Guf and Glory: The Seventh Sign’s Theological Dumpster Fire
I’m always bemused by movies that dare to retcon the Bible. Historical inaccuracy doesn’t bother me, mainly because it would require actual history to be involved, and I consider it ‘blasphemy’ only insofar as it deviates from the source material.
What mystifies me are the little big differences. Take, for instance, Judas. The Passion of the Christ cobbled together its Judas subplot from apocrypha and pure invention. Jesus Christ Superstar gives us a suicidal Judas whose hanging sparks a psychedelic dream ballet. The Last Temptation of Christ reimagines Judas as Christ’s reluctant ride-or-die. And The Greatest Story Ever Told has him self-immolate in a one-man trust fall.
You could overlook that The Seventh Sign (1988) casts notorious screen bad guy Jürgen Prochnow as an über-Aryan Jesus Christ. His glacial demeanor makes him more harbinger than healer, which may be the point, but it strips the role of mystery, compassion, and ambiguity.
Worse is that the villain is the Wandering Jew — well, except for the ‘Jew’ part, since Cartaphilus (Peter Friedman) is depicted as both a Catholic priest and a Roman soldier. According to myth, Cartaphilus is a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was cursed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming.
Cartaphilus, posing as Father Lucci, wants to bring about the end of the world so that his curse will lift. He shares this goal with Jesus, who’s busy breaking the seals of the Apocalypse. The irony is lost on the film.
Lucci is conveniently assigned to investigate a series of apocalyptic events, and he reports back to the Vatican that they are all hoaxes or have scientific explanations. Why does he do that? The world is ending either way.
The “signs” are a conflation of the seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls from the Book of Revelation. Hollywood loves an apocalypse, but it hates consistency. The Revelation of Saint John is cryptic and convoluted, but it’s a cohesive whole unto itself. The Seventh Sign wants scripture to accommodate script. Rather than reinvent Revelation, it regurgitates it into a half-baked Lifetime melodrama/Jack Chick tract hybrid.
Especially problematic is the fifth seal/sign: “And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (KJV).
Abby takes this to mean that “The fifth [sign] is the death of the last martyr.” Why? Beats me. Equally head-scratching is the movie’s definition of a martyr: a man with Down syndrome sentenced to death for murdering his incestuous parents, claiming he had been ordered to do so by God.
That raises several issues.
The guy is dubbed the “Word of God Killer,” which is both contrived and contradictory. The biblical passage talks of “those slain for the word of God,” not those who slay for the word of God. By that logic, the parents, incestuous or not, are the real martyrs. Isn’t honoring thy father and mother a commandment? Would a person with Down syndrome even be considered fit to stand trial?The titular seventh sign, though, is where the wheels really come off. “And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal there was silence in heaven.” Fair enough. But Lucci adds: “The silence of the Guf, empty. The stillbirth of the soulless child. You [Abby] are the seventh seal.”
Abby learns that “In Judeo-Christian mythology, The Guf is the Hall of Souls. Every time an infant is born, this is where its soul comes from … there are only a finite number of souls in The Guf. It’s when the last soul is used, and The Guf is empty, that the world will end. The first infant born without a soul, born dead as a soulless child must be, heralds the death of the world, and so is called The Final Sign.”
Jürgen Christ had mentioned the Guf earlier, so it must be kosher, right? Actually, the problem is that it’s too kosher. According to the Talmud, the Messiah will not come until the Guf is emptied of all its souls; nonetheless, this doesn’t refer to the Second Coming of Jesus, who is not the Messiah of the Jews.
The Seventh Sign treats the Guf like a divine gas tank: once empty, the world shuts down. But in Jewish tradition, the Guf isn’t about eschatological doom; it’s about messianic arrival. The soul-emptied Guf heralds not apocalypse but redemption.
Here’s an idea: pick a canon and stick to it. The Seventh Sign plays fast and loose with sacred texts, but not in a daring, subversive, or even blasphemous way. Consider this: Abby steals a document, written in “a secret form of Hebrew” (called “Melachim,” which is not a “code” but the name of the Book of Kings), from Jürgen Christ, and has Avi (Manny Jacobs), a young rabbinical student, translate it for her, even after Avi has already identified it, book, chapter and verse, as a biblical quote.
Why can’t Abby look it up herself?
Works Cited
The Holy Bible: King James Version. Thomas Nelson, 1987.
The Last Temptation of Christ. Directed by Martin Scorsese, performances by Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel, Universal Pictures, 1988.
The Passion of the Christ. Directed by Mel Gibson, performances by Jim Caviezel and Maia Morgenstern, Icon Productions, 2004.
Jesus Christ Superstar. Directed by Norman Jewison, performances by Carl Anderson and Ted Neeley, Universal Pictures, 1973.
The Greatest Story Ever Told. Directed by George Stevens, performances by Max von Sydow and Charlton Heston, United Artists, 1965.
The Seventh Sign. Directed by Carl Schultz, performances by Demi Moore and Jürgen Prochnow, TriStar Pictures, 1988.
Telushkin, Joseph. Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History. William Morrow, 1991.
Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken Books, 1995.
Related
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn4XtUKMIKQ
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