The Passion of the Christ - Page 9

+1

Going to see it tomorrow with a new bunch at the Church I met tonight

I will weigh in after viewing it..

Fellows

The marketing Mel Gibson's team is very poor. They complain that none of the big french distributor want to show their movies in their theaters, but they never ask them too.
This chip image of martyr that they want to have is very sickening.

I am open-minded and I do understand that they had different goals. I was annoyed at the schizophrenic Jesus in The Last Temptation. You were almost lead to believe that Jesus was delusional about being the Messiah, although he did perform miracles. The image of Jesus presented in The Last Temptation does not mesh with how I see him. I can't answer as to how I would have acted in his situation because I don't know.

Obviously Mel isn't in the same league as Scorsese, but few first time directors can do as well as he and The Last Temptation is far from Scorsese's best film.

powerdoc:

False cries of oppression are common in society, many Christians are very eager to cash in on Matthew 5:10.

Gibson also moaned about the Jewish criticism of the movie before there was any Jewish criticism.

How could you ascertain that? How do you know that someone or some group didn't complain to Gibson personally, or that you just happened to miss the first interview on the nightly news that brought forth the first complaint? I don't think it's fair to say that unless you've been with Gibson and his crew since day 1.

Anyway, I've said pretty much everything I can say about this movie and the issues surrounding it. Whether anyone agrees with me or not, I hope you'll all at least go see it when you have a chance. Make up your own mind, don't let anyone [else] make it up for you....

Hmm. "They're going to kill him." Yeah, Moogs, no overstatement there.

No i will not see this movie. I am not interested to see it, controversy or not.

When the Satanic verses where published by Salman Rushdie, and a Fatwah (death sentance) was put on his head, many people bought his book. Most of them where disapointed : the book was not huge. If i wanted to support Rushdie, then i should just send him some cash, but i don't buy a book for that. I buy book to read them, and i watch movie to enjoy them.

So i will not see this movie just for judging on my own. False cries of oppresions are very chip marketing and will prevent me to see it. If people are interested in this movie regardless of this marketing crap, i think that they should watch it, but otherwise there is plenty of movies that deserves attention.

You are right Groverat. It's very common, but despicable. In the french politic arena the right winged antisemit politician Le Pen is a professional of this practice. His common scheme is :
- a) made a provocation ( a silly wording like gaz's chambers are a detail of history)
- b) people react to this crap
- c) he moan to be a victim and a martyr of the free speech
- d) he get 20 % of the votes ---> it works

Moogs:


Because he admitted it on television when asked.

So very eager to be martyred.

'ole Mel should look less at Matthew 5:10 and more at Matthew 6:2&5.

Hi. Just want to say I saw "What women wants" five minutes ago.

What a mind****ing piece of crap that film is.

Except that this movie puts far more emphasis on the theologically meaningless scourging than it does the salvific crucifixion. Jesus' scourging had nothing to do with his saving of mankind.

And I would disagree that "few" every give a thought to Jesus' suffering. Millions pray the Rosary, which includes several meditations on the various pains Jesus suffered in his Passion.

Kirk

No, it didn't. It showed Jesus whose manhood and divinity were in tension, and how his flesh was weak when his spirit was strong. It was about how Jesus himself came to understand his own Messianic and divine nature.


No, Jesus does NOT give in to Satan on the Cross. It is on the Cross that the human Jesus, faced with Satan's most tempting temptation, freedom from the death his divinity has driven him to, comes to recognize his own divinity, and gives up his life for the salvation of all humankind. It is the richest, move moving and potent presentation of Jesus Christ in the history of film.

Kirk

I disagree, but as it appears your memory of the movie is fresher than mine, I will not argue over it. All I can say is that my statements sum what I got out of the film.

Probably. I have "Last Temptation" watching parties with various friends every Holy Saturday.

Kirk

I never gave it much thought or paid attention in church I guess, but did Jesus really get "tempted by the devil" while on the cross? Or is this just what we assume was going through his mind, since he knew he could save himself, but decided personally that saving himself was not how to fulfill his destiny. Did he know he had to "die for us?"

Without a doubt, read the gospels.

Shawn, Groverat... maybe I missed a quote somewhere earlier in the thread or in the news. You're saying Mel Gibson admitted during some media event that:

"Yes, I complained about Jewish criticisms before any Jews criticized my film?"



