"Time" wrote a negative review describing the film as "the corniest, phoniest, ickiest and most monstrously vulgar of all the big Bible stories Hollywood has told in the last decade". Bosley Crowther of "The New York Times" felt that the movie had "the nature of an illustrated lecture" and was a "peculiarly impersonal film that constructs a great deal of random action around Jesus and does very little to construct a living personality for Him.". "Variety" praised the film as "a major motion picture by any standard" that not only "succeeds as spectacle" but also "succeeds in touching the heart." Philip K. Scheuer of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote, "It is not great art, nor is it the definitive photoplay about Jesus (will there ever be one?), but it is at least permeated by a soberness of purpose that, allowing for ordinary human fallibility, can be tacitly felt and respected. Technically, of course, it is far glossier than the C. B. DeMille movie of 1927, and very probably at least its equal in effectiveness. Dramatically, I think, it falls somewhere between the theatrical entertainment that was "Ben-Hur" and the spiritual but spiritless "Francis of Assisi"."