Rebuilding the body of Christ is not so elementary; Lesley McDowell

Max von Sydow said it was like being in prison. "I couldn't smoke or drink in public. I couldn't get angry with anyone. I even had to keep it secret that I'm a married man." For Willem Dafoe it was "really a case of scrubbing myself of any expectations". When writer Dennis Potter tried it, he was greeted with screaming newspaper headlines and howls from an outraged public.

Portraying the Son of God, whether on celluloid or in a script, is not easy. The role of Jesus is fraught with contradictions, as Stephen Layton, conductor of the English National Orchestra, found two years ago when they put on a production of Bach's St John's Passion. "Christ is an incredibly tricky figure to play on stage," he said. "You have to avoid the statuesque, yet there's a particular gravitas to the role."

Too much gravitas and Christ loses his humanity; not enough and you are likely to be condemned, as Dafoe found out after his portrayal of a man tempted by bodily desires in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988). Should you actually court disapproval you may find your backers disappearing, as the Monty Python team did while making Life Of Brian (1979) - EMI pulled out of the production and it was left to George Harrison's Handmade Films to ride to the rescue. Even von Sydow's reverent portrayal of Christ, in the 1965 film The Greatest Story Ever Told, wasn't enough to prevent director George Stevens from losing a huge personal fortune.

And yet none of this has put off popular culture from claiming the figure of Jesus Christ as its own. As well as Russell T Davies's The Second Coming, there's Mel Gibson who is preparing The Passion, a film about the last days of Christ told entirely in Latin and Aramaic.

Whether he is a revolutionary, an erotic object or a suffering artist, Christ has consistently been portrayed by popular culture as an attractive figure - one to be admired, loved, even desired.

It is precisely this ability to be all things to all men that makes him so attractive, argues the former Bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway. "A theologian once said that He was like a well - people looking down the well only saw their own reflections. He has become almost like an archetype, someone people can project themselves on to. There are so many deep human archetypal elements in His story that it can be used across time. The idea of the good man oppressed by an overwhelming power is one that can be endlessly re- enacted."

If popular culture has given us one definitive image of Christ it's probably Robert Powell in Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 series Jesus Of Nazareth, possibly because Powell so closely resembled the "traditional" image: indeed Powell himself stated that he felt shocked when he first looked in the mirror and saw how closely he resembled it.

Tampering with this culturally-ingrained image is a dangerous one, as the BBC found out when Jeremy Bowen's series Son Of God was screened last year. Their photographic imaging of Christ as a swarthy, healthy-looking young man was a radical departure from the Powell image of a pale, slender, sensitive-looking soul and caused an outcry. It seems we like our divine images to retain a trace of that divinity - and not be too dark-skinned. New scholarship is getting in touch with the human Jesus," says Holloway.

Scottish poet Edwin Morgan concurs. AD, his trilogy of plays portraying Christ as a political radical who fathers a child, was performed at the Tramway two years ago. "I wanted to concentrate on Christ as a man," he says. "I wanted to place him in his context, in the Palestine of his day, to imagine what experiences he had, to relate him to the politics and religions of the day."

This need to reconcile the human elements of Christ with the divine has long dogged theologians as well as those seeking to portray him in popular culture. A critic for the Herald Tribune newspaper summed up this dilemma in 1965 when reviewing The Greatest Story Ever Told: "I wonder if there is not a diminution when we put the figure of Christ up on screen. How to personify the mystery and divinity, and once personified, how to make the figure more among men?"

As the current wave of television and film productions shows, it's a dilemma that poets, playwrights and film-makers may never work out.

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