Golgotha to Netflix

Brielle was standing by the tub from which she’d just emerged, an angel burrito there in her white towel, hair soaked, when she launched her latest theological-epistemological inquiry.

Brielle: Daddy, how do so many people know that Jesus died but they didn’t see it?

Daddy: Well, the people who saw it told other people about it and they wrote it down.

Brielle: Oh, they wrote it down. (nodding) That’s how they know. (obviously—writing is becoming a bigger and bigger part of her world every day).

Daddy: Yeah, and then the people who wrote those stories down gave them to other people who made them into a book—the Bible. And other people gave that book to us.

Brielle: And then they also gave it to Netflix.

Daddy: (unable to restrain a giggle) To Netflix?

Brielle: Yeah, Daddy, because they made a movie about it.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Since college I have been bothered and intrigued by the story of how biblical stories were recorded, preserved, crystallized into a canon and passed on to readers. It is our greatest leap of faith as Christians, I think. We trust that a transcendent God wanted to reveal Himself and relied on human storytellers to set down the truth about Him. Then he counted on history to keep the stories intact, and translators to render them accessible to the common soul. It’s quite a story.

I just failed to take it all the way to DVD.