The Passion of the Christ (Widescreen Edition)

The Bottom Line:

If you enjoy sadistic depictions of pain or feel that Christ's suffering the sentence of any common criminal was more important than his teachings than you may like this film; if you prefer not to see egregious use of slow-motion, ridiculous anachronistic jokes about tables, and 90 minutes of graphic torture than you may not.

An "okay" work of "FICTION". Interestingly enough, it portrays Mel Gibson's hatred for the Jews to the fullest!

Dear Mr. Walker,

Your comments are laden with emotion and hate towards Mel Gibson. Comparing him to Joseph Goebbels, is stupid. Leni Riefenstahl, Segei Eisenstein, they did "trash". Propaganda disguised as art. Triumph of the Will, Battleship Potemkin, ..now that's "Adolf" worthy.

I've read your words, and they're nothing but insults. Words upon words, that add insult to injury, that's all... do you have anything else to give? Anything to offer.., your words are a one-trick pony, aimed towards defaming Mel.

Blah, blah, blah.., Adolf, blah, blah, blah, Goebbels.

Mr. Walker, did you hate the movie, before you saw it?

How else, can you make such comments? You might as well.., be naming Saddam or O.J. Simpson. What did Mel, ever do, to you? Play Mad Max??

The Passion of the Christ (2004) made $611 million (worldwide). Roger Ebert described it, "The filmmaker (Gibson) has put his artistry and fortune at the service of his conviction and belief, and that doesn't happen often." People responded.

You may hate it, Mr. Walker. But its shadow remains, it touched millions. "Is the film "good" or "great?," is a question, Ebert pondered. "I imagine each person's reaction (visceral, theological, artistic) will differ," he mused. And so it shall, we disagree, Mr. Walker. But you don't, see me, libel you, do you?

I use arguments and facts, not slings. "Really clever", "contempt for the facts", "the world's slimmest "Bible" travesty", these are your words. You go on, "Gospel bashing", "purely stupid nature", and "Satan as an embodiment of Judaism", wow!!! What great restraint! What do you call, an enemy?

The Passion of the Christ, is an important film, your vitriol, will not change that.

I wonder, if De Mille, would escape you, unscathed. (Joke Coming) Look out, it's the Heston Holocaust. Flea! Flea!

My whole life and purpose as a christian is to follow Christ, there is no peace like the peace I know when I am in close relationship with Him. He is my all, my everything, my provider, I do, I truly love the Lord. I was 24 when I watched this with my husband and I still can remember how quite the movie theater was, all I could hear where muffled cries, sniffing and I was broken beyond words, I was touched, I was renewed, I was blessed. Mel Gibson did a perfect job. This is by far the best movie and most important movie that will ever be made. To know that there are some who are repelled by such love is incomprehensible, but you know Gos is love and He still and always loves us all, the weak, the strong, the christian, the non-christians, that's how Amazing He is, love unconditional, love supreme. And as for I and my family, we will worship Him as long as we live. To Him be the Glory forever and ever. Amen!

Let us surmise that in the heady early days of the Third (or Temporary) Reich, Herr Doktor Gobbles commissioned ... um ooops ... Doktor Goebbels commissioned a film the purpose of which would be to discredit Christianity. Let us further surmise that the result was a film called "The Passion of the Christ". Given these results, the filmmaker would have been awarded German filmdom's highest award, the Adolf, plus a special thorn cluster authorized by Herr Doktor Goebbels. That was then.

This is now. And here it is at last: a new technologically advanced edition of the world's slimiest "Bible" travesty in all its Gospel-bashing, anti-Semitic, and fantasy-pushing glory.

Aside from its propagandistic purposes, "Passion" is so full of inaccuracies, it's hard to know where to start. Let's start by noting that the only historically worthwhile (if not necessarily accurate) narratives we have of the so-called "passion" are the 4 canonical gospels. Nothing else of a non-scholarly nature is worth the paper it's printed on. This film depends on apocryphal (and useless) narratives, the ravings of a 19th-Century hysteric nun, and other fraudulent "sources". In addition there are other solecisms of a purely stupid nature.

For instance, Gibson thinks he's really clever by having people speak the languages they would have spoken at the time. And then, laughably, he has Jesus and Pilate conversing in Latin. Latin was not the lingua franca of the Roman East ... that was Greek. Furthermore, Jesus was born (at Bethlehem-in-Galilee, not Bethlehem-in-Judea) and raised in Galilee, an area which was under the Hebrew- and Greek-speaking rule of various Herods. Jesus and Pilate would have spoken in Greek. (The argument that Jesus would have learned Latin from Roman soldiers is just silly ... Galilee was part of an autonomous kingdom and Roman soldiers didn't enter the area until after the exile of Herod Antipas in 39 CE. Besides, the Roman military spoke a patois of Italic - related to Latin - that was widely used in northern Italy.)

