I don’t often write to movie directors but on one occasion I did write to the well known Australian director George Miller. My letter began: ‘I was watching your recent ABC interview and was intrigued by one of your responses as the interview drew to a close. You had interesting things to say about Ned Kelly and telling stories and when you were invited to suggest an untold story you responded, perhaps, that of Jesus. There was a pause before you added “been told.”’

Let’s face it, quite a few of us might add ‘been told’ when Jesus’ story is mentioned and any thought it might be ‘untold’ is quickly dismissed; but Miller touched on something that’s been exercising me for a while especially with regard to what we take to be a quite familiar story, that is, how do we move from the ‘been told’ to the untold? Of course when it comes to the gospels there are a few favoured contemporary strategies for attempting this; among them making extensive use of the quirky, gnostic gospels, or the work of the Jesus seminar in trying to track down the historical Jesus, both as a means of attempting to render the familiar story unfamiliar; or in Mel Gibson’s case you might make use of the revelations of an 18th century mystic. Whatever we do, if you don’t like these, you might prefer to have it resemble yesterday’s news, making it as familiar as possible – so familiar as to be unfamiliar perhaps. Often the intent is ‘to do something with it, as actors say’. They’re the words of one of the performers involved in a 4 Mysteries workshop who went on to give examples of what he meant by this: ‘Start in the middle, imply a feminist critique, rediscover the King James Version English …’

Elsewhere on the website I refer to an example of adopting the historical Jesus strategy. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s 2008 book on Jesus  is a work of serious intent which is said to ‘disrobe the mythical Jesus to reveal a man who has much in common with other great political leaders throughout history – human beings who believed that change was coming in their lifetimes. Gone is the Jesus of the miracles, gone the son of God, gone the weaver of arcane parables whose meanings are obscure.’ He’s reported to be making a movie based on the book that one writer described in this way: ‘Verhoeven’s Jesus movie will cast the famous Nazarene as a shit-stirring prophet, stripping away all that miracle-working and returning from the dead stuff.’ No doubt he’s reacting against some pretty kitsch notions of Jesus and there’s more that might be said about it, but even so, you begin to wonder what we’re left with. Perhaps, as the FAQs suggest, a ‘life-as-lived’, bitty story of Jesus that effectively drives a wedge between us and Jesus and which in its drive to develop a unifying account certainly isn’t interested in four versions: maybe Jesus is stranger still.

When George Miller said ‘been told’ he referred to the movie versions of the Jesus story over the past fifty years. As I suggested in my letter to him: ‘I’m not much interested in the movie versions you alluded to in the interview – too one-dimensional I think.   I’m more interested in a multi-dimensional take on the gospels and I’m intrigued that the gospels do it through mythic storytelling: it’s a way of imagining Jesus.’ To which I added, thinking of Mark’s gospel: ‘Think of Jet Li and  Seven Samurai.’

When I hear talk of ‘well-worn tales’ and ‘po-faced official versions’ using ‘a template everyone knows’, comments that suggest we’re all too familiar with the story, I wonder whether we’re talking about something other than the gospels. In the FAQs we consider the end of Mark’s gospel. Three women come to the tomb, only to find the rock across the mouth of the cave has been rolled away: there’s no body and there’s an angel.  What’s the angel figure doing here? There should be a dead body – where is it? What sort of a place is this?  Disorientation is the basis of what’s happening. The ending of the story text is up in the air, it doesn’t resolve things, which is its beauty and its strength.  At the end there are two questions: What have we seen? And what have we been given?  The tomb is a womb, not simply a burial chamber, but what’s been born here?  Now we’re onto something, moving away from the ‘been told’ to the untold – there’s a new story on the way. In the end the reason I wrote to George Miller was to suggest that he might be able to tell such a story.