"Passion" fails to nail key point

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 3/5/04 | Andrew Greeley

[walden]

'Passion' fails to nail key point

March 5, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

'The Passion of the Christ'' is a celebration of the bloody suffering of Jesus, a fundamentalist interpretation by a man who rejects the Vatican Council. It is not, contrary to claims, a literal interpretation of St. John's Gospel but is based on the ''revelations'' of a 19th century mystic. It is a film about torture, legitimated because it is the torture of Jesus. ''Passion'' is a glorification of sado-masochism.

For most of the first millennium of Christian history, the church spread a veil of modest discretion over the physical suffering of Jesus. It respected the privacy of his final hours and celebrated the empty crucifix as a symbol of the resurrection of Jesus (an event that is noted only weakly and vaguely in Mel Gibson's conclusion). The Greek churches even to this day resist sensationalist presentations of the suffering of Jesus. However, in the Middle Ages, the Western church gradually put the corpus back on the cross, though it did not present Jesus as naked, as he in fact would have been. The cult of the physical suffering of Jesus became especially strong during the Renaissance. It was not always a completely healthy devotion as the cult of the flagellants demonstrated.

Crucifixion was a cruel form of execution. After the slave revolution of Sparticus, 30,000 slaves were crucified along the Apian Way. The death of Jesus was not unique in its cruelty, however horrible it may have been. Whether our modern methods of execution are any more humane might be an open question. It was typical of everything in the life of Jesus that he chose to be united in his death with the poor and the oppressed, a point Gibson seems to have missed.

Those religious conservatives who seem to delight in how much Jesus suffered are certainly correct that his sufferings were terrible. Those who say the sufferings were absolutely unique to him simply display their own ignorance of history.

Gibson showed his hand in his interview with Diane Sawyer when he said that because the gates of heaven were closed by the sin of our first parents, Jesus had to suffer to open them again. This metaphor, which my generation heard often in grammar school, is a poor adaptation of the teaching of St. Anselm, who proposed that the suffering of Jesus paid the blood price to satisfy God and free us from our sins. Anselm's theology is not Catholic faith. It has caused a lot of misunderstanding among Catholics who absorbed it in their youth.

One may wonder what kind of God it would be who would demand such a price from his beloved son. Is this the same kind of implacably forgiving God whom Jesus preached about in his life?

We all must suffer; we all must die. Death, no matter how brief or how protracted, is horrible. Do those who die after a prolonged battle with cancer die any less horribly than Jesus? What does his death say to all of us who must die? One will watch ''The Passion of the Christ'' in vain for any hint of an answer to that question.

The lesson of Good Friday, properly understood, is that God suffers with us. Like every good parent, he suffers when his children suffer. When Jesus hung on the cross, God (the person was the Second Person of the Trinity) made common cause with the Iraqi peasant shot in the back and tossed into the pit to be consumed by fire. God cannot prevent our sufferings, but he suffers with us.

Isn't God above all suffering? One can only reply that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures presents himself as suffering with his people. Good Friday is good precisely because on that day God identified himself with his people. ''Christ,'' as Annie Dillard writes, ''hangs on the cross, as it were, forever, always incarnate and always nailed.''

That fundamental flaw that St. Paul describes as the struggle between what we want to do and what we actually do (and which St. Augustine dubbed ''original sin'') is our fear of our own mortality. We do those things that we know we shouldn't do because we are afraid of death. On Good Friday, God did not take away death, but he did absorb our God-forsakenness and promise that when it is time to die, he will die once again with us.

[Destro]

I imagine that Greek in the east became more and more the language of empire as East and West split, but not as early as 33 A.D.

Greek was spoken in the east for hundreds of years - Latin would not have been the language of any local there in 33.A.D. earlier or later.

[AnAmericanMother]

I don't disagree that Greek was the LOCAL language, but as that Bryn Mawr article points out, Roman administration was Rome-oriented and surprisingly uniform throughout the Empire.

[heyheyhey]

Greek was spoken in the east for hundreds of years - Latin would not have been the language of any local there in 33.A.D. earlier or later.

Here is something to ponder about Greek,

Acts 21:37-39 As the soldiers were about to take Paul into the barracks, he asked the commander, "May I say something to you?" "Do you speak Greek?" he replied. "Aren't you the Egyptian who started a revolt and led four thousand terrorists out into the desert some time ago?" Paul answered, "I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city. Please let me speak to the people."