If you have a link indicating the same I'll drop it. Sounds like I missed something somewhere along the way. If that's the case, sorry for the contradiction, otherwise I'll wait to see your clarification / a transcript of what Gibson said in this regard.


Kirkland:
how could the movie *not* focus on the abuse if the movie is about "the last hours of Christ"? During that time, he wasn't preaching to anyone about salvation or anything else. He was captured, made a prisoner (of sorts) and treated like one, and then marched up a hill to his own death. Of course it's going to be about the abuse.

This movie is about what he endured (or what we believe he might have endured based on Biblical references)... it's not about "whether he had to be beaten in order to save anyone". That is completely missing the point. This movie isn't out to prove "that Jesus logically had to be beaten X times" in order to save us, which is what you're implying.

This movie is basically a modern-day attempt to document "how it happened" in one man's eyes. Not whether or not anything *had* to happen or "what would have been logical"....

Not according to the Bible. The temptation on the cross is merely the device used by the author of the novel "Last Temptation" (whose name I can never spell) to examine the interrelation between the humanity and divine in Christ. Jesus' human body would have rebelled at the pain, in shock and agony, since he was fully human. How did his human soul, his divine spirit, respond to this, and what does this tell us about when Christ realized his divine nature _that's the question Last Temptation attempts to consider.


Undoubtedly. Jesus was not omniscient, not fully, at least, due to the limitations of his human consciousness _remember, he was just as human as he was divine but he knew what his Messianic destiny was. He knew that the Messiah was to be the Suffering Servant of second Isaiah.

Kirk

By lingering less on the whipping/scourging and more on the crucifixion. By providing more flashbacks to lend theological undercurrents and potency to the actions of salvation depicted at Golgotha. Use the Passion as a framework for a consideration of Jesus' entire ministry emphasize the soteriological power of the coming event by presenting Jesus' march to the place of the skulls, instead of focusing on splattering blood and absurd lacerations suffered at the theologically meaningless whipping post.


Any movie which doesn't use any event of Jesus' life to underline his soteriological mission is missing the entire point of why Jesus did what he did.


Being beaten was meaningless. Jesus could have not been flogged or whipped or spit upon so much as once, and he would have still saved the world at the cross.


Then as a film about Jesus, it is worthless nothing more than carnal fascination with blood and gore, the Gospel According to Quentin Tarantino. They what is utterly meaningless without they why particularly since we can't take any of the Gospels as infallible statements of fact on the historicity of events. They are theological treatises, not historical works.

Kirk

I posted this to my weblog last night, which details some of my problems, as a Christian, with Gibson's film:

Passionate Box Office

Early reports are placing The Passion of the Christ's box office in the north-of-$100-million range for the five day weekend. This is probably the biggest non-summer opening ever, and by far the best ever posted by an "independent" film. As a cinematic businessman, Gibson has clearly proved his worth.

Of course, the big box office take is bullied by mass buys by church groups across the country which is not to make light of the economic accomplishment here. Church groups, even fundamentalist groups who must certainly think that Gibson is going to Hell for his rote Catholicism, have mobilized a very unique and abnormal constituency for this film, and Gibson owes them a great debt.

But has he provided them with a great film? It's certainly moving, but the more people who see this, the more its theological shallowness troubles me. While I doubt that the film will set off waves of anti-Semitic violence, I do fear that it will do great violence to the subtlety and texture of the Gospel message. By focusing solely on the carnal, Gibson presents a Jesus who is utterly devoid of the spiritual (aside from the "best of" quotes), and that's not an image of Christ that, I think, serves Christendom well.

All the beatings, all the lacerations, all the spitting and abuse at the hands of centurions and priests and mobs _all of it is meaningless to salvation. Jesus didn't take mankind's sins upon his shoulders at his flogging, or at his trial. It is the cross that is the central device and message of Christianity, and it is complete in and of itself.

Jesus could have been carried lightly on down pillows and then crucified, and the world would be just as saved. He could have been flogged within an inch of his life then released and the world would now be damned. It was the cross that was the sacrifice, that made a Galilean carpenter the Lamb of God promised to Abraham, Moses and David. It was the death on the cross that ended death. All the rest was just window dressing or perhaps an attempt by the "ruler of this world" to break Jesus' human will before the final sacrifice.

