The Founder, Biblical Edition
Someone needs to do a modern miniseries of Acts – it’s essentially the OG VC-backed startup story. The apostles have a clear mission to bring people to Christ, but have no idea how to get there – they’re just throwing stuff up against a wall and seeing what sticks. The Pentecost, where they start speaking in tongues, is the first big conversion event where they get that hockey stick growth of thousands of people signing up due to their witnessing the powers of the Apostles. It is at this moment they are enlightened: “The savior has blessed us all with the ability to cast incredibly sik miracles”. After that, the gloves are off – they go around Israel flexing their siddhi and getting more and more people roped in based on the merits of them doing really cool shit. Early Christianity was basically an apocalypse cult with no regard to the future, since they all assumed that Jesus was coming back in their lifetimes, so they encouraged people to not get married and just sell all their stuff to pool resources for the fledgling Church. This is a parallel to startup lifestyle in general – young and energetic new grads burning up their time and social lives just completely ensconced in the mission. The pivot to preaching toward Gentiles is the classic product market fit pivot that many startups undergo as well – when the original mission of preaching to just Jews plateaus, they get a new CEO who comes in and completely alters the course of the organization to go all in on preaching to gentiles.
The latter half of the story then becomes a retelling of The Founder with James and Peter as The McDonald’s brothers and Paul as Ray Kroc. No, really, think about it. James and Peter: Keepers of the flame, true to the ideals of the “original” teachings of Jesus, parochial and insular mindset, preaching only to Jews as an extension and successive religion of Judaism itself. Parallel this to the McDonald’s Brothers’ obsession with keeping to their rigorous and exacting standards. They refused to expand the franchise beyond their own sphere of influence because they couldn’t gatekeep the exact qualities they had in mind for what “McDonald’s” represented to them. That isn’t too far off from the insularity of James’ and Peter’s mission to only proselytize to Jews. Paul/Ray Kroc comes in after the fact, sees what the duo is cooking up, and buys in completely. Ray Kroc with his infatuation with McDonald’s, the brand as well as the system, and Paul on the Road to Damascus where he personally meets Jesus. The new partner completely upends the traditional franchise, spreading their tendrils far and wide to an entirely new market segment with different priors – i.e. the Gentiles. What’s the result? The franchised nature of Pauline Christianity outcompetes the original flagship-only strain of Christianity and is now the mainstream religion, much like how Ray Kroc usurped the position from the brothers. Of course, Paul had some help in the form of the Roman Empire, but in this case you can look at them as the invisible hand of the market coming in to sweep out branches with less product market fit than the Pauline version of Christianity. You could have an amazing miniseries that goes from this early startup story to ending with The Founder pivot, ending in the modern day, showcasing the Pauline traditions that carried over to modern day evangelical Christianity. Christian media for the longest time was plagued with cheesy, low production quality slop – I think there’s a lot of room for high investment recontextualizations of Biblical stories in a modern context for Christians to reinterpret these stories, removed from their original trappings. Most Christian media is either pandering, or looking at Christianity or the world with a sense of smug disdain. What the people are really hungry for are prestige stories that properly retell the Bible, but recontextualize it in a modern context. Make it so, HBO.