Posted on 03/05/2004 12:45:57 PM PST by MegaSilver
This year in many of our Catholic and Protestant churches, we have both the gospel of Luke and - unfortunately - Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" as part of our Lenten and Holy Week journey with Jesus through his arrival in Jerusalem, his arrest, trial, crucifixion and the empty tomb and Resurrection.
Luke wrote his gospel account around 85 CE - some 55 years after the death of Jesus and 15 years after the destruction of the Jewish Temple and much of the rest of Jerusalem by the Roman army, and after the subsequent dispersal or diaspora of many Jews and Jewish-Christians to more distant lands. Both because of the danger they were in of being obliterated by Roman persecution, and also because of the family fight amongst Jewish-Christians and the rest of what remained of Judaism, Luke and the other gospel writers tend to downplay the responsibility which the Roman authorities exercised in condemning Jesus to death.
Instead, they played in bold relief the insistent demands of Jewish leaders on the one hand, and the reluctance of Roman rulers on the other hand in the passion and death of Jesus. However, Luke and his community knew full well that the Roman role in Jesus' death had been done in a ruthless manner without any qualms of conscience as the Roman death penalty - crucifixion - was handed out to Jesus, just as it was dealt to thousands of others.
So, Luke plays down the Roman role in his written gospel, but in playing up the Jewish role, he does so with such transparent inaccuracy regarding Jewish judicial process that while Roman authorities getting a hold of this gospel wouldn't have easily known, the Jewish Christian readers and hearers in Luke's community would have known that this gospel was still pointing a finger at Rome.
As well, Luke writes of Herod Antipas' ruthlessness (Lk. 9:9) and that of Pontius Pilate (Lk. 13:1-2) in earlier parts of his gospel. Regarding Luke's transparent inaccuracy, he puts the details of the trial of Jesus in total contradiction to our reliable knowledge of Jewish procedure at court: We know that there were a number of pretenders to the title Messiah, yet outside of the gospel accounts, there is not any other historical account of a single instance of a person ever being indicted and convicted by blasphemy and sentenced to death because that person claimed to be the Messiah.
Also, Jewish procedure would not allow for capital crimes to be tried during festival times (the gospels say Jesus was tried during the Passover festival); and such trials were certainly not to be dealt with in a single day (Jesus' trial was speedy in the extreme).
Again, Luke's use of transparent inaccuracy shows him indirectly pointing the finger at Rome. Unfortunately, later readers of the gospels - including Mel Gibson - would not catch the context nor these subtleties, and that's where it all gets dangerous.
We now know the centuries-long descent into the night of Auschwitz which the warped twisting and unthinking literalism of these verses of the gospels were used to justify. Generations of Christians who taunted Jews with accusations of "Christ-Killers" have not only twisted Luke's story of the passion of Jesus, but have entirely missed its ultimate purpose, namely to encourage our recommitment to join Jesus in his ongoing mission of repair and reconciliation of all false divisions which prevent unity in diversity of all humankind and all creation with God.
Jesus' suffering and death reveal both the full measure of our capacity (shared by all humankind) for destructiveness based on fear and ignorance, and also the full measure of God's power revealed in forgiving love through this man Jesus who did not count death too high a price for being God-with-us. Nonetheless, such suffering and dying is not in itself God's plan nor purpose; for the passion and cross of Christ are the not the goal nor the end-in-itself, but rather the consequence - of living a life committed to wholeness, justice and compassion and the pursuit of such change in the lives of people and nations.
More than 1900 years after the gospels were written, if inflammatory gospel passages are read aloud in church - or used as the basis of a gruesome film - without acknowledging their proper context and the evil done by their misappropriation, we would once again be complicit with the evil which wrought the Holocaust and other destructive and divisive rifts within the world today.
That.....or MAYBE.....God inspired them to write what they wrote.......
This headline is unsubtle.
It has been demonstrated completely that Luke is the most accurate historian of that era...and it has been confirmed over and over again.
Can't tell the difference between the Bishops and the Queens?
No... why?
You can have all the theories you want. I have the written, eyewitness account. It's good enough for me.
This tells me all I need to know about the good reverend.
A so-called clergyman can't even use the term AD (Year of the Lord). It tempts one to use the Lord's name in vain. I'd expect this from a PBS documentary, not a "rector".
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