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katsarisThoughts on 'The Passion of the Christ' (and Christianity) - Part 1
Now, first of all I have to mention once again that I don't consider myself a Christian. In my view Jesus (though almost certainly an existing person -- many of the specifics of Christianity would be near impossible to explain otherwise), was nothing more than a man and probably the religious leader of some reformatory Jewish group, later to be deified by the people that followed him and Paul who'd never met him.
But even without belief in a story, I can still look at it and say "ooh, this part is powerful" or the converse, "this part makes no sense" or "this part is weak." Not just for Christianity, but for aspects of Buddhism or of Hinduism, or of Greek or Norse mythology or even of Aztec and Maya beliefs, one can find a core which was powerful enough to make said beliefs to flourish and repeated over a span of millenia. And one can find elements that will make me go "Okay, what lame-brain thought up of *this* bizarreness?"
Okay, rambled enough for now (more to come later :-), let's move on to the film.
In Brief:
The movie was... vaguely disappointing. To consider how some other people (e.g. Orson Scott Card) raved about it, I had expected something much more moving and meaningful. I almost teared up in a place or two, but this was the reaction of compassion about overwhelming injustice and murder as a mother has to watch her child being tortured to death. It's the *easy* way to get people attached to a movie, this unashamed victimization and pathos... (hah -- unintended linguistic pun)
But anyway, that's a sidepoint that I make only to indicate why I'm not giving more plus points for a movie that managed to make me tear up. Actual disappointments to follow.
Historicity
I'm not the historical nitpicker that other people may be -- over At the Sign of the Unhinged Mind you could find Philosopher at Large with a laundry list of historical complains, ranging from the style of the clothes, to the shape of the lamps, to the architecture of the buildings and many, many more.
Those things don't concern me really one bit. But one of Gibson's rather arrogant claims is that this film is as close to witnessing the actual events as can possibly be made -- which is, I believe, why he chose to use Aramaic and Latin in all the dialogues instead of English. Silly but I didn't mind.
But given this claim of Gibson's, there did exist two so *obviously* unhistorical details that they greatly annoyed me.
One, which is more of a nitpick: Crucifictions were a real event and we *know* in what manner they took place. So, despite unhistorical Christian art, the nails *didn't* go through the palms in a crucifiction. They went through the wrist, so that they could support the whole weight of the body using the wristbones -- they would tear right through the palm otherwise. This is why, ludicrously, Gibson (and other directors) has had to use ropes in addition to the nails, making the nails superfluous.
Greek uses the same word for both "hand" and "arm". And the gospels meant "arm", not "hand", when they were talking about Jesus's wounds.
This is annoying because Gibson missed the perfect chance to correct an obvious misconception formed by hundreds of years of ignorantly created folkart, based on flawed translations of the bible...
Second and possibly more importantly:
Pontius Pilate was a real historical figure. And one of the few things we know about him is that he *wasn't* gentle and weak. He was brutal by even Roman standards, indeed so much so that Rome eventually recalled him and forced him to retire to some distant French village.
"Philosopher at Large" spelled it out better than I can, but the point is that, holding this ruthlessness of Pilate in mind, this scene out of the New Testament (even if we took the Bible on its word, which I don't) becomes something altogether different and far more intriguing and exciting where motivations are concerned.
Pilate never shirks away from using brutality, to innocent and guilty alike -- when it's a brutality that he himself chooses. But now, handed over a popular Jewish speaker by a Jewish group, he doesn't know what game is being played -- wasn't Jesus just welcomed into Jerusalem by crowds of people? Is another opposed Jewish faction trying to use Pilate (and the Roman occupation) in order to get rid of this nuisance? He doesn't have enough knowledge of the populace in order to discern the various inter-faction conflicts. And he may be ruthless on his own initiative, but he is unwilling to be ruthless as another people' unwitting tool.
So, he himself plays a political game, first handing over the responsibility to the local Hebrew leader (Herod Antipas) and then pulling off a lovely trick where he releases a rebel (Barabbas was not a random loony murderer - he was a "zealot", an insurrectionist) but thus hands over the choice and responsibility to the ones that brought.
We don't know the full political situation, so we don't know the exact elements of this game either -- but one thing is clear: The "washing of the hands" as recorded in the gospel was not a thing that only involved a man and his own conscience. It was a very public symbolic gesture between a man and the Jewish crowds, so that if he was then attacked for this action (by a rival Jewish group perhaps) he could deny personal (and Roman) responsibility.
