"This Good News will be preached to every creature." — and now, by the grace of G-d, from a Manhattan post-production film editing facility to every screen on earth.
What The Living Bible's translator Ken Taylor liked about The Rabbi From Tarsus was that the stage play's diction is actually Holy Scripture, which you will see if you look at pages 89-92 where the Living Bible references are given in the book Ken Taylor's Tyndale House published in 1981. In 1979, Phil Goble wrote the screenplay that tells the true story of Sha'ul of Tarsus — the zealous rabbi turned shliach, whose encounter on the Damascus road transformed him from persecutor into the most fruitful witness of the Resurrection of Messiah in the early centuries of the faith.
The play was seen by Ken Taylor and then published by Tyndale House Publishers of Wheaton, Illinois — the same prestigious house that would later publish a companion book to Mel Gibson's Passion film. The Rabbi From Tarsus film itself was produced as a VHS Home Video by Word, Inc. of Waco, Texas, and has been seen by countless thousands of viewers worldwide, inspiring new stage productions by other professional actors in Australia, South Africa, and beyond.
The Rabbi From Tarsus is more than a film — it is a testimony to the unbroken thread that runs from the Shliach Sha'ul's own ministry to the present-day work of Artists for Israel International: bringing the Good News of Messiah to the Jewish people and to all nations, in their own tongue and idiom. This Media Bible film stands alongside AFII's broader translation work, including the Orthodox Jewish Bible and the Yiddish Triglot Bible, all built on the conviction that the Resurrection message Paul carried from the Damascus Road is the same message still going out today.