Dallas Jenkins
speaker
227 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dallas Jenkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I know just enough, I'm a good enough formulating arguments to be dangerous. But at my heart, I always find that the way into The persuasion, if you want to look at it from that way, is storytelling. And it always seems to— Persuasion or communication? Both. Yeah, okay.
So if I say to you right now, so this morning I wake up and I get out of bed, the simple fact of me saying that, you're going— Well, then what happened? Even though you know that it's probably, most likely, banal. It's not very few significant things happen when you just get out of bed. But you're intrigued, right? That's all I know. I don't know that I can intellectualize why.
I just know that it works. And I know that... When I set out to make that short film about the two thieves, we showed their backstory. We showed how they met. We showed, again, all through not fact, but through what we call plausibility. Is it plausible? What would have been in the cultural context, the historical context?
So my co-writer, Tyler Thompson, at the time had never written a screenplay in his life, but we were working at the same place. And he's brilliant at connecting the Old Testament to the New. He's brilliant with historical context and cultural context. And so we worked together. to fashion a plausible backstory for the two thieves.
Jesus doesn't show up until the last five minutes of the short film. So we spend 20 minutes establishing the things that led these two thieves to be on the cross, and they finally get on the cross, and we get to the crucifixion moment when Jesus is there. And the audience, of course, in a church is going up. All right, now we're here. We get it.
This is the crucifixion story we've heard so many times, but we're seeing all these comments from Jesus that are in Scripture. We're seeing them now through the lens of the two thieves on the cross, this backstory that we've been following. And so what happened, to your question, is the audience I saw and experienced, and they told me there was a significant aha moment. Right, right. A what?
I had never considered this. It makes more sense to me now.
Yes, now when I read these four verses, I actually can not only understand it perhaps a little better, but I also can see myself in the thief on the cross. And that's the problem with most biblical storytelling, is that it's through the eyes of Jesus.
Jesus actually doesn't make for a good protagonist in a drama because he doesn't necessarily— outside of that moment in Scripture where it says he grew in wisdom and stature. But once his ministry starts, he doesn't make for a great protagonist because he doesn't necessarily learn. He doesn't necessarily go from bad to good or anything like that.
And so when we see all these miracles that he's performing and these life change that he's causing, we don't know anything about the people that— That he's causing it for. That's a clunky way of saying it, but we don't—how can we unpack the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years and touches the hem of his garment?
Ignatius talked about that. He said, St. Ignatius, when he says, we're to read the Bible with a holy, a sacred imagination. Right, right, right. The text isn't meant, Protestants are uncomfortable with this. I'm an evangelical Protestant. I'm not a Catholic. So I'm raised to be a little more protective and faithful to the fidelity of the text, the text, the text.
That's why there aren't too many things like the chosen because typically it's, well, we don't want to expand and your imagination can run wild into a dangerous area.
An evangelical would say... Well, yes, it's hyperlinked, but stay there. Don't bring your own humanity into the imagination of it. Stick to the text. Yes, this verse is set up by a verse written thousands of years ago, and that's beautiful and that's perfect because God wrote this book. So that's okay.
But when you start to bring your own analysis to it, now we're treading on thin ice, and that's for the realm of pastors to provide commentary, not for Dallas Jenkins to tell his own story.
So you look at a movie like The Last Temptation of Christ from Martin Scorsese's exploration of things, and most Christians were horrified to imply—I mean, Scorsese was exploring Jesus as humanity, and it went too far, right?
But then it's put in the hands of a— struggling Catholic... Right, right, right. ...who has made movies that most Christians would never even dare to see. But, of course, if you look closely, you can see a spiritual beauty in Taxi Driver and in Raging Bull and some other things.
But it's a little too... Risqué, you might say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So... So... I became comfortable with that as an evangelical, and my church was comfortable with it. Not only comfortable— Why? Well, because it felt so plausible, and yet it was rooted in a fidelity to Scripture, meaning it wasn't made by someone who doubts it.
You know, you look at the movie Noah from Darren Aronofsky where many Christians were offended by that because he was exploring the story of Noah as an environmentalist manifesto of sorts. And Ridley Scott doing the Exodus story about Moses and he's clearly not a believer. Right. And so that was clear.
Correct, but when it's in the hands of someone like myself who is a believer and who has been raised and trained in fidelity to Scripture and loves it. So my artistic imagination has some boundaries to it that I'm happy to— See, this is what Jonathan Paggio has done on the iconography side, right?
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