Now, why any of the above is important?
Among other things because of the accusation of antisemetism levelled against the movie, which could have easily been combatted had Gibson gone the route described above. Had we seen Pilate as a more ruthless figure, we'd have escaped the constant imagery of the big bad Jews scaring the poor gentle Roman into submission. Had we seen Pilate contemplating the various intra-Jewish dynamics, we'd have escaped the imagery of every Jew (except the apostles and a handful other people) being unanimous in their condemnation of Jesus. And had we seen Barabbas not as a mad murderer, but as a member of a rebel group, despised by the public perhaps, but not starking mad, the idea that people might choose to free Barabbas (an opponent of secular Roman rule) rather than Jesus (an opponent of traditional religious beliefs) might be made more undestandable, and cause less feelings of contempt on the part of the audience towards the again Jewish crowd.
Not to mention that the above would have been probably far closer to historical truth, or at least to historical *consistency*: Once again, Pilate as a man shirking away from brutality is a contradition to history -- unless he had another reason for so avoiding it than just his own conscience.
Pilate was many things but a gentle-but-weak man he wasn't.
Now, moving on...
Satan
Satan was another disappointment -- Jesus crushing the serpent with his heel was nice ofcourse. But I had heard there were numerous flashbacks throughout the film, so given Satan's presence from the start of the movie, I had hoped we'd also see the scene of Jesus' temptation in the desert as another one of the connecting elements in the movie between past and present.
Instead of that we saw horrible unnecessary, meaningless, gruesome scenes with demonic-faced children and demonic-faced babies. And worms coming out of Satan's nostrils to show us that he is, duh, evil.
Excessiveness in the gruesomeness aside, I guess that I'm also partly annoyed at how much certain modern-religious people want to emphasize Satan as the face of evil incarnate -- it was even worse and out of place in the movie adaptation of the story of Jean D'arc - "The Messenger", but *ugh* it was pretty horrible here as well.
Satan is superfluous in this film and does nothing but intrude and distract from this great (and "passionate" :-) love affair between Jesus on the one hand and the whole of Humanity on the other.
And if you want an enemy for this story -- have the enemy be Sin, (or Death), not Satan. The story of the crucifiction and the resurrection is after all supposedly about how the Christ "thanato thanaton patisas" -- "through Death, Death he conquered".
---
It's once again getting late, and I'm getting tired, so the second half, which will btw also discuss an aspect or two of Christianity, will come tomorrow or the day after...
Now, first of all I have to mention once again that I don't consider myself a Christian. In my view Jesus (though almost certainly an existing person -- many of the specifics of Christianity would be near impossible to explain otherwise), was nothing more than a man and probably the religious leader of some reformatory Jewish group, later to be deified by the people that followed him and Paul who'd never met him.
But even without belief in a story, I can still look at it and say "ooh, this part is powerful" or the converse, "this part makes no sense" or "this part is weak." Not just for Christianity, but for aspects of Buddhism or of Hinduism, or of Greek or Norse mythology or even of Aztec and Maya beliefs, one can find a core which was powerful enough to make said beliefs to flourish and repeated over a span of millenia. And one can find elements that will make me go "Okay, what lame-brain thought up of *this* bizarreness?"
Okay, rambled enough for now (more to come later :-), let's move on to the film.
In Brief:
The movie was... vaguely disappointing. To consider how some other people (e.g. Orson Scott Card) raved about it, I had expected something much more moving and meaningful. I almost teared up in a place or two, but this was the reaction of compassion about overwhelming injustice and murder as a mother has to watch her child being tortured to death. It's the *easy* way to get people attached to a movie, this unashamed victimization and pathos... (hah -- unintended linguistic pun)
But anyway, that's a sidepoint that I make only to indicate why I'm not giving more plus points for a movie that managed to make me tear up. Actual disappointments to follow.
Historicity
I'm not the historical nitpicker that other people may be -- over At the Sign of the Unhinged Mind you could find Philosopher at Large with a laundry list of historical complains, ranging from the style of the clothes, to the shape of the lamps, to the architecture of the buildings and many, many more.
Those things don't concern me really one bit. But one of Gibson's rather arrogant claims is that this film is as close to witnessing the actual events as can possibly be made -- which is, I believe, why he chose to use Aramaic and Latin in all the dialogues instead of English. Silly but I didn't mind.
But given this claim of Gibson's, there did exist two so *obviously* unhistorical details that they greatly annoyed me.
