Having returned from The Passion of the Christ I can now understand what the so-called fuss is all about. There is an element of shallowness to it, but it is all the shallowness of Catholic Sunday school. Nothing has so reminded me of the hours spent learning that story as a child. Now, from those days, the only things I can remember learning are mathematics and about Jesus. Whatever else I studied then was built upon and overlaid by more sophisticated knowledge and is part of the archeology of my character, but the Jesus stuff always floated above that, as basic life lessons. I was thinking yesterday of how I’ve always taken the idea of “feeding the spirit” seriously, from the teaching, “Man cannot live on bread alone, but also by the word of God”. It was explained that just as the body needs food, so does the soul. This lesson happened at around the same time as some Participation campaign teaching about “a healthy mind and a healthy body” so the spirit thing became associated with mental health and made a lot of sense.

It seems to me now that Catholicism was something some of my teachers must have had a passion themselves for, since they infused with a certain wonder, and that left an impression. Watching this film brought this all back, because of the way they described his torture, “They did this to him, they did that…” and their imaginations were more vivid that what I imagined in turn. But now watching this movie, I feel I understand it much more. Every other film version has sanitized it. I’m sure it really was that bad in a way. That being said, I felt that by adhering to the Gospels so closely, and by thus making it so Sunday school, it all become suspect. The Aramaic and Latin work but barely …. even I could tell that the Latin pronunciation was execrable.

As for not providing enough context – the context is there, but it’s subtle and easy to miss. But it’s also silly to ask Gibson to do that, since this movie does have a novelization after all. Which raises the other point, that the Gospels are examples of the ancient west’s novel, and so it shouldn’t be assumed that everything is accurate, but it can be assumed that there is embellishment and dramatization. I really doubt Jesus was mobbed that way, although that is based on something … and I don’t remember anything in the Sunday schooling about an earthquake.

There are two things that were running through my mind. No three actually. One was Gibson’s statement in one of the interviews where he said that whether we like it or not, the history of humanity is tied up in this man. And that is true, though it is also true of Achilles, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Confucius, Christopher Columbus, and any other historical and/or semi-fictional figure you could think of.

The second was the issue of its truth. A scholar of early Christianity once pointed out that some of this stuff might be true, because it would have been too far fetched otherwise. A virgin birth, for example, would have been as absurd then as now, so why repeat it for 2000 years if it wasn’t based on something that could be believed by those who witnessed it, or knew those who had? We know that novel situations create tales, and so the tale of Jesus carrying the whole cross with a scourged body (which scholars are now saying wouldn’t have happened) would have been such to set tongues wagging to such an extent that it could have been written down within 100 years when the Gospels were created.

Now the third was its secular aspect. Jesus talking to the sky is Jesus talking to the sky – in my contemporary secularism, there are times when you think, this poor guy, suffering all this for a delusion. And I think that’s not entirely wrong – not a failure of the movie. You watch this, and you see a nice guy with a philosophy of love in a world of brutality, and a self-conviction that he had a relationship to clouds and he was executed for it. That to me is the story.

The amazement that created in such a brutal and inhumane world was enough to call make him a god and build a religion around it. The success of Christianity is this secular world where we now tolerate and are kind to one another. For all the shit raised by the present day Christians in their bad suits and bad haircuts, at least we aren’t torturing them for it, and at least we know that prosecuting homosexuals, abortionists and dare I say it, jews and muslims, is wrong wrong wrong, because of the foundation of compassion that the institution of the Church built into Western society through 1500 years and without making egregious mistakes of its own along the way. The Church may not have always practiced what it preached, but the secular world does. So thank Jesus for Gay Marriage. (And it should be pointed out that although the United States, the most self-consciously Christian country in the world, appears often to be no better than ancient Rome, with it’s fondness for execution and prosecution of non-conformity, we also know that it is simply a matter of time before a reformation of their society takes place).

This movie inspires nothing in me that makes praying the Rosary make any more sense, or that praying in general is any more worth my time. It????s a story about the furless apes and their funny ideas and their capacity to cruelly torture one another. There are times when you wince. I found my jaw clenched with a tension. It isn’t nice to see someone brutalised, but the reaction is dulled by the knowledge that he’s wearing a slashed flesh-toned suit. So in the end it left me sobered, but not any more moved than usual. Aesthetically it was well done. The opening sequence, from Full Moon to Gethesmane, was masterful. It really is very much an animated painting. However, by the end of the film, there were people in a row behind me crying. I knew this because their sniffling was added to the soundtrack, and made me do a double take.