Messiah is a 2019 series created by Netflix.
8 out of 10 stars. I didn’t love it, but I liked it and the writers went to a lot of trouble to make the messiah very much like Jesus. He talks in parables and he behaves the way you would expect Jesus to behave.
In Syria a young Muslim man brings a young boy shot by Israeli soldiers back to life. Overnight he becomes a messiah, a prophet, and leads a group of refugees into the desert. He is then captured by the Israeli Mossad and interrogated. He escapes from this prison and shows up in the United State in Texas in the middle of a tornado where he saves the daughter of a local preacher. After hearing her story thousands of pilgrims flock to Texas to this small town to see him.
What I loved about this series is that this young man looked and behaved like Jesus. If you’ve read the apocryphal gospels and the older images of Jesus in ancient biblical texts, this is as close as anyone can describe him. So kudos to Netflix’s writers for getting it right. They even matched Jesus’s parables with new versions of some of the old ones.
What I hated about this series was the sideline story about the Texas preacher’s family who were so not worthy of anything. They set him up with a televangelist to make money from him and he goes along. This was so pointless and not worthy of the messiah.
Over the centuries, what was actually known about Jesus has been distorted and hidden. He didn’t go around bringing people back to life. He didn’t solve the world’s problems. He was a man, a prophet, trying to put people on the right path. And that’s what this guy is doing.
They added a CIA analyst who thinks he’s a terrorist and a Pentagon guy determined to kill him at any cost.
8 out of 10 stars. Excellent casting. The writing for the main plot line was done well. The Texas subplot not so much.
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