Jesus Video - a Celebration on Film

Over the summer people from the churches in Ashtead are celebrating 2000 years since the birth of Jesus Christ by visiting every home to offer a free copy of a video of his life.

Organise a party? Build a memorial? Plant a tree? They'd all be possible ways of marking an occasion. But how do you mark an event like the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the person who changed the world?

"A group of us from the Anglican, Baptist and Catholic Churches met to think this through. We decided that the ultimate celebration would be to let everyone in Ashtead know why we've got the millennium," says Simon Thomas, one of the clergy in the Parish of Ashtead. "And the Jesus video is an excellent way to do this."

The 87-minute video tells the story of Jesus, the man behind the millennium. Its script is based firmly on the Gospel of Luke, one of the four books of the Bible that recounts events during Jesus' life. Luke was an educated Greek, who wanted to tell people about his new-found faith in Jesus.

Photo of Jesus and child taken from the video

Jesus - the video
The film has been seen by an estimated 1.25 billion people and is available throughout the world in 500 languages.

Other non-Christian historians who were writing at the time back up the history that Luke records. For example, the respected Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who was no friend of Christianity, says in his book Antiquities of the Jews "At the time there was a wise man called Jesus. And his conduct was good and he was known to be virtuous. And many people among the Jews and from other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who became his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days later after his crucifixion and that he was alive."

"We will drop a letter through people's doors shortly before each visit so that people are not worried when we come back a few days later to offer a copy of the video," explains Paul Gruzalski, a member of St Michael's Catholic Church who is helping to organise the programme of visits. "If people would like, we will come back a few days after that to see what they thought of it."

"Please take this opportunity to see why I am so excited about Jesus," says Baptist minister John Newton.

"I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord. But don't come up with any patronising nonsense about him being a great moral teacher. He hasn't left that alternative open to us."
C.S. Lewis

Photo of Jesus on the Cross taken from the video

The three photographs on this page are used with permission

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