Jesus Films for World Evangelisation: Dubbing Dissonance and Bible Transmediation

Dubbing Euro-American Jesus films and using them for world evangelisation has reached an unprecedented popularity to the extent that global audiences are now more likely to be introduced to the biblical message in film, rather than text. Dubbed Jesus films are widely perceived as biblically accurate and authoritative as long as they use translated biblical texts and claim to be historical. The communicative contribution of their images, notably how they portray Jesus in looks and behaviour, is largely neglected. Consequently, dubbing leads to an awkward co-cultural fusion of foreign images and local speech, which can generate new and often unanticipated meaning that deviates from the intended meaning of original Jesus films. This dubbing dissonance increases with the socio-cultural distance between foreign images and local speech. Dubbing, then, leads to new media products that assume their own communicative dynamics and stand between Bible translation and transmediation. Just as Bible translation has been localised in recent decades, I propose that Bible transmediation from text to film equally needs to be localised by promoting the idea that different language communities produce their own media products.