Considers the ways in which films about the life of Jesus use historical, cultural, and cinematic materials to position their representations as viable and authoritative.

Jesus has been present on screen from cinema's beginnings. At the earliest film screenings, lecturers provided respectful contextualisation to filmed images, drawing on historical scholarship or traditions in art and worship for their authority. Over time, films incorporated those discourses into their own narratives, visual style, and marketing. Passions and Temptations explores the Jesus of post–World War II American cinema, asking how such films as King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Ben-Hur, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ constructed positions of authority to underwrite their representations.

Epic cinema of the 1950s and 1960s craved Jesus's authority but insulated itself from exclusive theological claims, turning recurrently to those moments—crucifixion, Sermon on the Mount—that contextualized Jesus as a preacher of peace. As society secularized, Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson presented a Messiah whose relevance lay in his having suffered physical and psychological extremes beyond normal human experience. It is not the Jesus of the Mount in these films, but the Christ of Gethsemane. In the controversies surrounding these later films, claims of authority hit the streets in the form of picketing, pulpit commentary, and journalistic sensationalism. In the twenty-first century, with Christianity itself called into question, representing Jesus is no longer the high-wire act it was previously, but the representational traditions established in earlier years continue to haunt the Jesus film at a time when Christians remain a desirable, but problematic, audience for Hollywood cinemas.