The Man From Earth

“An impromptu goodbye party for Professor John Oldman becomes a mysterious interrogation after the retiring scholar reveals to his colleagues he is an immortal who has walked the earth for 14,000 years. Acclaimed Sci-Fi writer Jerome Bixby conceived this story back in the early 1960's. It would come to be his last great work, finally completing it on his deathbed in April of 1998.” (IMDB)

I had a chance to watch the independent film The Man From Earth yesterday. I love movies and they are in fact one of my hobbies. Occasionally I will write a movie review. This is not exactly a review but more of a reflection. I found the film unusual and an utterly compelling psychological study. It is drama, but not in the normal sense. Nearly the entire film takes place in the sparse living room of the major character. The drama is in the dialogue; there is no action to speak of. Yet the skill of the storytelling captured me and drew me in—What if? What if we were to meet a man who, through a freak of nature, was to be thousands of years old? What would be his perspective on life? On his experiences? Would his experience translate in to wisdom? Would we believe such an outrageous claim? How could it be proved? Could it be proved? Would we be willing to accept this claim at face value without hard evidence?

The film raises all these questions and more. Would someone like this, someone who is very bright, have crossed paths with historical figures? In the case of the protagonist Professor John Oldman the answer is yes. And this is where the film starts to reveal an underlying philosophical agenda. Without giving away the central plot device, the film brought to mind two different films (and the accompanying novel to one) that have come out in the past several years—The Da Vinci Code, and The God Who Wasn’t There.

In the case of both of these titles, there was an agenda rooted in the postmodern historical skepticism, a skepticism which views all things as possible but nothing as probable. When it comes to history there is blatant cynicism—“History can’t be trusted because it is written by the winners. The Bible can’t be trusted because it has been changed over the centuries. What really happened is in no way reflected in the historical record. The stories that were passed down for a generation before they were written down misinterpreted the events that had happened. Even these were changed for reasons of power and politics in the subsequent transmission. Even could we recover the original records they would be untrustworthy because the original authors didn’t get the original story right.”

These issues are of course close to my heart as an historical theologian. They were at the forefront when Dan Wallace, Ed Komoszewski, and I decided to write Reinventing Jesus.

The American public is easy prey to ahistorical sensationalism. During the 1970’s Erich Von Danken wrote Chariots of the Gods? His method was to put forth supposition after supposition: What if? and then what if? and then what if? followed by a conclusion that in effect claimed “Now that we have proved that . . .” while the whole case was built on unproven (and worse than dubious “what if”) assumptions.

More recently with the rampant historical skepticism in society, statements of documented fact are often met with retorts of “Well that is just your opinion!” or we can’t trust that because “History is written by the winners.” History is based on documented evidence, real historians agree on evidence. The question is not did this happen or not, but “What does this evidence mean?”

While well written, well acted and compelling as a story the historical skepticism upon which The Man From Earth is based feeds the rampant distrust of history current in society and, from the perspective of historic Christianity, the historical foundations of the faith.