Remember a year or two ago, when Mel Gibson's The Passion all but dominated public discussion around the Easter season? With Lent and Easter in mind, S. Brent Plate at The Revealer has written an interesting piece about Jesus films and the "plurality" of Jesus. He sees in the popularity and diversity of Jesus films a reflection of the difficulty we have in "pinning down" exactly who Jesus was:

In other words, the reason we keep getting more and more Jesus films (the varieties are now as old as cinema itself) is that Jesus is never just one thing. The fundamental paradox is that Jesus becomes historical only and when people from various times and places can find a particular and personal relation to this figure in their here and now. For Christians, historically in the past and in the present, Jesus is not reducible to a one-dimensional object situated in the past, and the variety of Jesus films in the past 100 years shows how this might be true.

Tracing the Jesus-film theme around the web, I found James Kushiner of the Mere Comments blog recommending a viewing of Cecil DeMille's King of Kings. And Christianity Today has a list of the top ten Jesus films. Watching all these Jesus films before Easter would be a bit over-ambitious at this point, but it would be an interesting exercise to choose a few of them and compare the way that Jesus is portrayed in each.