Half way through watching this DVD by Brian Flemming, I was thinking to myself, This is brilliant, perhaps the most important and challenging documentary I've seen in ages. Then everything changes and by the end, I find myself disappointed.
The first half challenges the existence of the historical Jesus. This is a major contention and, while I'm no scholar of the period, the evidence presented certainly needs to be challenged if misleading. At this point, the documentary is compelling and thought-provoking.
Then it turns personal: Flemming, the narrative voice, appears on camera and identifies himself as a former Christian fundamentalist, who was taught in a fundamentalist school. This alone should not be cause for alarm and might even make the documentary strong because more personal. But Flemming changes the focus, moving away from the fascinating thesis that there was no historical Jesus to a clumsy confrontation with the head of his old school. He sets the man up, arriving under misleading pretenses -- an "end justifies the means" technique used by Michael Moore (which is why I am no fan) -- in order to get the man to look stupid on camera. It's overkill -- and it weakens Flemming's work.
If Flemming had stayed with and continued to develop his original thesis, I might be saying this is a brilliant documentary. All I can say is that it's interesting, and the first half is especially worth watching, as are numerous interviews. But this could have been so much more if Flemming could have kept the anger about his schooling off camera.
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