Yesterday I watched The Passion of The Christ. After all this uproar about the movie I just wanted to see for myself. The plot and text are taken from the bible, the gospel according to John, chapters 18-20 (roughly).
These ’’gospels’’ were written some 200 years after the happenings in Rome, when Christianity started to become popular with Roman slaves. So it can be only very fundamentalist Christians who take these recordings to be historically accurate.
Everything revolves around - well, the passion of the christ.
The original meaning of passion is suffering. If you share the Christian love of suffering - there it is, plenty of it. So much so, that in reality any person subjected to this kind and amount of suffering (mainly in the form of severe flogging) would certainly not have lived to face further suffering (such as the long and heavy and painful bearing of the cross, let alone the crucifixion itself).
The original meaning of Christ is saviour. The idea is that through the suffering and death of his son, God is willing to forgive men (and women) their sins. Frankly, I have always been puzzled by this scapegoat logic.
As to the accusations of being anti-semite: Of course Jesus was a Jew himself, so the presentation of the Jewish priest can not be anti-semite, only anti-priest. This it is. Pilate as the Roman governor is repeatedly shown as not wanting to execute Jesus. According to the text of the bible he states repeatedly that he cannot find him guilty of a crime. So, yes, this way he is the good one, the Jewish priests are the bad ones. (Actually, the real Pilate was removed from his post by the Romans, because he was too cruel, even for the time.) Still, I don’t get the logic: If God wanted to have his son killed and become the saviour, why are those bad then who killed him?
According to the bible, Judas (correctly called Jehuda in the movie - Jehuda means Jew) was the traitor who showed the Romans the way to Jesus and was payed 30 silver coins by the priests for that. He is the archetype of the traitor and was shown as such.
Of course there is no arguing with religious beliefs. The question is: Did I like the film?
No. It was unnecessarily brutal, fundamentalist and useless. I’m just afraid that too many people take up this fundamental view of things.