Prominent Bible Teacher Points Out 'Red Flags' in Trailer for Netflix's New 'Mary' Movie
Mike Winger, host of the popular “Bible Thinker” podcast, sees some red flags in the recently released trailer for the upcoming Netflix movie “Mary” about the mother of Jesus Christ.
Winger, an ordained minister who seeks to promote the Christian worldview through his online teachings, did almost a scene-by-scene breakdown of the trailer in a video he published Wednesday.
The opening scene with Joseph and Mary is the first thing he noticed.
Netflix has released the trailer for upcoming Biblical film ‘Mary’
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“He’s on a horse, and she’s on foot, for some reason. It’s kind of weird,” said Winger, who went on to point out there is a Disney “girl boss” vibe that permeates much of the trailer.
He noted the very first scene after that is clearly extra-biblical, with Mary’s father saying to her that her birth was a miracle and that he had made a promise in exchange to God because of it.
“There’s nothing in scripture about this,” Winger said.
The Bible expert suggested the movie creators may have pulled it from early Gnostic writings, meaning it would be heretical.
Winger said he does think Anthony Hopkins as King Herod is probably good casting, and the jealousy and rage the king carries toward the imminent birth of Jesus Christ, the promised messiah for the Jewish people, is certainly biblically accurate.
The trailer also implies there’s some sort of direct interaction between Herod and Mary, which is never mentioned in any biblical account. “That seems very strange to me,” Winger said.
Further, the drama seen in the trailer between Mary and Joseph when he finds out she is pregnant, but not by him, is real, too.
Winger took particular aim at the “girl boss” scenes, like when Mary is told, “You are far more powerful than words.”
“This is the ‘girl boss’ part that I’m worried about. … Like, nobody in the first century says this to anybody,” he contended.
“These concepts come from Oprah. These concepts come from modern Disney films. This is the very self-focused bucket-list version of humanity, where we’re sort of focused upon our experience and living our journey and experiencing our lives and seeing ourselves as powerful and strong. ‘Look, you’re so powerful.’”
In the Bible’s book of Luke, when Mary is told by an angel that she will give birth to the son of God, she responds first in disbelief, given she is a virgin, but ultimately says, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
To Winger, the Netflix “girl boss” content “means that people are taking their own thoughts and their own worldviews and projecting them onto what is the most important story in the world, [which] is the story of Jesus Christ.”
The Bible expert also objected theologically to a line delivered in the trailer that says, “Love will cost you dearly. It will pierce your heart. But in the end, love will save the world.”
“It wasn’t ‘love will cost you dearly,'” Winger said. “Maybe by love, they mean Jesus’s love — that kind of thing. But again, this is a very modernistic way of trying to communicate it that we don’t find in the Gospels.”
“I find those to be, like, slight red flags because if we’re going to take Jesus and we’re going to turn him into a modernistic metaphor of love, then we’re going to lose out on the fact that he is the only way to receive forgiveness of sins. He’s the salvation of God, promised through all the scriptures,” he continued.
“So you’ll have a sort of cultural-Christianity type Jesus. … We can all celebrate him, because he ultimately requires nothing of us. He just encourages us to be loving to one another. That’s the fear,” Winger said.
The podcast host acknowledged trailers can be cut differently than the movie itself, so “Mary” as a whole may handle the concerns he raised in a more biblically complete way.
Winger concluded by saying when the movie comes out in December, “Maybe I’ll do a review of it. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be very good. I think it’s going to be annoying.”
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