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The Passion Part II posted March 2004
read Frederica's response to some conservative Christians about this
article
by: Frederica Mathewes-Green
I
haven't written a review of "The Passion" because my feelings are
so mixed. I am so glad for all the people who are having their
faith strengthened and renewed, or even finding faith for the first
time. I don't want to puncture that. A friend at my church saw it
once, wanted to see it a second time, then read a negative review
("the characters were flat", etc). She decided not to see it again.
That's sad.
When people get disappointed with the film I think it has to do
with what Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief."
What people are enthralled by is the Lord Jesus Christ. When their
enthusiasm begins to dip is when the notice that the movie is not
him, himself, in person, but a movie about him. But of course it is
the Lord himself that our faith is in, and the movie is a tool; if
we expect it to be perfect, we're putting our faith in the wrong
place.
Where there's some confusion on this point is that Mel Gibson has
repeatedly said that his aim was a movie that is utterly faithful
to the Scriptures. People expected almost a newsreel quality. But
it turns out what he meant was to be utterly faithful to his
artistic vision of the Gospels. So we have to change our initial
expectation; instead of thinking of it as a Gospel newsreel, we
must liken the movie to the works of Michelangelo and other greater
or lesser artists to the centuries who have offered their view of
the Gospel.
The most exciting thing about the movie for me is the depth of
Gibson's commitment to Christ. His faith is real and gripping. It
moves him deeply and it moves us too. Real vibrant faith--not the
calculated kind we usually see--is contagious.
But I was disappointed that he didn't take more care with the
material. Even granting that he did not intend to restrict himself
to the Gospels, the material he does use is too often simply
inaccurate. Numerous examples could be given, but I'll start with
Mary Magdalene. Now, there aren't that many women in the Gospels,
so they should not be too hard to tell apart. Mary Magdalene is a
woman named Mary from the city of Magdala on the sea of Galilee.
She is one of the women who followed Jesus and helped support his
mission financially, so she may ahve been well-off. She was
exorcised of seven demons. That's all we know about her history.
There's no reason to think she was a prostitute or notable sinner
of any type.
She is not Mary of Bethany (a city south of Jerusalem), the sister
of Martha and Lazarus, who anointed Jesus' head. She is not the
prostitute who anointed Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair.
These two understandably get confused, and historically in the West
all three women are lumped together under Mary Magdalene's name, a
confusion continued in the "Last Temptation of Christ," "The
DaVinci Code," and other works.
So I was mighty confused when, in the movie, Mary Magdalene is
looking at Christ on the Cross and begins remembering the incident
with the woman taken in adultery in John 8. Now, this is an
interesting passage to scholars because it clearly does not belong
in this place in the story. It breaks into the middle of something
else that's going on in John. In fact, it doesn't sound like John
at all; both in writing style and in content it sounds more like
Luke. But no early text has ever been found that does not include
this story at this point. One of those tantalizing mysteries of
biblical scholarship. No one doubts that the story is true.
So I wondered why she'd remember this; maybe Gibson believes she
was one of the onlookers. Gradually it dawned that Gibson thought
she *was* the adulterous woman. This is an entirely different
fourth woman, and to add her to the mix is to add a whole new layer
of confusion to an already bad situation. Instead of advancing the
cause of Scriptural understanding, it sets it back. This is just
carelessness. It's as if you made a movie of Gone with the Wind and
combined Scarlett, Melanie, and Scarlett's sisters into one
character.
Those
were the stages of my disappointment--from realizing that it wasn't
going to be strictly accurate to the Scriptures, and re-setting my
expectation for a careful handling of the Scriptures through the eyes
of an artist; and then realizing that the Scriptures were not going to
be handled carefully.
Another example, I just read a quote where Gibson was asked about the
dead donkey when Judas hanged himself. He said that the scripture says
Judas "went out and hanged himself with a halter" (Matthew 27:5) and
asked himself, "wehre am I going to get a halter?" and came up with the
donkey. Now if you have reasonable familiarity with the Gospels you
immediately went "with a halter?" because that's not in the bible. A
striking visual like that would stay in memory. But it isn't there; I
looked it up in the Greek just to make sure. This undermines my trust
in his familiarity with the Scriptures.
Many
Christians in the liturgical traditions (Orthodox, Catholic, some
Anglican and Lutheran) stop at noon to pray and remember the
Crucifixion. This is a very ancient practice. After decades of doing
this, you come to associate the particular brutal noonday light with
that event; the paradox of so much flooding light and shadowlessness,
motionlessness, with that moment of both triumph and agony. So when
they're climbing to Calvary and the shadows are long, and warm
afternoon sun is playing on everyone's faces, it was another moment of
confusion for me. How could he just ignore a Scripture that is not just
a matter of words on a page, but that so many faithful "know in their
bones" because we relive it every day? It was jarring so see the
Crucifixion shadow-lit, and as a result felt obviously untrue.
Anyway little things like this contributed to my being unable to
believe that this was the real story. But I still valued it as I would
any other artwork by a believer. Even Michelangelo could make a
mistake, as when he put horns on Moses because of a bad translation. I
remain grateful for the depth and vitality of Gibson's faith and
appreciate the energy he put into this film.
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