Word: jesus
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Director Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ represents the teachings of Jesus through a gore-drenched recreation of the final twelve hours before his death. Here, the son of God is a wholly human figure, and Gibson constantly reminds his audience of this with an unceasing depiction of shredded flesh and spattered blood. The effect is alternately piercing and numbing. Nevertheless, Gibson eventually succeeds in overwhelming his audience with the kind of potent visual poignancy unseen in his previous directorial work. The telling of the story is equally effective, as screenwriters Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald (Wise...
...Christ for nonbelievers: almost no characterization or narrative, a spectacularly large amount of violence and almost all of the Jews are evil Christ-killers. In Gibson’s mania to present the extent of Jesus’ suffering, character is lost, and by the end of the film, Jesus begins to resemble a piñata more than a man. The effect is that it is hard to understand quite what the point of all this is. It is never clear why he is so dangerous. It is never clear why he doesn’t take his numerous...
Nearly all of the anti-gay marriage protesters used religious motifs, and a large banner proclaiming “Jesus Is The Lord” was the most visible poster in front of the State House. A number of these protestors held signs urging spectators to say “No to gay marriage/yes to Jesus...
...simply inaccurate in some cases—inaccuracies a non-scholar or specialist may never recognize. An expert in early Christian studies, with emphasis on Hellenistic and Roman contexts, Aitken points out many errors in the film. “The movie focuses only on the torturing of Jesus by excluding the Last Supper, the rehabilitation of Peter and the discovery of the empty tomb...
Aitken highlights historical errors as well; for example, despite the extreme unlikelihood that Jesus would have spoken any Latin, he converses with Pontius Pilate fluently in the film. Greek, which was spoken commonly in Jerusalem at the time, is completely absent. Additionally, Gibson misrepresents the ethnic make-up of Jerusalem and greatly heightens the role of the so-called “Jewish mob,” which calls for Jesus’s death. According to Aitken, Gibson also fictionally contextualizes Judas’s story, adding a scene of his harassment by a group of morphing, devil-like...