Melania and Christ

The release of the recent documentary following Melania Trump in the 20 days before the President's second inauguration has been met with little critical adulation on either side of the Atlantic. I must confess that I haven't expended an afternoon in the cinema watching the film, so I must suspend judgement on it as a piece of cinema. However, it has raised questions about whether biographical art forms can ever be truly objective, or whether they will always, in the telling of the story, create an image of the person which is in some way biased, warped, or inadequate.

This is an important question for us as Christians, since the heart of our scriptural witness is made up of not one, but four accounts of the life of Christ. The Ancient Greek genre of bios differed from our modern 'biography' in that it was even more closely focused on the individual under examination, rarely seeking to draw conclusions from the life of a single subject about the wider society in which they lived. A more pressing question for Greek writers was whether this person was to emulated, either in their achievements or in their qualities. The Gospels share this laser focus on the figure of Christ, but we are invited to draw our own conclusions about which parts of the life and ministry of Christ were unique to him as the Son of God, and which provide examples that we can seek to copy.

But above all, what prevents the Gospels from being mere propaganda is the fact that, from the very beginning of the Christian tradition, faithful scribes have chosen to preserve all four of them, with their complexities and contradictions. Even between the so-called 'synoptic Gospels' (Matthew, Mark and Luke, named because they present a more consistent 'single view' of Christ, in contrast to John), there are differences in emphasis, and the writers have chosen to preserve details that are confusing or even embarrassing to the interpretative tradition. This side of eternity, our knowledge of God in the person of Christ can only ever be partial and flawed. But the fourfold Gospel witness encourages us to grapple with the difficulties of our partial knowledge, rather than settle for a single, simple story.