I devoted Easter Sunday to a handful of religious themed movies, starting last night with Martin Scorsese’s 2016 movie “Silence.” It’s a story about two Christian missionaries in 17th century Japan who arrive from Portugal and take on a mission to find Father Ferreiri, a lost missionary rumored to have given up his faith.

The movie feels a bit like “Apocalypse Now” in its setup, but soon becomes enmeshed in everyday Japanese life in a fishing community of Christians desperate for priests. They step into their role and have faith-affirming experiences. But then the inquisitors start to become a problem.

I won’t give away the whole plot of the film, I’ll just jump to one scene that I think reveals the most important truth of the film. The young missionary, Father Rodriquez, played by Andrew Garfield, finally comes into contact with Father Ferreira, played by Liam Neeson.

It turns out he had turned away from the Catholic Church, partly because of threats of death against his parishioners, but also because he had become disenchanted with the course of Christianity in Japan. Here’s the crucial scene:

Ferreira: Rodrigues, please listen. The Japanese only believe in their distortion of our gospel. So they did not believe at all. They never believed.

Rodrigues: How can you say that From the time of Saint Francis Xavier, through your own time, there were hundreds of thousands of converts here.

Ferreira: Converts?

Rodrigues: Converts, yes!

Ferreira: Francis Xavier came here to teach the Japanese about the son of God. But first he had to ask how to refer to God. Dainichi he was told. And shall I show you their Dainichi?

He points to the sun in the sky

Ferreira: Behold…there is the SUN of God. God’s only begotten sun. In the scriptures Jesus rose on the third day. In Japan… the sun of God rises daily.

“Silence” is based on a historical novel, so I don’t know if this story accurately portrays Christianity in Japan, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of story Michel de Montaigne might share.

Today, I started my viewing with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew.” Pasolini, who was gay and a Marxist, clashed regularly with the Catholic Church throughout his career, but this film was beloved by the Church — it was an extremely faithful adaptation of the Matthew Gospel.

But it’s also a really angry movie and I’m not sure if the church understood the film’s context well. Matthew is the Christ story that focused most of the social justice aspects, and Pasolini puts a heavy emphasis on Jesus’s attacks on wealth (while mentioning relatively little about his non-violence.)

It’s also a fairly amateurish movie. Pasolini was a famous essayist and poet before he took up film in the early 60s. Federico Fellini famously said that he should have stuck to writing. Pasolini’s visual style in this film is clumsy and the acting is atrocious all around. He gets better at these aspects as his career goes on.

The main thing I took away from the film today is the that Jesus story is pretty strange. We know nothing about his life from the time he was a small child until he started preaching around the age of 28. It’s hard to figure why he gathered a following, given that he wasn’t aligned with any church. The disciples seem like a random selection guys who showed up at his sermons, and the image of them all trekking through the Holy Land give the movie a hang-out movie vibe. The scene where Jesus walks on water and meets his disciples at sea is one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes in religious movie history.

Next up after “St. Matthew” was a return to Scorsese, his 1988 classic “The Last Temptation of Christ.” This has been one of my favorite movies for a long time, but I had to downgrade it a bit after watching again today. It might be Scorsese’s strangest film, filled with odd hallucinatory bits and strange casting — especially Andre Gregory (that’s the Andre from “My Dinner with Andre”) as a John the Baptist who seems to be running a hippie commune; and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate, in a surprisingly low-energy turn for him.

The movie’s main conceit is the manufactured plotline that Jesus grew up with Mary Magdalene and the two are hopelessly in love with one another, but the fact that they can never be together drove her into prostitution. This pretty much drives Jesus insane, he is at war with his human drives and has guilt over what has become of Mary M. (There’s one other manufactured plot point — that Jesus built crosses before he started his ministry. Most of the historical evidence of the era indicates that crosses were improvised structures and were not manufactured by craftsmen.)

Like “Silence,” this movie is an adaptation of a novel, and explicitly details in the opening credits that it is not based on the Gospels. This gives writer Paul Schrader, a frequent Scorsese collaborator who also wrote “Taxi Driver,” to throw in numerous hallucinatory elements and make Jesus seem much like an existential conflicted protagonist of 20th century cinema. The Scorsese/Schrader Jesus can’t decide what he wants to preach — it’s one love day, then he brings a sword the next, then he leads his disciples to the brink of burning down the Temple in Jerusalem, but then loses his nerve.

It can feel like a strange way to approach the Jesus story, but in fairness to Scorsese and Schrader, the various tales of Jesus are confusing and sometimes contradictory. He does shift emphasis in his sermons rapidly, which always makes me wonder why the disciples just roll with it. He also at times performs miracles readily, but when he could use one to convince non-believers, he refuses. The hallucinatory nature of the story also makes sense when you put it in context of the film’s highly controversial last half hour.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” goes into an extended fantasy sequence towards the end where Jesus, guided by a young girl guardian angel who turns out to be Satan, imagines a domestic life with various women and lots of children. The trippy nature of the film plays into this plot device — we’ve already become accustomed to hallucinatory elements.

The highlight of the hallucination sequence is a moment where Jesus meets Paul, the former persecutor of Christians who is struck by a light on the road to Damascus and basically creates Christianity. Paul, echoing the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevski’s “The Brother Karamazov” informs Jesus that his Church does not need him, that he’s far more powerful as a symbol. Soon after, the Disciples come to visit and inform Jesus of the terrors of the world that resulted from him walking away from his death and resurrection. Jesus then repents, returns to the cross and declares “it is completed!”

Well, I’ve already written too much and have two more movies to go. The first was a rewatch of “Dekalog One,” the heartbreaking story of a young boy’s death and a father’s over-reliance on technology. I followed it up with another story about grief, the 2011 Terrence Malick film “The Tree of Life.” It’s a movie that pairs remarkably well with Kieslowski’s meditation, but I screwed up and watched the extended version of the film, which even Malick advises is not the definitive version of the movie, he prefers the 45 minute shorter cut known as the Theatrical Release.

The longer version of “The Tree of Life” is far darker than the theatrical version, and that’s unfortunate, because the theatrical version is a nearly perfect blend of darkness and light. It’s a very spiritual film, and I think it capped off the day well.

My thought going into the day is that these films might give me some insights on religion and spirituality — so I obviously came into it somewhat receptive. The movies mostly made me even more puzzled about the gap between the physical and spiritual dimensions of life.