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How often do you see the brutal beating, torture, and crucifixion of a good man?

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I don't know why the Bible isn't enough for you; I certainly understood the brutal beating and execution of Jesus perfectly well before 'The Passion'.

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Mel Gibson is one of those Catholics who rejects Vatican II. His father is a blatant anti-Semite, and I have heard that Passion really overplays the Jewish-betrayal angle.

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Quite frankly, I would consider a movie about Jesus's life more appropriate than one about his death;

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Everyone doesn't know what Jesus taught -- either even Mr. Gibson doesn't or he conveniently chose to forget the bit about turning our Father's house into a place of merchandise

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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I don't know why the Bible isn't enough for you; I certainly understood the brutal beating and execution of Jesus perfectly well before 'The Passion'.

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For me, knowing what happened and seeing what happened were different. I was struck by the enormity of it, which was Gibson's point.
That's an imagination issue, I guess. But if you're on a subject like Jesus, why focus on the death? His life was much more exceptional.

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Mel Gibson is one of those Catholics who rejects Vatican II. His father is a blatant anti-Semite, and I have heard that Passion really overplays the Jewish-betrayal angle.

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Neither of these statements is entirely true. Vatican II said that it was no longer mandatory to do the Mass in Latin, etc, but it never said that it was not acceptable to continue to do it that way. It did say, however, that the Jews were not responsible for Jesus's death. Gibson simply chooses to attend a Mass that is done in the traditional manner, which was never outlawed, and while his father is anti-Semitic, to the best of my knowledge Mel Gibson has never explicitly stated views that were anti-Semitic.
He rejects the decision on the culpability of the Jews, and has been open about this. The exact wording runs something vaguely like "neither the entire community at that time nor any Jew at this time can be called responsible for the crucifixion of JC". It's a reasonable, logical statement, backed up by Papal sanction (which is, to Catholics, supposed to be infalliable), and he has made it clear he rejects it. 'Rejecting' the Latin issue would be flatly nonsensical, and I refuse to believe that's the sole motivation behind it.
In addition, explicit statements of racism are usually a sign of a severe problem; implicit statements abound quite a bit more.

Similarly, the Passion doesn't overplay the Jewish-betrayal angle. Most of the Jews in the film are portrayed as terrible people. But so are the Romans. The Romans laugh as they beat Jesus, and they seem to enjoy the brutality of their actions. Peter himself denies Jesus in the movie, just as he does in the Gospels. And for that matter, Gibson's own hand holds Jesus down as the Romans nail him to the cross, which is supposed to indicate that we are all responsible.
Treating the Romans as jerks is fine and good, but one has to remember that it would not be for centuries that Christians even stopped considering themselves Jews, much less created the kind of schism that exists now. Portraying nearly all of the Jews who are not directly related to Jesus or his teachings as terrible people is heinously unrealistic and most definitely implicit anti-semitism.

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Quite frankly, I would consider a movie about Jesus's life more appropriate than one about his death;

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Maybe. But this would be a very different movie, and not the one that Gibson set out to make. I understand if you dislike the movie for this reason, though. I have a different opinion, but I understand how this could bother a person.
Opinions being what they are, I'll let sleeping dogs lie on this one. I just feel like Gibson's movie was designed to cash in on fundamentalism rather than to really educate about the glory of Christ.

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Everyone doesn't know what Jesus taught -- either even Mr. Gibson doesn't or he conveniently chose to forget the bit about turning our Father's house into a place of merchandise

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I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Because if you mean the part about the Jewish temple being wildly corrupt, the movie does show a scene of Jesus toppling over the tables of the money-changers.
Jesus spoke in metaphor quite a bit, and 'moneychangers in the Temple' are conventionally taken to be metanymic for 'selling' faith. I'm sure it's been used against simony, indulgences, and so forth, and this kind of movie really brings the issue up. If Gibson had the sort of passion for the issue he is portraying here that he claims he does, he would have paid whoever he promised to pay with the box office sales and given the rest to charity; it's very morally ambiguous to give people your version of God for profit.

I do have some issues with the historical inaccuracies, though. The Romans in the movie speak Church Latin, not Classical Latin (so they all speak with Italian accents, basically). Most of them would've been speaking Greek under those circumstances, anyway. Jesus, as Alec rightly notes, wouldn't've looked like the man who was playing him. And the brief scene of the resurrection doesn't quite mesh with the Gospel account. When Jesus appeared before the disciples, he was still bleeding. Thomas refused to believe that it was him until he touched his wounds. Those wounds are not present in the movie.
I haven't seen the movie -- I've read a lot of reviews, both positive and negative -- so I'll have to take your word for it. It's interesting that one of the biggest metaphorical issues in the Crucifixion -- the various wounds inflicted upon Christ on the cross and the skepticism of Thomas -- was apparently eschewed in favor of whipping scenes.
People need to know that if we could find one major celebrity and call him a Jesus look-alike, that particular celebrity would be U. bin Laden. I am incensed by the physical appearance issue, because it's a matter of petty, 'conventional' racism over factual accuracy.
Then again, why should we pay that much attention to how Jesus comes out -- in physical and spiritual terms both -- if the only reason for the movie is to off him? :rolleyes:

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The world was dominated by the Roman Empire, and if you started handing out holy books depecting them as evil god-killing bastards, they would get pissed off.

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Or, in other words, it's saying that we're not responsible for the evil we do, but we have to pay for it anyway. Lovely...

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Originally written by Alorael:


?Alorael, who also doesn't think that saying that Jews killed Jesus is a useful phrase. Nobody says that Americans killed Kennedy and Lincoln. Of course Jews killed Jesus. Everyone around him was Jewish, except for the ruling Romans who were more literally involved in the killing.

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