One, which is more of a nitpick: Crucifictions were a real event and we *know* in what manner they took place. So, despite unhistorical Christian art, the nails *didn't* go through the palms in a crucifiction. They went through the wrist, so that they could support the whole weight of the body using the wristbones -- they would tear right through the palm otherwise. This is why, ludicrously, Gibson (and other directors) has had to use ropes in addition to the nails, making the nails superfluous.
Greek uses the same word for both "hand" and "arm". And the gospels meant "arm", not "hand", when they were talking about Jesus's wounds.
This is annoying because Gibson missed the perfect chance to correct an obvious misconception formed by hundreds of years of ignorantly created folkart, based on flawed translations of the bible...
Second and possibly more importantly:
Pontius Pilate was a real historical figure. And one of the few things we know about him is that he *wasn't* gentle and weak. He was brutal by even Roman standards, indeed so much so that Rome eventually recalled him and forced him to retire to some distant French village.
"Philosopher at Large" spelled it out better than I can, but the point is that, holding this ruthlessness of Pilate in mind, this scene out of the New Testament (even if we took the Bible on its word, which I don't) becomes something altogether different and far more intriguing and exciting where motivations are concerned.
Pilate never shirks away from using brutality, to innocent and guilty alike -- when it's a brutality that he himself chooses. But now, handed over a popular Jewish speaker by a Jewish group, he doesn't know what game is being played -- wasn't Jesus just welcomed into Jerusalem by crowds of people? Is another opposed Jewish faction trying to use Pilate (and the Roman occupation) in order to get rid of this nuisance? He doesn't have enough knowledge of the populace in order to discern the various inter-faction conflicts. And he may be ruthless on his own initiative, but he is unwilling to be ruthless as another people' unwitting tool.
So, he himself plays a political game, first handing over the responsibility to the local Hebrew leader (Herod Antipas) and then pulling off a lovely trick where he releases a rebel (Barabbas was not a random loony murderer - he was a "zealot", an insurrectionist) but thus hands over the choice and responsibility to the ones that brought.
We don't know the full political situation, so we don't know the exact elements of this game either -- but one thing is clear: The "washing of the hands" as recorded in the gospel was not a thing that only involved a man and his own conscience. It was a very public symbolic gesture between a man and the Jewish crowds, so that if he was then attacked for this action (by a rival Jewish group perhaps) he could deny personal (and Roman) responsibility.
Now, why any of the above is important?
Among other things because of the accusation of antisemetism levelled against the movie, which could have easily been combatted had Gibson gone the route described above. Had we seen Pilate as a more ruthless figure, we'd have escaped the constant imagery of the big bad Jews scaring the poor gentle Roman into submission. Had we seen Pilate contemplating the various intra-Jewish dynamics, we'd have escaped the imagery of every Jew (except the apostles and a handful other people) being unanimous in their condemnation of Jesus. And had we seen Barabbas not as a mad murderer, but as a member of a rebel group, despised by the public perhaps, but not starking mad, the idea that people might choose to free Barabbas (an opponent of secular Roman rule) rather than Jesus (an opponent of traditional religious beliefs) might be made more undestandable, and cause less feelings of contempt on the part of the audience towards the again Jewish crowd.
Not to mention that the above would have been probably far closer to historical truth, or at least to historical *consistency*: Once again, Pilate as a man shirking away from brutality is a contradition to history -- unless he had another reason for so avoiding it than just his own conscience.
Pilate was many things but a gentle-but-weak man he wasn't.
Now, moving on...
Satan
Satan was another disappointment -- Jesus crushing the serpent with his heel was nice ofcourse. But I had heard there were numerous flashbacks throughout the film, so given Satan's presence from the start of the movie, I had hoped we'd also see the scene of Jesus' temptation in the desert as another one of the connecting elements in the movie between past and present.
Instead of that we saw horrible unnecessary, meaningless, gruesome scenes with demonic-faced children and demonic-faced babies. And worms coming out of Satan's nostrils to show us that he is, duh, evil.
Excessiveness in the gruesomeness aside, I guess that I'm also partly annoyed at how much certain modern-religious people want to emphasize Satan as the face of evil incarnate -- it was even worse and out of place in the movie adaptation of the story of Jean D'arc - "The Messenger", but *ugh* it was pretty horrible here as well.
Satan is superfluous in this film and does nothing but intrude and distract from this great (and "passionate" :-) love affair between Jesus on the one hand and the whole of Humanity on the other.
