What was seen in 1964 as a daringly direct, almost reportorial account of the Gospel of St. Matthew, set against the everyday life of the times, today looks like a stylized classic. Pasolini employed a cast of non-professional actors, and settings of rugged Southern Italian landscapes and hill towns, shot with a mixture of cinema-verité techniques, expressive close-ups and ingenious set-pieces. His Christ is an anguished and determined revolutionary, setting children against their parents as he has turned against his own, a peripatetic preacher against the afflictions of social injustice. (He has an artist's ego: "Only in his own country, a prophet goes unhonored.") His miracles are as matter-of-fact as Pasolini's pageantry is gritty. The faces Pasolini has chosen are those of the rural proletariat, but they evoke parallels with Italian religious art; similarly, the music is a mixture of black spirituals, the Missa Luba, and Bach. Pasolini spoke of "my tendency always to see something sacred and mythic and epic in everything, even the most humdrum, simple and banal objects and events. So in this sense The Gospel was just right for me, even though I don't believe in the divinity of Christ, because my vision of the world is religious...." (in Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini)