Description:
Are you ready for a dose of Old World spirituality on your digital desktop? Jesus: Gospel & Paintings brings the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to a CD-ROM format that incorporates text, narration, works of art, and music. Produced by Montparnasse Multimedia of Paris, this European CD-ROM features reproductions of Renaissance art masterworks, with musical accompaniment that ranges from Bach to Verdi. The CD-ROM divides the stories of the Gospel into 12 scenes, which are easily navigated from the home page. Each scene contains four features: an animation, a commentary that paraphrases the story, an explanation of its historical context, and the biblical text of the scene. You can move quickly to related scenes or further background information. One especially interesting feature is the Synopsis, which allows you to see all four Gospels at once for any given scene. Along with the 12 scenes, there is a Discovery button that allows you to click on the sayings of Christ or on symbols, such as a loaf of bread. This leads you to the relevant passages in the Gospels. A similar feature is called Actors, which allows you to search for a relationship between two separate terms, such as "John the Baptist" and "Galilee." The use of these features is not immediately obvious onscreen, but it is clearly explained on the disc jacket. This scene-by-scene exploration of the Gospels will not interest everyone, and there are a handful of spelling errors that detract from its overall appearance. The European interpretation may appeal most to Catholics and those interested in the cultural history of Western Christianity. It might make a perfect Confirmation gift. --Matthew Kohut
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