And if you want an enemy for this story -- have the enemy be Sin, (or Death), not Satan. The story of the crucifiction and the resurrection is after all supposedly about how the Christ "thanato thanaton patisas" -- "through Death, Death he conquered".
---
It's once again getting late, and I'm getting tired, so the second half, which will btw also discuss an aspect or two of Christianity, will come tomorrow or the day after...
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Okay Aris, what *is* the word? *g*
Date: 2004-03-14 07:18 am (UTC)I'm going to need it in my article, and it's so slow for me to go back and forth between online translations and Perseus (like I said, I can get say, THEO and the S at the end, but then the middle of it - Theophrastus? Theotokos? something else entirely?)
----
Some other things, bearing in mind the International Pilgrimage Site aspect (it's kind of like trying to imagine the Hajj to a Mecca under Imperial British occupation!) of Augustan Jerusalem -- this is purely historical fiction and should be considered such, none of the counter-government groups mentioned are authentic:
People are coming from Syria and Libya and Crete, and many other places now no longer on the map, according to Acts, so the city is even more international than it would have been on a regular day of the year. (There's a whole other half of the "anti-Semitism" which I haven't had a chance to explore, and that's leaving out all the Canaanites and Arab inhabitants of Israel! It's kind of like the Westerns and other history pictures that leave out blacks in America - more subtle, but definitely real.)
So in addition to the usual Jewish People's Liberation Front and the Liberation Front of Judea and the People's Jewish Liberation Front and the Sons of Judas Maccabeus, your lucky Roman procurator would also have the prospect of having members of the Libyan Liberation Front and the Free Cyrene Now! group and the Sons of Queen Zenobia and the Palmyran Restoration Fund and possibly the Thracian Avengers and the Remember The Alexandrine Library! zealots along with the Sons of Alexander and the Independent Egypt Front and the Remember Carthage/Roma Delenda Est supporters, all looking to start something both with the government and with each other...
...and mixed in with all the ordinary international businessmen and women and people on religious holiday, and how is anyone to know if this guy in a business himation is really the Ephesian glass recycling buyer he says he is, or that gal in the expensive silk palla the Phoenecian shipping magnate she's supposed to be, or are they really buying arms and/or information about where Roman convoys are going to be next - and anyway the security forces are drawn from local areas, and who knows where *their* loyalties really lie, Indira Ghandi was certainly not the first person to be assassinated by her own auxiliaries, better keep the lictors at hand at all times...(speaking of which, where were the lictors? I didn't see any elite Secret Service men there, as a governor would have been entitled to have.)
--Oh and don't forget the agents of the Parthian Empire and the Kushan Empire and the various internal Roman factions who aren't happy with the outcome of the last Civil War, either!
It would look something like a cross between "Casablanca" and Tattooine, or even more so, a John LeCarre espionage novel set in the ancient world.
----
The reason I think that the factual errors are so critical, unlike in say something like Cleopatra or The Mummy, is that it's being presented as The Gospel Truth in *every* regard, and the rejection of it a denial not simply of a theology, but of objective physical reality and history, as if people who challenge G's P are Flat Earthers who say the Moon is made of cheese... If he had just acknowledged it was a traditional Mystery/Miracle play it would be different. They're symbolic, not historic: nobody expects a Purimspiel to have exact replicas of the clothes worn or the royal hall in Ctesiphon, or thinks that the milkmaids who heralded the theophany of Lord Krishna were really all wearing identical green-and-orange dresses with gold jewelry as in the traditional balletic reenactments.
P@L.
PS: for yet another obscure nitpick -
Date: 2004-03-14 07:21 am (UTC)More seriously - One thing which is driving me crazy in all the social contextual stuff (as opposed to artistic/formal) about Gibson's Passion is the circular [il]logic being used in reference to it being a wonderful "evangelizing" tool. It goes something like this:
--This will be the greatest work of art ever, bringing more people to God than ever before! [sic,sic,sic]
--But many non-Christians are underwhelmed, or even turned off, by it.
--Well, what do you expect? They hate God and hated His message the first time, damnéd fools!
--[...]
I wish this were an exaggeration of the comments I've read, but it isn't. Now, being that both my parents and many of their friends were converts, *evangelization* is something I do know something about. I'm afraid that yes, it may "work", in the unfortunately-all-too-common arena of "rice-Christian," ministry-to-uneducated-impoverished-peasants which seems to be the rule for missions in South America and Asia: a bloody Mystery Play, combined with an our-medicine-is-stronger-than-your-shamans' apppeal - but they just honestly have no *clue* why it doesn't work on intelligent non-Christians who aren't impressed by unfounded assertion and don't simply let their emotions run their actions.
