Andree Seu blogs on how easy it would be to adapt Biblical stories for the screen.
“Okay, so what does a Christian film look like?” one of you asks over lattes at Starbucks, your pens poised above blank sheets of paper.
“It tells it how it is,” replies Johnny. “The Christian is nothing if not a prophet of truth.”
I wish I could remember the title of a book one of my college English professors said was the best story from Jesus’ time period he had read. It something like Ben Hur, a story about a man or boy who lived around 30 A.D. and meets Jesus at one point in the story. It was juvenile fiction, but I don’t remember any more than that.
Quo Vadis?
Quo Vadis actually doesn’t have Jesus in it (Paul and Peter, though!) and takes place in Nero’s Rome. Has a lot of good stuff in it, though it can’t decide between Christian Epic and Roman Political Thriller (and sometimes is better at the latter.)
It’s the only Ben-Hur-ish story I can think of. The main character starts out as a rather strongly Roman unchristian, but “falls in love” with a girl who turns out to be a Christian…and things go from there.
No, not Quo Vadis. This was a simpler book than that. It may be The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare. That book fits what I remember, but I don’t know for sure. I remember my professor saying that most fictional accounts of Jesus make him so flat in one way or another, but this book (that is, the book in question) presents him in a rounded way.
I wonder if it was a novel by G.A. Henty. (I haven’t read any of the Henty novels, but I seem to remember reading about one that matches your description.