American Academy Lecture

The Jesus Film: On Universal Translation, Endangered Languages, and the Holy Writ in the Age of AI

The most translated text in the world, available in over 2000 languages from every country, is not a famous work of literature, a UN declaration, or even the Bible (now in 736 languages), but an obscure two-hour movie known as “the Jesus film.” Shot in Israel and Palestine with a local cast of thousands in 1979, JESUS: The Film was produced by John Heyman, a German-Jewish child refugee turned risqué Hollywood maverick, with financing from American evangelicals. A flop at the box office, the film was only resurrected by an army of missionary organizations determined to bring the gospel into all 7,168 spoken and signed languages, and in doing so, to redraw the global religious map. Four billion people are now said to have watched JESUS a total of eight billion times, making it the most watched film in history. In this lecture, Ross Perlin presents his initial research on the film and its wider impact as a planetary linguistic event — serving as a point of departure for an alternative history of translation, a new genealogy of linguistics, and a reflective detour into the role of Large Language Models in AI.