What's disturbing me most is not that it is likely to *cause* anti-Semitism in this country at least - but the extent of anti-Semitism, and anti-everyone-else-bigotry, that it is *revealing* (along with the abysmal ignorance of even the Scriptures among Bible-thumpers nationwide.) Then again, it's better to know about the termites, even if what is revealed by kicking over the rock is really disgusting...
Re: Okay Aris, what *is* the word? *g*
Date: 2004-03-14 08:55 am (UTC)--
Mind you, on the whole I tend to be reluctant to talk about Ancient Greek as if I was an authority -- I learned my lesson the hard way when I once ignorantly claimed to an American friend that the Ancient Greek "B" (Beta) was pronounced like modern-day English "V", and that it was only through the transfer to Latin that the sound was altered to what most English-speaking people speak today.
Ofcourse that was nonsense, as I later found out -- in reality it seems that it's Latin/English that preserves the original sound, and it's Modern Greek that pronounces it differently (as a "V"). :-)
---
*g* Anyway, I very much appreciate your comments and eloquent description! I would have linked my review to your forum, once I had also written the second half of it. :-)
Btw, "Theotokos", means She-who-bore-God, it's one of the customary epithets associated with the Virgin Mary, second only to "Panagia" in popularity when referring to her. "Panagia" means something like All-saint or Most-holy perhaps.
Thanks!
Date: 2004-03-14 03:59 pm (UTC)I don't know that much about Anglo-Saxon either, and that's a whole millennium closer to me than classical Greek is to modern Greek. I get confused about the whole Þ versus ð business all the time.
I would have linked my review to your forum, once I had also written the second half of it. :-)
Great! We will be looking forward to it when you finish it.
Is "Theotokos" past tense, then? It's usually translated "God-bearer" here without any indication of specific time.
Re: Thanks!
Date: 2004-03-14 05:05 pm (UTC)In John 20:25 you can also find it as "hersin" Chi, Epsilon, Ro, Sigma, Iota, Ni, which is the dative plural form of the same word, I believe. And there's the again plural "heiras" (accusative this time, I believe) in 20:27.
Is "Theotokos" past tense, then? It's usually translated "God-bearer" here without any indication of specific time.
Uh... But I don't know enough Ancient Greek to be able to tell for sure whether there's a tense in Theotokos or not. Sorry. :-)
Re: Thanks!
Date: 2004-03-14 05:41 pm (UTC)Uh... But I don't know enough Ancient Greek to be able to tell for sure whether there's a tense in Theotokos or not. Sorry. :-)
So -- it's all Greek to you, too, huh?
[gd&rlh!]
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 09:27 pm (UTC)In regards to Gibson's uncreative portrayal of Satan as, duh, evil, I think it's pretty much the same as portraying Jesus as being, duh, tortured. The language of this film is symbols, instantly recognizable. The audience has been taught these things so much that they exist in their unconscious. What Gibson does, I assume, is take these symbols and portray them to the extremity of their meaning. It's not enough for the devil to be the devil. He has to be disgusting, covered in worms or whatever. That's the kind of vocabulary he decided to use. It's not enough for the audience to merely know that Jesus suffers. They have to see it in as much detail as possible, to understand the sacrifice made. Does he succeed in making this a spiritual/emotional experience? I wouldn't know. Do people come out of that theater with a heightened awareness of their savior's suffering? Or do they come out of it angry and bitter at those who made him suffer? It all depends on how good a storyteller Gibson is. Personally, I don't like it when symbols are invoked too much. Aside from the "beating us over the head" feeling it tends to give, I also think it's manipulative.
That's about as much as I can say without having seen the movie or read the book. Probably shouldn't have said anything, since I run a pretty good risk of being wrong on a few things, but I couldn't resist. Religion is an interesting topic.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-25 06:41 pm (UTC)Heehee. Yeah, "not having seeb a movie" does indeed make it difficult for one to comment on. :-)
I'm not sure if it has that much to do with symbolism, rather than some general fixation on Gibson's behalf upon the gruesome that he had on this film.
Anyway, your post helped remind me that it's about time I post the second part of this review that I'd been planning to write almost two weeks ago instead... :-)