As I Was Saying This Time Last Week

[arisbe]

Zmirak'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.

Comments

Distortions

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

Gibson invents nothing, embellishes nothing, does nothing to suggest that all Jews rejected Christ or sought His death.

THIS is simply not true, as Krauthhammer and Sullivan and numerous other critics of the film have ably pointed out.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Got here on a link from neven.

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.

[winegodeatsyou.livejournal.com]

While I agree with you about the JDL and the ADL, I will say that Mel did severely depart from the gospels in the use of the devil and in the use of Emmerick's The Delorosa Passion of the Christ (which depending on the Catholic you speak to is either divine or very close to heretical).

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.

[nandan.livejournal.com]

Most people who insist on absolute literal interpretations of a religious tract are intolerant bastards.

Case closed.

[rawmr.livejournal.com]

"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."

Now who is stretching the truth out of all proportion in the name of self righteousness?