Was it sacrilegious – not to mention completely shallow – of me that I bought “The Bible” miniseries for the hunky guy who plays Jesus?

The series itself – from Roma “Touched by an Angel” Downey and her hubby, “Survivor” impresario Mark Burnett – isn’t very good, concentrating too much on the dreary dutifulness of religion rather than the joy it can bring. Which is, I think, part of Jesus’ message.

The actor who plays Jesus in “The Bible” and the subsequent Downey-Burnett collaboration “Son of God” – Portugal’s Diogo Morgado – is one of a long line of beautiful Jesuses. Think of Jim Caviezel in “The Passion of the Christ.” (The moment I saw him in “The Thin Red Line” as the otherworldly Christ figure Witt, I knew he’d make an excellent Jesus.) Or Robert Powell, my favorite, in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jeffrey Hunter’s blue eyes were so dreamy in “King of Kings” that some critics dubbed the film “I Was A Teenage Jesus.”

Sure, there have been stern-looking Jesuses (a miscast Max von Sydow in “The Greatest Story Ever Told”) and even commonplace Jesuses. (Dennis Potter’s “Son of Man,” with stocky, course-looking Colin Blakely in the title role, was lambasted for making Jesus ordinary, even homely, when it aired on British TV in 1969.)

But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: Jesus must be gorgeous.

I’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”

Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it.

McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more

‘Son of God,’ ‘The Bible’ and the tradition of the beautiful Jesus

Lit by lightning