In the ABC special Kevin Costner Presents: The First Christmas, the Oscar-winning actor and producer hosts and narrates what is a more realistic retelling of the story of the birth of Jesus Christ, mixing a scripted reenactment with expert interviews. It is certainly a different picture than what we’ve all seen for out entire lives, which is Mary, Joseph and the Magi looking over the just-born Christ in a rickety manger.
The Gist: To illustrate what the common view of Jesus’ birth is, Costner opens the special by telling the one of his first acting gigs: When he was around 4, he had a line in a nativity play, and his knowledge of the “first Christmas” was embedded in his brain the same way it is for most people. It’s the view of Mary and Joseph, holding baby Jesus in amongst livestock in a manger, with three wise men on camels bearing gifts. But the story, as passed down over the millennia, is more complicated than that. And, given how people lived at that time — around 4 BCE — the what Christ’s birth might have looked like was a whole lot different than the popular imagery suggests.
The story starts in Galilee, a “backwater” of the Roman Empire, in the Judea region. Mary (Gia Rose Patel) and Joseph (Ethan Thorne), who are only teenagers at the time, are engaged to be married. The Romans periodically roll through town to take a census to accurately levy taxes on the Judean people, and when they do, they’re greeted by nothing but terror. And the king of Judea, Herod (Anthony Barclay), is a sicky, paranoid puppet of the empire, willing to kill his son because of that paranoia.
One night Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel (Saif Al-Warith) and is told that she’ll bear a child that will be the son of god and named Jesus Christ. She isn’t sure why she was chosen, as she isn’t royalty, but will be a loyal disciple and carry the child.
She leaves Nazareth and Joseph to tend to her pregnant cousin, and comes back pregnant herself, despite swearing that no one has taken her purity from her. Soon after her return, Joseph is also visited by Gabriel, who lets him know that the baby will need a strong father.
To satisfy the census, Mary and Joseph take a treacherous 90-mile journey to Bethlehem, likely with a group of other travelers, and take refuge at the home of a cousin of Joseph’s as Mary went into labor. Rather than a manger, Jesus was likely born in a subterranean shelter under the house where they were staying. The Magi, who heard that the son of God was born in Judea, likely presented their gifts to a 2-year-old Jesus, rather than directly after his birth.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Kevin Costner Presents: The First Jesus has parallels to The Chosen, going back to Jesus’ “origin story”. But it’s also similar to the style of Kevin Costner’s The West.
Performance Worth Watching: Gia Rose Patel is excellent as Mary, who is strong and independent and willing to sacrifice to serve God, even if it means walking away from the love of her life in Joseph.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Like with the aforementioned The West, Costner and the experts he talks to for this special — clergy from different denominations of Christianity as well as theology and religious history experts — take a more realistic view of Jesus’ birth story. Instead of taking the words in the New Testament at face value, or going by the imagery of the first Christmas that has settled into common knowledge over the centuries, Costner and the show’s producers try to couch the story in the common sense of how people in the Judea region lived at the time.
This includes not only busting myths, like the likelihood that Jesus was actually born in a manger surrounded by wise men, but also giving the brutal reality of living under Roman rule. As Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem, for instance, they come across a village where the Romans slaughtered everyone in it but one, based on the rumor that it harbored spies. Why leave one person alive? So they could tell the others what the Romans did. They also come across people who were being executed via crucifixion, a cruel and inhuman form of punishment the Romans used because it left the crucified out in the elements to starve and die over days.
In other words, the story of the birth of Jesus was much more dangerous and complex than the Bible or popular legend indicates. Costner even points out that many women died in childbirth — usually done kneeling or squatting, not on their backs — and half of all babies didn’t survive until their first birthdays. Such a clear-eyed view is refreshing, even if some of the aspects of the story, like Gabriel appearing before Mary and Joseph, and Mary getting pregnant while still a virgin, are still accepted at face value.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Kevin Costner Presents: The First Christmas has a lot of interesting takes on the story of Jesus’ birth, and the reenactments are well-written and acted.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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