Despite its quest for authenticity, the BBC1 drama series The Passion portrays a hollowed-out Jesus, devoid of richness and complexity. Other filmic portrayals of him are less literal but more eloquent of the truth of the gospels 

Albert Schweitzer once wrote that when scholars look down the well of history to find the historical Jesus, they see their own reflections gazing up at them. Our knowledge of Jesus comes to us from stories which were written several decades after his death and Resurrection, and the Gospel narratives are not historical records but texts written by the emerging Church to witness to its belief that Jesus was the Son of God. Having said this, some scholars argue that the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear the hallmarks of historical authenticity. They communicate enough of the rough-and-ready textures of everyday life to suggest that, even if they are not first-hand accounts, they are faithful to the recollections of those who were there.

The BBC drama The Passion, screened in four episodes over Easter, is driven by a quest for historical authenticity, with the production team taking great care to create as accurate a representation as possible of Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion and of the characters around Jesus. They show us the city heaving with pilgrims and insurgents in the days leading up to the Passover, with the High Priest Caiaphas (Ben Daniels) and the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate (James Nesbitt) desperately trying to keep order under the distant but threatening eye of the Emperor Tiberius. Caiaphas comes across as a leader torn between his religious responsibilities to the people of Judaea and the need to avoid incurring the wrath of Rome, and the drama successfully avoids the suggestions of anti-Semitism which many detected in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004).

The Passion comes across as a well-intentioned attempt to keep its Christian audiences happy while engaging the interests of a wider public. Yet there is an absence at its heart, not least because of the representation of Jesus himself. Joseph Mawle in the role of Jesus is intriguing to watch, with a hypnotic gaze and a driving sense of purpose about his mission. Unfortunately, however, the script burdens him with a series of one-liners and non-sequiturs, so that he ends up sounding like a cross between a pop psychologist and a political agitator. For example, when Mary Magdalene suggests that perhaps they should not enter Jerusalem by the east gate, Jesus responds cryptically, "No. The gate's important. My father will never abandon me." When he encounters a prostitute who invites him into her "cold" bed, Jesus tells her, "Your bed is cold because your heart is empty." There is little here to engage and, while Jesus' provocation of the religious authorities is well portrayed, there is hardly any sense of the personal charisma which persuaded people to give up everything to follow him.

By attempting to offer us the different perspectives of its main protagonists, The Passion is shot through with hostile and overwrought male relationships, with the women's roles rarely rising above stereotypes. Mary the mother of Jesus (Penelope Wilton) is a disillusioned if sympathetic figure, but we see too little of her to develop any real sense of her character. Mary Magdalene (Paloma Baeza) is loyal, beautiful and has little to say for herself. When she encounters the risen Christ at the tomb, he calls her "child" rather than the biblical "woman", and one can only wonder why any modern scriptwriter would think such a change appropriate or desirable. I found myself wishing that the producers had been more creative with the women's roles, and I wondered if this lacuna was a result of it being an all-male production team. What kind of Passion might we have if those gazing down the deep wells of history were not all white establishment men?

One answer might be found in the recently released Son of Man, a South African film which makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, being set in post-apartheid Soweto. Son of Man is also a flawed film but it is a robust and moving drama, with a particularly powerful performance from Pauline Malefane as Mary. It shows an imaginative appreciation of the significance of the women around Jesus, including the humorous inclusion of two women among the 12, which might be because Malefane herself was one of the scriptwriters.

Such comparisons are interesting, because they ask us to consider what constitutes authenticity in the story of Jesus. The near impossibility of making a good historical drama about him might be because he is, for those who believe in him, a contemporary figure. His significance is not then but now, and his life story is woven in intimate, complex and often contradictory ways into the lives of millions of Christians. The BBC's Passion uses history as a screen to distance us from the real questions posed by Jesus, and I was left with the feeling that the failure to develop his character resulted from a certain nervousness on the part of the producers. We see Jesus as a man obsessively committed to doing the will of God, but in a way which makes it difficult to feel any sense of connection with him. In fact, the most interesting relationships in the story revolve around Judas in his encounters with Jesus and Caiaphas, and it is easier to sympathise with Judas' sense of divided loyalties than with Jesus' torment. The Passion offers little by way of explicit theologising but, like Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, it is implicitly informed by the most brutal kind of atonement theology, so that it cannot escape the suggestion that Jesus is the tortured victim of a vindictive and punishing Father God whose appetite for retribution will only be satisfied by the torture and death of his Son.

Christians have always brought considerable imagination and creativity to their interpretations of the story of Christ, and modern Christians are no different. Contemporary theology and biblical studies have opened up a broad spectrum of possible interpretations which are relevant to our questions today, including different ways of understanding Christ's death in relation to the will of God and the human condition. It is risky to engage with these provocative and challenging interpretations - not least because they might raise issues and questions which a historical drama can avoid by sticking to what is safe and familiar. Perhaps this is why films which seek to portray Christ's story in allegories and metaphors are more persuasive than those which strive for historical realism.

The Canadian film Jesus of Montreal (1989) was a play within a play, with a sense of growing similarity between the young actor who played Jesus (Lothaire Bluteau), and the life of Christ himself. Director Lars von Trier explored his own faith in Breaking the Waves (1996), with the character of Bess (Emily Watson) as a female Christ figure whose love is tested to the limits and beyond. Such films invite us to see parallels with the story of Christ, but they also leave us free to bring our own interpretations and meanings to the story, by resisting the temptation to suggest that this is how it really was.

Both the BBC's Passion and Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ seek to create the illusion of authenticity, although they do so for different motives. Gibson's film was inspired by his Catholic faith and his desire to communicate the divinity of Christ to his audience. The BBC drama is more reticent - even the Resurrection scenes are filmed with a certain ambiguity. Yet for all their different approaches, both films offer us a Christ who is trapped in history, with little sense of his relevance or meaning for today.

In an interview with Radio Times, Passion producer Nigel Stafford-Clark refers to "tiptoeing through a minefield of sensibilities". It would be a great pity if the readiness of some Christians to take offence were to result in a diet of anodyne offerings from film makers and drama producers. Christ was and is a controversial figure, and it is not disrespect but tedium which constitutes the greatest threat to the telling of his story. It feels churlish to say that The Passion did not work, but for me it did not feel like a story about a man one would follow to death and beyond, and if that is not the kind of man he was, then the rest of the story does not really stand up since we have seen and heard it so often before.