, he reveals what a self-serving brutal hypocrite he is. He can be a loving father in one scene, and a religious fanatic in the next. And something this show does powerfully is create a tangible, frightening, almost claustrophobic sense of “reality” – the crowded narrow streets, the pervasive fear, the melting pot of three factions in one area: the new faith, those that worshiped the temple, and the zealots. I have never seen a faith-based production on this scale before, and that for twelve weeks it was sharing the gospel on primetime television is astounding. THE BAD: Massive Biblical deviations caused a lot of viewers to tune out, and I get why; I stuck with it, but the show really does itself a disservice by its inaccuracies. These range from black disciples to bigger infractions. The biggest Biblical deviation is Cornelius, who in scripture was a godly and devout man and here undergoes a radical salvation experience after being Pilate’s brutal and godless right hand man. I don’t mind writers mucking about in history, because history was not a living breathing person whose reputation gets dragged through the mud and leaves ignorant audiences confused, but this seems pretty disrespectful to the memory of a man whom God honored in allowing him to be the first convert. And I say that as someone who found his arc ultimately powerful. There are other Biblical discrepancies but in the face of Cornelius, most seem minor and in some instances, stuff is merely “fleshed out” instead of truly altered. But… this is bad history. And I mean BAD. Those with some basic knowledge of Roman history will scoff; those with more of an intensive knowledge of Roman and Judean history will wind up with a headache. For starters, Pilate is a total psychopath who intends to crucify women and slaughters ten Jews a day until the zealot who tried to assassinate him is found. He butchers men in the temple, forces Caiaphas to eat the ashes of a dead centurion, and generally is an ‘evil Roman’ archetype, which in my opinion is just plain lazy writing. The real Pontius Pilate was not a nice fellow, but not nearly the barbarian that this one is; they’ve made him the catalyst for ‘everything that stinks in Jerusalem’ and as a result, he’s a one-note stereotypical villain. You are left just waiting for him to do one of the three things he does all the time: a) yell at or threaten his wife / tell her to STOP INTERFERING IN MY AFFAIRS, b) yell at or abuse the high priest, or c) order more executions for no reason other than to ‘prove a point’ (I will hand it to the actor, though – he sells it and scares the living daylight out of me). Why they did such an excellent job with Caiaphas in making him a complex and interesting villain and such a shoddy job with Pilate is beyond me. They’ve taken as ‘inspiration’ some of Pilate’s general abuses of the Jews (including spilling blood in the temple) and then taken it to frankly unbelievable levels (for the record, the Romans did not crucify women and Pilate would have never suggested such a thing). Regarding the general history... Caligula and Tiberius never visited Jerusalem. Tiberius died far from that ‘toilet bowl’ of the Roman Empire. Pilate, Caiaphas, and Herod were all removed from their positions before Caligula insisted his statue be installed in Jerusalem. It never made it as far as Judea, and Caligula died before he could retaliate against the new governor’s refusal to install it. (Those interested can read the Jewish scholar Josephus for more information on Pilate, Herod, Caligula, and Judean history in general.) I could nitpick further about centurions not being permitted to marry but that seems minor at this point. The horrendous history brings it down a notch and makes anyone knowledgeable about the period side-eye the project. Frankly, I wish they hadn’t done it, since it destroys some of the credibility. THE UGLY: Here is where the parental warnings come in. This series is brutal. Knowing that many of these events were standard practices in that period makes it even harder to stomach, but you can belly up to this ancient bar for a grand assortment of regular stonings, floggings, crucifixions, beatings, etc. Pilate even throws in some domestic abuse, in case you forgot that he's mean. Sometimes the camera looks away (when a Christian woman is strangled out of focus in the background) and sometimes it does not (when we get to see and hear every blow against Stephen, including the one that kills him, at which point I cringing and feeling slightly sick). For every wonderful, powerful, inspirational, spiritual moment, there’s one of graphic violence. I, personally, found the message worth it, but some of my less desensitized friends quit watching it, and I’d honestly be hesitant about recommending it to some people because it IS so brutal. Most of the un-Biblical violence doesn’t need to be there – and people have a point when they say the show looked for ways to inject it. Case in point: Tabitha in the Bible is a seamstress who suddenly dies and is brought back to life. SPOILER. Here, Tabitha is a servant in Herodias’ household, who is raped off-screen by Caligula (we hear him laughing about it later – “I don’t think she liked me!”), THEN beaten so badly by Cornelius on Pilate’s orders (because she dared to become a believer of Jesus under his roof) that she dies of her injuries. END SPOILER. Great back story! Did we need it, though? QUESTION (since I know some people are wondering): Is this heavily Catholic?: No. It doesn’t adhere to any particular church’s stance on anything, and if anything, devalues Catholicism somewhat in its more blatant assertions about Peter (“I am not the rock; Jesus is the rock”). So if you’re a Protestant shying away from it thinking it has heavily Catholic overtones, there are none. IN CONCLUSION: Though two chunks of this review could be construed as complaining, it really isn't. I loved this series. I honestly did. It was the bright point of my week. I begged most of my friends into watching it, and then held intense theological discussions with most of them after the effect. These characters are now solidified in my imagination and my heart. I'm actually quite forgiving of Biblical fiction, and that is what this series actually is. I'm inclined to cut it an awful lot of slack, but I also feel that if given more seasons, it could find a better balance between the love of Christ it displays and the brutality of the times. If I don't get to see the rest of Acts unfold in living color on my television screen next year, I might just cry.