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

At the Academy, Perlin is working on his third book, “The Jesus Film: On Universal Translation, Endangered Languages, and Holy Writ in the Age of AI.” The book will trace the history of an obscure two-hour movie, an American Biblical drama known as “the Jesus film.” Shot in Palestine and Israel, “JESUS” was co-directed by Peter Sykes and John Krish, and produced by John Heyman, a German-Jewish child refugee turned Hollywood maverick, with financing from American evangelicals. The film flopped at the box office upon its release in 1979 but caught the attention of missionary organizations bent on bringing the gospel into all 7,168 spoken and signed languages. With translations in over 2,000 languages, the film’s screenplay is today the world’s most translated text, and four billion people have reportedly watched “JESUS” a total of eight billion times, making it the most watched motion picture in history. Furthermore, Meta, Google, and OpenAI are reportedly using the film to train their models on less common languages. Perlin’s project takes the film and its broader impact as a point of departure for an alternative history of translation, a new genealogy of linguistics, and a sidelong meditation on the Large Language Models behind AI. In Berlin, Perlin will conduct archival research at the Berliner Missionswerk, and deepen a long-standing collaboration with the Endangered Language Documentation Programme, housed at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.