Gibson's contempt for the canonical gospels is a main theme of the film. In Gethsemane, Jesus is shown not so much praying to his god but having a conversation with Satan - something the gospel writers seem totally unaware of. Later on, the soldiers that arrest Jesus throw him bodily from a bridge - an event utterly absent from the gospels.

The events between Jesus' arrest and his crucifixion show not only Gibson's contempt for the gospels, but also his utter ignorance of the practices of Roman law and the evidence of archaeology. The bit covering his appearance before the Sanhedrin is hilarious. The charge - the only charge - was actually a term totally misused these days, "blasphemy". That is, in the Greek, "blasphemia", which means treason, in the sense that Jesus has claimed to be King of Judea. Despite pathetic attempts by Christians, from the First Century CE on, to give this term a religious connotation, it is a political crime, pure and simple. Gibson's failure to recognize this fact is stupid - as is everything else in this film.

The scourging of Jesus is a good example of Gibson's contempt for facts. Roman judicial procedure is well known and the gospels in fact do a fair job of showing it correctly. Gibson's version is not only inaccurate, it's trashy. The pronouncing of sentence of crucifixion ends with this sentence: "Let him be scourged." No person to be tried before a Roman court was whipped until that sentence was uttered.

Furthermore, the whip shown in this film wasn't the one used in these cases - it was employed by Gibson solely for its shock value, not in any interest of accuracy. The actual whip (Latin: flagellum) consisted of several strands of leather of varying length, each tied to a small lead ball. If you believe the Shroud of Turin is any sort of genuine artifact, please note that it is that whip whose marks appear on the back of the individual portrayed in the shroud. This tool of punishment also appears in archaeological contexts.

The number of strokes was limited to a those needed to start a flow of blood - the purpose of scourging being primarily to weaken the victim and shorten his/her time on the cross. They were delivered by a trained professional. What Gibson's film shows is not only ridiculously excessive but incomprehensibly and improbably brutal. This portrayal is clearly for salacious shock value and not any concern for truth. It is at this point (if not before) that the film degenerates into a work of pure fiction.

There is, however, more degeneracy to come. In a scene that occurs nowhere in the gospels nor any other creditable source, Mary is wandering among the pools of blood in the courtyard in which Jesus was scourged. We'll forego questioning how she got past all those guards into a secure area of a Roman fortress. Then out trundles Mrs. Pilate with an armload of bedsheets or used togas or some such. She vanishes and Mary begins to mop up all the blood with togas or sheets or whatever. Say what? Is she collecting souvenirs? I can see a framed slice of sheet on a humble wall in Nazareth. "There's a toga of actual blood!" What ... you don't like the bit about the frame on the wall? That's just as disgusting and stupid as somebody mopping up blood in the first place. No wonder the gospels ignore the whole silly story in the first place. Not only is it silly, it's a fairy tale insulting to the intelligence of anyone whose cerebrum's weight exceeds 1 ounce.

Ah, but wherefore Herr Dr. Goebbels' award of the prestigious thorn cluster? Well, of course: the film's stunning if subtle anti-Semitism. We could point to the film's zeal in promoting the old canard that the Jews "forced" a conviction on a Roman governor who in fact would just as soon crucify people as look at them.

We can and do point to one of the film's most prominent characters - one who actually appears only once, in a brief sentence, in the gospels' passion narratives. This character is Satan, the so-called devil, who pops up everywhere in this film. This character is the most palpable, horrifying manifestation of the film's anti-Semitism. This manifestation takes the form of Satan being cast as a First Century Jew ... right down to the shawl over his head.

This libelous identification of Judaism with Christianity's evil angel must of course give much schadenfreude to nutters like the Aryan Brotherhood, the American Nazi Party, and others who live only to hate. Gibson's depiction of Satan as an embodiment of Judaism - this nation's moral bedrock - is an act of the most desperate bigotry.

Considering that "Passion" is a tissue of lies and misrepresentations, an affront to anyone who values and respects the gospels, and a virtual celluloid hate crime, we would expect Christians everywhere to shun it for the arrant nastiness that it is. But what do we find? They are busy declaring this shabby travesty a triumph of their faith. What does that say of them? Fools have rushed in where our better angels would fear to tread.

Shame, Mel Gibson; shame, shame.