Posted on 02/19/2004 3:40:35 PM PST by missyme
"Critics Never Stop"
JERUSALEM (AP) - The dearth of information about Jesus' crucifixion makes it impossible to describe the event in accurate detail, as Mel Gibson attempts to do in his new film, "The Passion of Christ," Bible scholars and anthropologists say.
The crucifixion is the centerpiece of the movie, set to open in U.S. theaters Feb. 25, Ash Wednesday on the Roman Catholic calendar.
People who have seen the movie say it adopts standard Christian imagery in excruciating detail: Jesus being pinioned to a Latin cross - a T-shaped device with a short upper extension - with one nail driven through both feet and one through each palm.
In a December e-mail sent to The Associated Press, Gibson said he did "an immense amount of reading" to supplement the Bible's relatively unadorned account of the crucifixion in the four Gospels.
"I consulted a huge number of theologians, scholars, priests, spiritual writers," Gibson wrote. "The film is faithful to the Gospels but I had to fill in a lot of details - like the way Jesus would have carried His cross, or whether the nails went through the palms of His hands or his wrists ... Since the experts canceled each other out, I was thrown back on my own resources to weigh the different arguments and decide for myself."
Some scholars say even the most widely recognized features of the crucifixion, such as the shape of the cross and the use of nails, are open to debate.
James F. Strange, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said 1st century historian Josephus provided only general information, probably because crucifixion was so common that details seemed superfluous.
Crucifixion was first used in the 5th century B.C., and was a widely used form of execution in Asia, Europe and Africa for the ensuing eight centuries, said Israeli anthropologist Joe Zias. Depending on technique, death could be swift or take days.
"If you suspended people by their hands and left their feet free you would kill them within an hour," Zias said. "If you suspended them in a way they couldn't exhale they'd be dead within minutes."
Zias said the question of whether Jesus was nailed to the cross or simply tied to it remains a mystery. "There is no evidence whatsoever he was nailed," he said. "The Gospels say he was crucified and leave it at that."
Zias criticized "The Passion of Christ" for accepting the standard version of three nails being used. He said experiments on cadavers carried out by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages have shown that people hanging with nails through their hands will fall to the ground within a relatively short time, pulled by gravity.
The Gospels suggest it took Jesus three to six hours to die.
"All this is Crucifixion 101," Zias said. "People who study these things understand them. But Gibson ignored them in his film."
John Dominic Crossan, emeritus professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago, agrees with Zias that little is known about Jesus' execution.
"Early Christians believed that Jesus was nailed to the cross," he said. "But there is absolutely no proof of this. The only skeleton of a crucified person ever recovered indicated that the two arms were tied to a crossbar, and two nails were used in either shinbone. There was no standard procedure in any of this. The only common feature in the different types of crucifixion is intense sadism."
The type of cross in Jesus' execution is also in question, Crossan said. First century Romans are known to have used both a T-shaped device, without an upper extension, and the Latin cross that is standard in Christian iconography.
Each of the four Gospels says an inscription mocking Jesus as the "king of the Jews" was affixed to the cross. Crossan said this would have made sense "because the whole point of crucifixion was to warn people through alluding to a specific crime."
Two of the Gospels say the inscription was mounted above Jesus. This presumably would strengthen the argument for a Latin cross, which would have provided space for writing about the condemned man's head.
However, the other two Gospels don't give a locator. "It (the written warning) could just as easily have hung around his neck," Crossan said.
Crossan is also uncertain whether the cross on which Jesus was crucified was carried to the execution grounds - either by Simon of Cyrene, as three of the Gospels report, or by Jesus himself, according to John's account.
It is possible that the vertical part of the cross was kept at Golgotha, the place of Jesus' death, and that the condemned person carried the crossbar, Crossan said.
"The point is we simply don't know," he said, "not in general cases and not in the case of Jesus either."
But those little fact kinda get in the way of the story!
I'm actually not familiar with them. Are they?
I was assuming that you were trying to give an example of historical evidence that supports events in the Bible.
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. John 20:19&20
But he [Thomas] said to them, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."--John 20:25
He [Jesus] said to them, "Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet.--Luke 24:38-40
This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.--Acts 2:23
having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.--Colossians 2:14
I've heard of them, I just wasn't familiar as to whether their content was religious or secular.
Not off the top of my head. I was making the bigger point that to prove that the contents of the Bible are true, logic requires some independent, non-Biblical source.
"We declare to you what was from the beginning. What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands...." (I John 1:1)
Would John lie to us?
Read between the lines - it was Bush's fault.
The willingness to pile on Gibson, and carry water for the ADL's complaints, come from a barely-concealed hostility toward Christianity. It p*sses me off-- and I'm not religious at all, not a Christian.
The violence of this movie has me thinking I'll choose my spots. I'll go when I'm up for enduring that. Even if I didn't go, though, I would buy a ticket on principle.
Eusebius writes that Tiberius heard of Jesus' reputation for miracles, and put Jesus' name before the Roman Senate, asking them to declare Jesus one of the Roman gods. (Miracle workers of that sort were a far more accepted phenomenon in those times than they are now.)
The Senate did not confirm Jesus.
But what if they had? Jesus would simply have become another member of the Roman pantheon... (I could go on at length with speculations, but you can paint your own alternative history...)
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