'In Search of Historic Jesus' (1980): The $250,000 Religious Mystery That Became a Box-Office Phenomenon

MOVIES OF THE 80s

There are movies that become hits because Hollywood spends millions of dollars convincing audiences that they need to see them.

And then there are movies like In Search of Historic Jesus.

Made for a reported budget of somewhere around $250,000, this peculiar religious docudrama arrived in theaters in 1979 with none of the conventional ingredients of a blockbuster. There were no movie stars. No elaborate sets. No expensive special effects. No major studio campaign.

What it did have was Jesus Christ, the Shroud of Turin, a growing fascination with ancient mysteries, and Sunn Classic Pictures.

That turned out to be more than enough.

In Search of Historic Jesus was exactly the kind of movie Sunn Classic knew how to make: inexpensive, earnest, aggressively marketed, and built around a question that audiences couldn’t resist.

Was it possible to prove the story of Jesus through science?

The answer the movie arrived at was considerably less complicated than the question.

And yet, somehow, audiences showed up in droves.

THE SUNN CLASSIC FORMULA

By the late 1970s, Sunn Classic had perfected a very particular kind of filmmaking.

The Utah-based company didn’t need Hollywood budgets because it had figured out something Hollywood sometimes forgot: people will go to the movies if you give them a question they desperately want answered.

In Search of Noah’s Ark had already demonstrated the potential of combining biblical subjects with archaeology and mystery. In Search of Historic Jesus followed essentially the same blueprint.

The film was based on the 1979 book of the same name by Lee Roddy and Charles E. Sellier Jr., the latter of whom was one of the driving forces behind Sunn Classic’s strange little empire of documentaries, docudramas and mystery movies.

The timing was particularly convenient.

The Shroud of Turin had become a major international sensation, and the public fascination surrounding the artifact provided an ideal hook for a movie attempting to investigate the historical Jesus.

The production brought together writers Jack Jacobs and Malvin Wald, with Robert Starling also receiving an uncredited contribution, while technical advisor Geoffrey Ashe supplied the project with an appropriately scholarly appearance.

That was an important part of the Sunn Classic formula.

The movies didn’t simply tell you what to believe.

They investigated it.

At least, that’s what they wanted you to think.

JESUS IN UTAH

Directed by Henning Schellerup and produced by James L. Conway, In Search of Historic Jesus had no intention of recreating first-century Judea on anything resembling a Hollywood scale.

Instead, Utah would have to do.

The landscapes around Heber, Provo and Park City became stand-ins for the Holy Land, allowing the production to create its biblical world without spending the kind of money required to actually build one.

John Rubinstein played Jesus, surrounded by veteran performers including John Anderson and Nehemiah Persoff.

Brad Crandall provided the authoritative narration, delivering the material with the grave seriousness that became a hallmark of Sunn Classic’s productions.

The movie alternates between interviews, narration, historical discussion and dramatized sequences from the New Testament.

And then there are the miracles.

Sunn Classic wasn’t working with Industrial Light & Magic. The visual effects were understandably primitive, including glowing-hand effects intended to communicate supernatural events.

There is something almost charming about the sheer earnestness of it.

The movie clearly believes that it is investigating the greatest mystery in human history.

It just doesn’t necessarily have the resources—or the evidence—to do much investigating.

THE SHROUD OF TURIN

Much of the film’s appeal rested on the enormous fascination surrounding the Shroud of Turin.

In 1978, the mysterious cloth had been publicly exhibited, generating worldwide attention and renewed debate over whether it might actually be the burial cloth of Jesus.

For Sunn Classic, this was almost too perfect.

Here was a religious mystery that could be approached through archaeology, science and historical investigation while still appealing directly to an audience already inclined to believe in the biblical account.

The movie takes its audience through questions about Jesus’ life, his so-called “lost years,” the historical record and the evidence surrounding the crucifixion.

But the distinction between investigating a mystery and building a case for a predetermined conclusion is often difficult to ignore.

The film isn’t really interested in asking whether the evidence proves the story.

It’s interested in finding evidence that might support it.

That distinction is at the heart of In Search of Historic Jesus.

THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT THE MOVIE IS THAT IT WORKED

Critics weren’t buying it.

Leonard Maltin eventually dismissed the movie with his infamous “BOMB” rating, referring to its investigative claims as “drivel.” Other critics were similarly unimpressed by its mixture of speculation, sensationalism and bargain-basement production values.

And honestly, it’s not difficult to understand why.

In Search of Historic Jesus has the look and feel of a particularly earnest television special that somehow escaped the television schedule and wound up in a movie theater.

But critics weren’t the audience Sunn Classic was really courting.

Families were.

Church groups were.

People fascinated by biblical history were.

And Sunn Classic knew exactly how to reach them.

Instead of relying upon the traditional Hollywood distribution model, the company used an aggressive form of four-wall distribution. Sunn Classic would rent theaters itself, book short runs and then promote the film heavily in local markets.

It was less like launching a Hollywood movie and more like taking a traveling religious revival on the road.

And it worked.

Spectacularly.

The movie reportedly earned approximately $22.4 million in North America—an astonishing return on a production that may have cost only a fraction of a million dollars.

For a movie dismissed by critics as junk, it was anything but a commercial failure.

FROM THEATERS TO TELEVISION

That success eventually carried In Search of Historic Jesus beyond its theatrical life.

NBC aired the film in 1981, exposing it to an even larger audience and helping transform what had begun as an unusual theatrical curiosity into a piece of religious-media history.

Like many Sunn Classic productions, it also found a second life in home video.

What had once been a heavily marketed theatrical mystery became the kind of movie discovered years later by viewers who had no idea what they were watching.

And that’s part of what makes it so interesting today.

In Search of Historic Jesus exists somewhere between religious documentary, exploitation movie, television special and historical curiosity.

It doesn’t really fit comfortably into any one category.

THE PROBLEM WITH FINDING THE TRUTH

The years haven’t been particularly kind to the film’s claims.

Subsequent scientific investigation, most notably radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin, undermined the idea that the artifact was a first-century burial cloth. The movie’s confident presentation of speculation as evidence has consequently aged rather poorly.

But that doesn’t make In Search of Historic Jesus uninteresting.

Quite the opposite.

It makes the film a fascinating snapshot of a very specific moment in American culture—a time when faith, archaeology, television, mystery and movie-theater spectacle could all be packaged together and sold to millions of people.

Sunn Classic understood something that major studios sometimes overlooked.

You didn’t necessarily need to spend millions of dollars to make an audience believe that something was important.

You just needed to convince them that there was a mystery they couldn’t afford to miss.

A BIZARRE LITTLE PIECE OF MOVIE HISTORY

In Search of Historic Jesus is not a great movie.

It isn’t particularly rigorous history, either.

But judging it exclusively on those terms misses what makes it worth remembering.

This was a movie made for almost nothing that managed to turn one of the oldest stories in human history into a commercial phenomenon. It took the familiar machinery of religious filmmaking, mixed it with the sensationalism of a mystery documentary and distributed it with the instincts of a carnival barker.

And audiences came.

Millions of dollars followed.

That may ultimately be the most interesting mystery surrounding In Search of Historic Jesus.

The filmmakers set out to prove something about Jesus.

Instead, they accidentally proved something about the audience.

Give people a mystery. Tell them there might be an answer. Make that answer feel just within reach.

Then put it on a movie screen.

Sometimes, that’s all Hollywood—or something pretending to be Hollywood—needs.