The Roman commander was surprised that Paul spoke Greek.

[Destro]

Which proves that Roman citizen Paul hose to speak to the Roman cohort commander in Greek without a second thought and the cohort commander was releived he could communicate with Paul in Greek since he was trying to determine if he was a trouble maker or not. Again proves that Greek was the brideg language between people-not Latin and thus Mel Gibson for some reason chose not to shpw this in the movie which tainted it for me.

[Destro]

Which proves that Roman citizen Paul chose to speak to the Roman cohort commander in Greek without a second thought and the cohort commander was releived he could communicate with Paul in Greek since he was trying to determine if he was a trouble maker or not. Again proves that Greek was the brideg language between people-not Latin and thus Mel Gibson for some reason chose not to shpw this in the movie which tainted it for me.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

You aren't addressing whether or not Pilate spoke and wrote Latin in his administration. Didn't Pliny the Younger write in Latin to Trajan, despite administering a "Greek" province? Isn't Pontius Pilatus an Italic name? What language are the suriving archaelogical inscriptions in? Aren't they in Latin?

http://www.bibleprobe.com/pontius_pilate.htm

Why would Pilate speak in Greek to the Jews when Josephus reports these same Jews had great trouble learning Greek after AD 70?

[heyheyhey]

OK. Then what about Pilate's inscription on the cross in three languages? What was Latin doing there?

[AnAmericanMother]

No, Paul was from Tarsus in what is now SE Turkey, and Aramaic probably was his native tongue. Greek would be his second language, in a matter of life and death he would have used that rather than Latin (in the interest of accuracy). Note however that he addressed the crowd in Aramaic, not Greek, and that the commander was surprised that he spoke Greek at all . . . thought he was an Egyptian in fact.

[AnAmericanMother]

Sorry, should have given the reference.

It's the next verse, 40 (Young's Literal Translation): "And he having given him leave, Paul having stood upon the stairs, did beckon with the hand to the people, and there having been a great silence, he spake unto them in the Hebrew dialect, saying:"

[heyheyhey]

That's right.

I don't really care what was the "real" language used in the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, and I don't think it is possible to establish it beyond any doubt, since the original tape recording didn't survive - according to world's most renown researchers. However, to claim that Gibson's choice of Latin is a gross historical inaccuracy is nothing but anti-Gibsonism.

[Destro]

and yet the NT says Greek was one of the languages placed on the sign on the cross and Gibson left that out. Unforgivable.

[AnAmericanMother]

It does bother me a bit that the Greek was omitted from the inscription on the cross, per Luke and John. On the other hand, Matthew and Mark mention the inscription but don't say that it was in three languages.

On still another hand, imagine the actors having to learn Greek as well as Latin and Aramaic! Gibson may have had a revolution on his hands.

I can see this as an artistic decision rather than any sort of attempt to falsely obscure Greek in the film. How many of the moviegoers speak Greek anyhow? (I speak Greek and Latin, but not Aramaic. The vulgar Latin is similar to the church Latin I know fairly well, but my Greek is classical, not koine.)

[AnAmericanMother]

Our posts crossed in the aether.

Seems to me Gibson had an artistic choice - two Gospel writers mention this, two don't. Three languages or two? Three might have been a bit overboard . . . everybody was grousing already that nobody was going to watch a movie in Latin and Aramaic, with subtitles.

[heyheyhey]

Greek ...left out. Unforgivable.

To 99.9999998765% viewers it was Chinese.
Hence - forgivable. :D

[eastsider]

One may wonder what kind of God it would be who would demand such a price from his beloved son.

I was thinking about this article over the weekend, and the line I quoted above deserves comment.

The suggestion that the Father's divine will demanded the Son's sacrifice against the Son's divine will is nonsense. Assuming that the Father willed the sacrifice of the Son, the Son (and the Holy Spirit) would have willed the same thing; otherwise, the divine will would be conflicted -- more precisely, it would be infinitely conflicted.

[eastsider]

d) The scribbled words (misspelled like much graffiti often is) reads: Alexamenos cebete (sic, sebete) Theon

Good eye, Destro!