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acroyearMel Gibson has agreed to remove at least one scene from his movie The Passion of the Christ that has been the subject of protests by Jewish leaders and religious scholars who have seen it, the New York Times reported today (Wednesday). The scene reportedly features Jewish high priest Caiaphas declaring of the Crucifixion, "His blood be on us and on our children." The Times, which said that it had been permitted to see the film, reported that the film depicts Pilate as being reluctant to treat Jesus severely but that in the end, he agrees to crucify him in order to mollify a Jewish mob.-- IMDB News
If that's the case, then I understand what's pissing them off. The Gospel reading had "The People" saying that phrase, where it becomes the final piece of Christ shedding his blood for our sins. In the interpretation above, if accurately described, it DOES become a "Jew thing" when coming specifically from a Pharasee. In the Gospels, the Pharasees hem and haw and basically pass the buck out of their own fears; they are gutless turds, as it were, refusing to finish the task they started. Now that may remain accurate in the film, but they at no point ever took the blame, either directly or for thier people, for what happened.
Now the Gospel readings DO have, in all 4 of them, the debate before the people where Pilate tries to take his case to the people, who as I described had already been persuaded to ask for Barabas instead. That sequence seems to be biblically accurate in the film, and thus shouldn't be constantly mentioned as a "potentially bad thing" by the press.
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Date: 2004-02-05 11:35 am (UTC)Dunno... the Bible is a great storyteller, and there are many things that are (and probably are) accurate in it. There are also *just* enough things that are contradictory, and in some editions extremely slanted one way or another, to make me not able to take it as word for word, story by story, as perfect.
Sorry, at this point in my life I couldn't tell you which sections are contradictory... lost both versions I owned in the basement flood 8 years ago and haven't gotten around to replacing them. And it's been about 12 years since I used to get annoyed with bible-thumpers and pull up the references in my head (by book and story, not by specific lines) just to watch their heads spin as they tried to get their "Bible is Word of God and Perfect" brains around the idea that it couldn't be in a few cases. Not many... though I seem to remember that one of them has to do with the timing of Passover and the Easter related holidays... Most of the bible-thumpers want to disregard any idea that modern calendar stuff and actual timing during the year way back then might be different as well.
The movie is receiving a bit of mixed review and opinion from quite a few Christian and Jewish leaders... not all agreeing with others of the same sub-organization.
Though you do have to wonder about a movie about Christ's life when it's been hit by lighting even half as many times as they were plagued during filming....
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Date: 2004-02-05 11:55 am (UTC)This particular passage has no parallel in any of the other three Gospels, if I recall correctly, so Matthew's the only source, and Matthew says it came from "The People".
Sometimes moving a line between characters can keep the line alive, but changes the characters; when Treebeard spoke Tom Bombadills line, or when Wormtongue speaks a line that Gandalf spoke, both the line and the characters were changed from the original.
Similarly, moving this line changes the Pharasees, and the Jews, and the line itself, from the version Matthew originally wrote. The line does seem to have a particular bit of venom, rather than what it was in the original work that led to Christ's "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do..."