How to Make Christ Present in Our Lives: Seeing, Knowing and Presencing as Embodied Practices of Watching Jesus Films

Jesus films have become an integral part of Bible translation strategies, yet little is known about how they really communicate. Drawing on my anthropological research in Benin, West Africa, I affirm the importance of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) idea of “knowing is seeing” as an embodied practice. I then demonstrate that the way people see and know depends on their sociocultural backgrounds. Accordingly, viewers in Benin watch films as an embodied practice that goes beyond the explanatory power of meaning-based communication models. For them the filmic portrayal of Jesus is not an image or representation; they rather make Christ present in a veracious and immediate way. Consequently, they experience the actor as if he were really Jesus, to the extent that he interacts with them in dreams. I argue that conventional models of communication based on semiotics are not sufficient to account for this. I therefore propose a more embodied approach called presencing, which builds on semiotics but also goes beyond it by accounting for the way people make sense of and interact with the world. I conclude that we need to pay close attention to our audiences’ communicative preferences and ways of presencing during Bible translation and when designing, translating and producing Scripture-based films. This will help to promote better communication that results in making Christ—as presented in Scripture rather than represented by an actor—present in the lives of those we seek to serve.