Originally broadcast on the television program, Frontline.

Letterbox format.

Narrator, Will Lyman.

Explores the life of Jesus and the movement he started, challenging familiar assumptions and conventional notions about the origins of Christianity. Drawing upon new and sometimes controversial historical evidence and interviews with the nation's leading New Testament scholars, the series transports the viewer back two thousand years to the time and place where Jesus once lived and preached. The film traces Jesus' life, focusing on the events that occurred after he died and on his first followers, the men and women whose belief, conviction, and martyrdom created a major movement that transformed the Roman Empire in the space of only three hundred years.

Pt. 1 traces the life of Jesus, exploring the message that helped his ministry grow and the events that led to his crucifixion. Born in the reign of Emperor Augustus during the Pax Romana, Jesus was a subject of the Empire. Looks at how scholars and archeologists have pieced together a new portrait of where Jesus was born, how he lived, and who he was.

Pt. 2 turns from the life of Jesus to the period that followed his death, examining the rise of Christianity and concluding with the first Jewish Revolt, the bloody and violent siege of Jerusalem and the beginnng of a rift between Christianity and Judaism. Explores new evidence suggesting that Jesus' followers, because of their diversity and the differences in their cultures and languages, looked at and interpreted Jesus and his teachings in many different ways.

Pt. 3 examines the period after the first Jewish Revolt, tracing the development and impact of the Gospels, looking at the increasingly hostile relationship between Christians and Jews. The episdoe concludes with the second Jewish revolt against Rome.

Pt. 4 documents the extraordinary events of the second and third centuries in which Christianity grew from a small Jewish sect to an official religion of the Roman Empire.

VHS format.