But in the Gospel According to Mel, by the time we get to the death, both Jesus and the audience are so exhausted by the extremes of everything that came before that it is not a climax or at least, not the climax it should have been. By accentuating the flogging and scourging, Gibson draws a shadow over the crux of his film.

Agony wasn't enough, if it had been, then Jesus' torment in Gesthemane would have been salvific. Sacrifice was required, and that sacrifice was on the cross, not in Pilate's torture chambers. We don't venerate whips or scourges, we don't adorn churches with Christ at the whipping post. But Gibson worships these moments, worth less than a paragraph in the Gospels, with his film, to the detriment of the theological impact he should have been seeking to achieve.

I find that quite humourous, if not ironically hypocritical. I can certainly imagine the many people who've put me down for my Catholicism lining up in droves to see this movie.

Am I the only person who's really, really annoyed that this movie's fallen victim to crass commercialism? (i.e. the nails and mugs shown on page 1 of this thread)

I saw The Passion film today and it was hard to watch.

I don't really have any comments about the film.

Fellowship

Isn't a movie like this crass commercialism by definition?

mmm, a movie like any other artistic medium can be an artistic expression. But I have yet to see the movie.

Some other things succumb to crass commercialism as well:

Here

That is funny!

when we were in bethlehem my wife bought a can opener with the popes image on it.

a POPENER.

ummm... Fellowship... ya gotta say more.

But maybe that says it all.

I saw the film today, and agree with Fellowship...I don't even know what to say. I cried through almost the whole thing. The idea that one man was willing to go through all that is just amazing. It made me feel closer to God than I ever have before. Awesome movie, amazing Man.

I wonder if they recognize the Catholicism that seeps from the film the way so much of the questionable material emanates from the writings of a controversial saint, or the structure that is modeled after the Stations of the Cross.

Kirk

Not really joking about it. Last Temptation is the most spiritual and powerful Christological film ever. It is a truly inspiring piece of film.

Kirk

Let's break it down:

In ancient times the Jews atoned for their sins by performing sacrifices of live animals at temples by high priests. This was a mandatory thing in many respects. Kinda like a tax. If you believe Genesis, the human race acquired sin and death through adam and eve's first sin. This practice pretty much continued all the way up to and past Jesus' ministry.

Throughout the bible you see the justice of "an eye for an eye". So the original sin had to have a sacrifice that was equal, namely, A perfect life without sin. This is where Jesus comes in. A new way of atoning for sins was to be put into place with the sacrifice of Jesus, a sinless perfect human. This would allow for each person to approach God through prayer for themselves by merit of Jesus' sacrifice. They would no longer need priests to do that for them.

Now here is why the sacrifice is so important to christians. If you believe (a) Christ is God or (b) Christ is God's son, the fact that He took on the body of a lower life form and gave up tremendous power in order to experience a humiliating painful death by the hands of those that he could easily crush like fleas, and the bible describes as specs of dust, in order for them and anyone since to be able to pray to God, is a huge sacrifice for (a) God or (b) God's son. If you believe in God, you believe he could have just wiped the slate clean and start over.

So the quick answer I guess would be, that is a lot of love for specs of dust like us to sacrifice either (a) Himself or (b) His son.

My apologies. Your response appeared to be satirical when I first read it. In re-reading it I see I was incorrect.

Listen to what you are saying... the means of execution is the reason for the salvation? So you're saying, had all the books been different and Jesus died on the way to the cross, that his death would have meant nothing? That God said to him "you must not only die, but die on a cross, otherwise everything is void?"

You're taking this whole scenario WAY too literally. All we really know is that Jesus' sacrifice was to *give his life* to his captors (pacificism, love for one's enemies, etc.) in order to save us. The coroner's report would have been meaningless in this context, had there been such a thing back then. The point is that he gave himself up to his enemies and he did not resist their decision to end his life. That's it. In a nutshell.

Whether they had beaten him over the head with a boulder or hung him or crucified him would not have mattered, all that matters is that he gave his life to them, knowing they would end it. And so the way in which they got there (I don't think it's unfair to assume he endured some harsh abuse, if not as much as Gibson envisions) is just as relevant as the ultimate "cause of death".

