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The New Republic has an article about a new Mel Gibson directed film slated for a spring 2004 release called The Passion. Nothing like a good film about Jesus to stir up political and religious tensions. This article is a retort to what the author claims was a smear campaign by Gibson’s production company, Icon. This is the first I’ve heard of the film, so I don’t know the other side of story. Fascinating read.

this may seem a bit irreverant and insensitive, but here it goes … may be churches should encourage people that after they watch the passion of x they should watch monty python’s “life of brian”. “life of brian” might bring some perspective and well it is a really funny, irreverant, and moderately accurate illustration of life in judea in roman times.
cheers

Yes, people ought to see Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ too. “Always look on the bright side of life. Doo doo doo. Doo do do do do doo.”

Laryn, I don’t see anything wrong with Gibson’s focus because he’s doing a particular type of story, a “Passion” narrative, which is (and has been for hundreds of years) about the last days of Jesus’ suffering". Even Bach, who definitely knew that Jesus’ resurrection is the main event of the story, stopped at the death of Jesus in his St. Matthew’s Passion (but he does a great thing by ending the piece abruptly so it feels unfinished). I think Gibson did a great thing by keeping the resurrection scene in the style and tone of the entire film. The important message of the resurrection in Gibson’s film is that “by his wounds we are healed”, which we saw quoted from Isaiah at the beginning. And as far as J.C.‘s performance of J.C. on the cross, it makes sense that Jesus would only be able to whisper “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” in his weakened state, but now we’re arguing about accuracies…which brings me to the point I was trying to make earlier.

Adam, I responded to vanlee’s post because I don’t like when we force a scientific type interpretation upon the Gospels. The Gospel narrative has its own rules that we need to follow when we’re reading, or watching it. The story is reduced if we’re looking only for accuracies, because the history of Jesus’ suffering and death in the Gospels is not meant just to tell us every little (“objective”) detail about how things happened. That’s what the Mayo Clinic or a modern historian would do to tell the story. Rather, the Gospel writers chose to include the details that fit with Jesus’ overall ministry throughout his life. Many of Jesus’ teachings to his disciples were meant to show them how to interpret what he was doing so that when he left them to do their work, they would spread the Gospel message accurately (i.e. according to Jesus’ message that the coming of the Kingdom of God has finally begun), not accurately (i.e. according to objective science’s arrangement of facts which explain cause and effect relationships that help explain other historical developments in the history of Modern Western Civilization).

I heard another critic (not a film critic, but a scientist, an expert in the Jewish “Kabala”) impose science upon the gospel story again this past week. He criticized Gibson’s The Passion for believing too easily in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life. He said that, since The Gospels were written at least 70 years after Jesus’ life, they could not be considered accurate accounts. They had too much of a subjective bias because they were in a certain highly charged political context in Rome etc.

How arrogant! This guy does not trust the “subjective” perspective of the Gospel writers because they wrote their accounts 70 years after the fact, yet he’ll swear on scientific evidence and interpretations that were not discovered or developed until well over a thousand years after the actual events! He trusts modern science to have the true interpretation of the events of Jesus’ life and death even though, as a method, it wasn’t developed until the middle of the second century (which is itself a timeline based on the life of Jesus). If science were truly an objective method, it would come to the Gospel text as if it were a thing-in-itself, letting it speak its own truths on its own terms, but science requires things to speak its own language if the “thing” can be said to speak at all.

Grant, I guess we disagree about the effectiveness of some of Gibson’s choices. I have another question (besides the others I listed above):

1.Did anyone think the Romans were too caricatured? Whether or not their glee in torture was “accurate,” I didn’t find it believable in the film.

2. Also, though I think charges of anti-Semitism are largely unfounded, I thought he could have made Caiaphas a little more 3 dimensional. [/list]

This film was not as bad as I expected, but the one thing that really bothered me was that some of Gibson’s additions to the biblical story are not consistent with the message of Christ. The additions include scenes of schadenfreude (glee at another’s misfortune) for example when the priest puts his hand on the hot surface, when Judas is pursued by demons, and when the bad criminal gets his eyes poked out be a crow. The message presented is one of vengance—that God abides by the principle of “an eye for an eye.” Jesus on the other hand preached something totally contrary to that. The biblical Jesus would have told the crow to go away. Or maybe Jesus got his eyes poked out too. Point is, Gibson missed the point.

PS I couldn’t BELIEVE the cheesy table-making scene. How does something stupid like that make it into an important film like this?

Ok, so real quickly, who was gleeful when the crow pecked the theif’s eye? I saw it more as a judgement. Should I assume your intent is to focus on the love of God and ignore his wrath? Moments later the same theif would be in Hades, and eventually Christ will say to him – Depart from me you cursed one into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

If you ignore God’s wrath, there is no passion, no crucifixion. Can you see what’s going on here? His wrath and love come together on the cross. You can’t focus on one and ignore the other, or the cross is meaningless.

The crow was God’s judgement and the audience was supposed to be happy about it. Like: tell Jesus off and you’ll get your eyes pecked out man.

The film perpetuates the false idea that bad things happen to bad people because they are bad, and that God is cool with that. Meanwhile bad things are also happening to Jesus, but that’s different. It’s a bit confusing.

I’m going to have to go with Dan on this one. Gleeful? Yikes.

Ok, so real quickly, who was gleeful when the crow pecked the theif’s eye?

I think the crow had nothing to do with vengeance. The crow, typologically in the Bible, is a symbol of death. I don’t think Gibson missed the point. I don’t think it had anything to do with God’s vengeance but on the thiefs rejection of Jesus’ sacrifice.

A quote from the Passion website:
(Q). There is a crow at crucifixion scene. What does that represent?

(A) Historically, it was not unheard of that crows would approach a person being crucified waiting for them to die. It is also symbolic of the thief’s rejection of Jesus.

The table scene was difficult for me to swallow as well. I asked Rajeev (the post supervisor) about it and his reply was that Gibson’s intent with it was two fold: To emphasize the humanness of Jesus and to give pause for the audience to catch their breath. The movie is intense from begining to end, and there has to be some light moments so as not to drown the audience out

The additions include scenes of schadenfreude (glee at another’s misfortune) for example when the priest puts his hand on the hot surface, when Judas is pursued by demons, and when the bad criminal gets his eyes poked out be a crow. The message presented is one of vengance—that God abides by the principle of “an eye for an eye.”

PS I couldn’t BELIEVE the cheesy table-making scene. How does something stupid like that make it into an important film like this

What did people think of the portrayal of Satan? I thought it was effective—I was intrigued. People have asked whether the fact that it was a woman was misogynistic, but I didn’t see that. I thought it was androgynous enough. Satan could perhaps have had a greater role while Jesus was on the cross. Did anyone feel that Satan moving through the (Jewish) crowd represented anti-Semitism, like a review I read recently?