A Memo to the Producers of "Revelations"

Jason Byassee has a great piece on Sojo.net about the NBC series Revelations. Check it out...

Revelations is a new NBC miniseries designed to tap into the lucrative market of end-times belief—demonstrated by the success of the Left Behind novels. Actor Bill Pullman plays a Harvard scientist whose skepticism, be assured, will gradually be worn down by a Roman Catholic nun who believes signs of the "end of days" are upon us. That Pullman's child has been murdered by the Antichrist and that another now-comatose child is channeling his daughter's spirit while quoting the Bible in Latin from her hospital bed will, no doubt, help wear away his skepticism.

Since network television is new to making shows that deal sympathetically with religious themes, I thought they could use the following pointers.

Notes to the makers of Revelations:

1. It's Revelation. Not Revelations. It's singular, not plural. That's because it's the one revelation of Jesus Christ. Really. I looked it up. People who say "Revelations" show they don't know what they're talking about. I know you've already spent massively advertising this misnomer, and it's a common mistake, but it's still dumb, so please fix it.

2. Jesus hasn't come back for 20 centuries. Sorry to be so obvious here, but someone seems to have convinced you that the "end of days" is really near this time. You're not the first to think this, but everyone who ever has, has been wrong. Like when believers sold their stuff and expected the apocalypse at the turn of the first millennium - the year 1000. Or when someone wrote 88 Reasons the Rapture Will Happen in 1988. Or the Y2K nonsense. Trust us on this; we in the church have been waiting for Jesus to come "soon" for quite some time.

3. The New Testament was written in Greek. So when your lightening-struck brain-dead little girl starts "quoting scripture" and doing so in Latin, the aura created by the use of a dead language is punctured a bit by the fact that it's the wrong language she uses.

Read the rest!