The archetypical blue-eyed Jesus played by Max Von Sydow, from whom so many Hollywood stereotypes emerge. In this dreary production Jesus is so different from those who surrounds him that he is almost alien, and his pronouncements so super-spiritual that they are almost of no earthly use.

Jesus never speaks normally; he's always 'pronouncing' something in carefully measured, hallowed tones. It's hard to believe that he was a man like us, as the writer to the Hebrews says, tested like us, yet without sin. He doesn't even talk like us. The miracles are all carefully camouflaged and reported rather than witnessed so that the viewer is never completely sure what has happened, just like the eventual resurrection.

Everyone is frightened for Jesus because he is clearly an innocent likely to fall victim to a much more practical and vicious world. His teachings focus so much on the 'love your neighbour' elements that he ends up looking more like a 1st century Ghandi. The greatest story ever told seems to suggest that Jesus' life as it is recorded in the Gospels was the greatest 'story' ever told, meant to inspire, but not to be taken literally.