As I Was Saying This Time Last Week
Mar. 5th, 2004 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbeZmirak's Passion piece in TAC is even better than the one in Godspy:
Make no mistake: as the Gospels make clear, Jesus did indeed say things that contravened the law of Moses—divinely imposed, the highest, purest religion existing on earth. In the high priest’s presence, Jesus asserted His own divinity. Faced with this, the high priest had only two choices: bow down and worship Jesus or put Him to death.
There is no room in the Gospels for the liberal 19th-century myth of Jesus as a great moral teacher, unjustly persecuted. As C.S. Lewis has written, Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, perhaps deranged, imposter. Religious Jews who reject His divinity but affirm Him as a noble ethicist are being extremely generous.
I don't know about generous. Liberal Jews and liberal Christians have agreed on the cover story that Jesus was a great teacher, but none of his followers got the point. Some great teacher! The teachings of Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad are well preserved in the movements to which they gave their names. Christianity alone is a total fraud. Or so the mainstream churches tell us -- and a great many Catholic theologians are being sucked into the mainstream -- and any Christian who doesn't follow the party line runs the risk of being denounced as a closet Hitler.
It seems to me, though, without seeing the movie, that Zmirak has a much clearer idea than Gibson of what it is all about. The Temple authorities had very good reasons for acting as they did. But for Mel, the Devil made 'em do it, and that says it all. Which is, when you come to think of it, pretty close to anti-Semitism, though that might not be the motivating factor. Mel is just too much the authoritarian to want to see Jesus as a challenge to the religious authorities of his day, so their animosity must be attributed solely to supernatural (sorry, John, preternatural) intervention.
The JDL, ADL, whatever, has gone off half cocked and shot itself in the foot by presuming that Mel is anti-Semitic in so far as he follows the Gospels, not when he departs from them. The Jewish propaganda machine has discredited itself in the eyes of all fair-minded folks of any religion and none. And just as well, as long as false accusations of anti-Semitism are the weapon of choice against any who question the indiscriminate slaughter of Arabs.
But there I go again.
Make no mistake: as the Gospels make clear, Jesus did indeed say things that contravened the law of Moses—divinely imposed, the highest, purest religion existing on earth. In the high priest’s presence, Jesus asserted His own divinity. Faced with this, the high priest had only two choices: bow down and worship Jesus or put Him to death.
There is no room in the Gospels for the liberal 19th-century myth of Jesus as a great moral teacher, unjustly persecuted. As C.S. Lewis has written, Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, perhaps deranged, imposter. Religious Jews who reject His divinity but affirm Him as a noble ethicist are being extremely generous.
I don't know about generous. Liberal Jews and liberal Christians have agreed on the cover story that Jesus was a great teacher, but none of his followers got the point. Some great teacher! The teachings of Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad are well preserved in the movements to which they gave their names. Christianity alone is a total fraud. Or so the mainstream churches tell us -- and a great many Catholic theologians are being sucked into the mainstream -- and any Christian who doesn't follow the party line runs the risk of being denounced as a closet Hitler.
It seems to me, though, without seeing the movie, that Zmirak has a much clearer idea than Gibson of what it is all about. The Temple authorities had very good reasons for acting as they did. But for Mel, the Devil made 'em do it, and that says it all. Which is, when you come to think of it, pretty close to anti-Semitism, though that might not be the motivating factor. Mel is just too much the authoritarian to want to see Jesus as a challenge to the religious authorities of his day, so their animosity must be attributed solely to supernatural (sorry, John, preternatural) intervention.
The JDL, ADL, whatever, has gone off half cocked and shot itself in the foot by presuming that Mel is anti-Semitic in so far as he follows the Gospels, not when he departs from them. The Jewish propaganda machine has discredited itself in the eyes of all fair-minded folks of any religion and none. And just as well, as long as false accusations of anti-Semitism are the weapon of choice against any who question the indiscriminate slaughter of Arabs.
But there I go again.
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Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:18 pm (UTC)THIS is simply not true, as Krauthhammer and Sullivan and numerous other critics of the film have ably pointed out.
Re: Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:22 pm (UTC)...There is something sacrificial, even redemptive, in the sufferings and wanderings of the Jewish people ever since. Perhaps Jesus was not the only Jew whose passion plays a part in the salvation of the gentiles.
The Jewish people, sacrificed in the Holocaust, as part of the "divine plan" of Jesus's "Redemption"--not of His own people, but of us, the Gentiles "elected" in place of the Jews themselves, as God's "chosen ones."
Re: Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:30 pm (UTC)He asserted his "Sonship," he asserted his "Messiahship," he asserted his special relationship with His Father, but He ALSO said, "Call no man holy but the Father." We STILL DON'T KNOW what He was asserting about His own nature and I AM NOT PREPARED TO ACCEPT that it was SO OPPOSITE to what the Jews believed about "Messiahs." For one thing, "Messiahship" would be claimed upon numerous occasions, in centuries following, and NEVER did the Jews demand "death" as a punishment to THOSE aspirants the way they did for Jesus. What that makes ME think is that Jesus's claim was different in its political aspect, not in its theological aspect and that the ecclesiastical politicians who edited the Gospels were quite uncomfortable with THAT, and deliberately omitted it!