Again, I agree the movie went overboard with the gore, but it's silly to imply that the act of crucifixion is what the story is all about. Crucifixion was just a means to an end, and many other means would have sufficed, had history played out differently. At least to my way of seeing things. You seem to imply that had he died (at the hands of his captors) in any other way or any earlier on, that his death would have not resulted in anyone's salvation. That's illogical even in the face of ideas predicated completely on faith (like religion).


Fellows: don't feel the need to post everything the same day. It's kind of an overwhelming thing (whether you liked it or didn't like it)... I'm sure given a night to sleep on it you'll have something to say.

No, the execution was necessary. Everything else every wad of spit, every stroke of the whip, every thorn and barb was utterly meaningless. Jesus could have been executed in a multitude of ways, and that execution would still have been salvific, But he was not, he was crucified, so the question here is about the crucifixion.


Not at all what I'm saying.


No, it is not. The only thing that matters is the death. Everything that came before is soteriologically meaningless.


The crucifixion is what Jesus' life was all about, all leading up to. All his teachings are just the bon mots of a wise rabbi without his death, which is upon a cross. Sure, he could have died otherwise, and been sacrificed to God in a different manner, but he was not. So speculative considerations don't change the fact that the Passion is about the Cross, which is the only part of the Passion that counts for anything. All the whipping in the world wouldn't have made Jesus a Messiah, lest he died at that post.

Kirk

I haven't read this whole thread, actually I haven't read any of it. If Mel is guilty of anything, it's understanding marketting. The frenzy, for and against, has been expertly conducted during the pre-release campaign. The groups responded predictably, and still don't realize that they aren't so much being attacked or defended as they are being used.

As for violence, my historical references suggest that Gibson is probably closer to the truth of it than the Christians have wanted to admitt in their art.

I'm interested to see how the Jews come off. Worse than the Romans? We got plenty of violent portrayals of pagans and christians, good and bad, duplicitous, lecherous, traitorous, of every manner of villany. Should the Jews be excused, should they be excused in this case of Jesus? And if so, why?

Are we harbouring a little racism if we do not give Jews the same shoddy historical treatment?

The only thing I know for sure is that you've all benn played, and very well too. I don't think I'm watching this one untill it comes out on video.

Kirkland, I don't think you get it.

Jesus is a goat.

Death comes regardless, Jesus chooses suffering and death.

Gibson may be extremely problematic, but what you are arguing now is no less problematic. If nailing oneself to a cross and dying there were pleasant, we might all do it.

This is the tactic of people who tell you to drink the koolaid because everything will be better when the centauris come.

Blood and gore are a part of religion too.

I'd like to take this moment to express the views of those of us who don't really care to see this film. It is well understood among all thinking people that the levels of brutality experienced in other times have often been greater than what we experience today. To show such brutality without context is in itself a travesty.

Second, I would like to take this time to bear witness to the thousands if not millions who have died at the hands of Christians who for some reason thought they had the right to persecute whomever didn't follow their ideology. They died maybe not for the sins of Christians but because of them. Included in those would be those poor early followers of Christ who refused to pronounce Mary the Mother of God, because it didn't meet their intellectual standards as a doctrine. I would also like to mourn the loss of millions of native and indigenous people around the world who lost their lives (and coincidently of coourse tehir land) to diseases introduced by Christian evangelists. Also included would be those killed as witches, who weren't and those killed as witches that were. For some reason Christians choose to focus on this man, even though none remember him and no one is sure even what he said. Jesus as he is presented is a great person. So was Ghandi, so was Martin Luther King. There have been many great persons, not all of them were Christians. Get used to it.

I saw the leader to a story a while ago which examined the known historical reasons for Jesus demise. They concluded the reason the Jewish hierarchy so detested Jesus was he partied with tax collectors and prostitutes. Now you can go on and on about your Son of God but we are all sons and daughters of God, we all have a conscience that is informed by God, and believe it or not, Christians have no monopoly on God and good works. Get used to it. Most of the world doesn't care. If you want to show how one man was tortured, fine, if you want to jump from there to some kind of overly intellectual doctrine about why it should be important to me, forget it. No reasonable person would accept such and argument. And no moral person would tolerate it. It s quite simply abhorrent to the senses. Or to put it more emphaticly, no supreme good has ever come from such an evil act. Jesus's power comes from what remains of the story of his life. That is his legacy. The rest, they made it all up, and you bought it, some of you apparently, hook line and sinker.