Re: Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:35 pm (UTC)There is no room in the Gospels for the liberal 19th-century myth of Jesus as a great moral teacher, unjustly persecuted. As C.S. Lewis has written, Jesus was either the Son of God or a wicked, perhaps deranged, imposter. Religious Jews who reject His divinity but affirm Him as a noble ethicist are being extremely generous.
Instead, we can posit that He was something that we do not yet understand--not the "Son of God," any more than any of the rest of us are, potentially--by BECOMING HIM (which is how I read, "No man comes to the Father except through me)--but the "Son of Man," the title HE preferred, and told others to call Him by.
Re: Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:39 pm (UTC)No, he DID NOT; it's still there, in the Aramaic, and, if you listen carefully to that segment of the film, you can actually still hear it being shouted, and you KNOW, therefore, that it can STILL be dubbed back into the film, when it is shown in highly volatile anti-Semitic venues, like among les beurs in France, or the Arabs of Palestine or the Fundamentalist Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.
Re: Distortions
Date: 2004-03-05 09:46 pm (UTC)And, it is perfectly obvious what motivates the rabid defenders of this film: a desire to attack the changes in tone and emphasis that were effected by the Second Vatican Council, which did, indeed, embrace a DEGREE of religious pluralism regarding soteriology which reactionary Christians CANNOT STOMACH, but which makes Christianity a better world citizen than IT EVER WAS PREVIOUSLY--finally a competitor in the discussions about spirituality and enlightenment that take place in Eastern faiths, to a degree that IT NEVER WAS BEFORE!
no subject
Date: 2004-03-05 11:47 pm (UTC)Can I tell you a secret?
We Jews think that Jesus was a loony-toon who probably was asking for it when the Romans executed him, because he wanted to start an uprising against the Romans. Jews, at that time, had no power to put heretics to death, and so mainly ignored him, instead of stoning him to death.
That's when we think about Jesus at all, which we basically don't, because, frankly, we don't care about him.
The whole "Jesus was a great teacher" is something that we say to Christians in order to be polite. We don't BELIEVE it. We don't think there's anything worthwhile to be studied in the things he said. We just say it to be nice.
In other words, we agree with C S Lewis's posed dichotomy.
Ashes in your mouth.
Date: 2004-03-06 12:22 am (UTC)Let me tell YOU a little secret: every Jew I've ever known was OBSESSED with Jesus, whether he'd admit it or not.
And, if Martin Buber is representative of serious Jewish religious philosophy in the 20th century (and I think he is), higher level Jewish thinking in the area of religion CANNOT DO WITHOUT JESUS. (And, if you doubt it, I suggest you take a look at his Two Kinds of Faith. Yeshua Ben-Nazroti may not be God, he may not be the "Son of God," but he definitely IS your "Messiah," for the very simple reason, as Buber is himself FORCED--by logic--to admit: He "perfected" the Torah.
Re: Ashes in your mouth.
Date: 2004-03-06 07:46 am (UTC)Who?
Re: Ashes in your mouth.
Date: 2004-03-06 08:04 am (UTC)I see what the problem might be: you probably mixed up the names. It was Yehuda ha-Nassi who compiled and edited the Talmud, so perhaps you mistook one name for the other?
Re: Ashes in your mouth.
Date: 2004-03-06 11:41 am (UTC)Re: Ashes in your mouth.
Date: 2004-03-06 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-06 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-06 12:24 am (UTC)The problem for me is the way the debate has been framed, one can hardly be against the movie on theological and historical inconsistency without looking like you side with a bunch of pseudo-liberal reactionaries.
The party line down here my friend is so scarily conversative that I don't know if I have ever met a so-called "mainline" Christain. You and I are near "liberal" moderates, not conversatives by Southern "Christian" thought. Namely, we aren't fundamentalist Authoritarians or neo-Arians (which I would consider the U.U.'s and some of the Anglican-espiscopal, despite my deep respect of the latter).
You said this about "Mel is just too much the authoritarian to want to see Jesus as a challenge to the religious authorities of his day, so their animosity must be attributed solely to supernatural (sorry, John, preternatural)intervention" that's a pretty profound statement which I agree with a lot. Nice way to sum that up.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-06 01:44 am (UTC)Case closed.
You are right--they are MYSTICAL texts--not MEANT to be taken literally!
Date: 2004-03-06 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 07:20 am (UTC)Now who is stretching the truth out of all proportion in the name of self righteousness?
no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 01:23 pm (UTC)But seriously, I consider the Iraq war to be vile and bestial. (Call me selfrighteous if you like, but that is not an agrument.) An impressive number of folks who have criticized Mr. Bush's foreign policy agenda, and the neoconservative intellectuals who formulated it, have been smeared as anti-Semites. Indeed, it is alleged that neoconservative, used to describe the war hawks, is simply a code word for Jew -- though that is the term they use to describe themselves, and a great many of their paleoconservative critics are Jewish by faith or descent.
I find that I must continue to respectfully disagree with you.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-07 07:57 pm (UTC)Don't be sorry. Life's no fun if we can't disagree.