MAN has it been a long time since i've posted here, so I won't rabble endlessly, I will just give my thoughts on the topic, because most of you probably don't remember me
I haven't read this thread comprehensively, but some points i think i should make before delving into my thoughts about the film:
THE TREE IN EDEN AND THE FRUIT OF WISDOM: God told Eve not to eat the fruit, because he gave human beings free will, and he knew she could resist if she wanted to. However, God, being the supreme and ultimate existence (the guy who single handedly runs everything, from the millions of chemical bonds occuring between the nitrogen and carbon molecules in your DNA strands every day to the gravitational pull of the sun, and so forth), knew that Eve would NOT resist the temptation, and what the future would hold for mankind.
God told Eve to resist the fruit of wisdom for one reason: wisdom is suffering. Within the "fruit" (of course, this wasn't an apple or a tangelo or something, this was THE fruit, the divine blossom) was everything the blissful minds of Adam and Eve had never known: attachment, modesty, self-interest, and all of the other human flaws which contribute to suffering.
Think about the implications of the word "wisdom", as the fruit is named: If you know nothing, you fear nothing, and you are attached to nothing. Ignorance is bliss, and bliss is euphoria. So if wisdom is equivalent to suffering, than God wanted to keep Eve from eating the fruit so Man would never have to know suffering.
JESUS DYING FOR OUR SINS: If you have read the new testament (or even the prophecies of the Messiah in the Old), you know very well that Jesus COULD have stopped his crucifiction had he chosen to do so. The man COULD perform miracles, son of God or not; he rose a man from the dead, satiated a hungry mob with only 2 or 3 loaves of bred and water (which he turned to wine), and more; all of which were witnessed not only by his followers but by his disbeleivers. To say that this is mythology does have some validity, but if you look at it context, it is difficult to make such an assumption: the life of Jesus, chronicled in the Gospels, (which were written by four men sixty to seventy years after his death), is sometimes erratic in the testamonials of John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark. Some scenes differ from book to book, such as the condemning in the courtyard (only one gospel contains the Jewish mob chanting "his blood be on us, his blood be on our children", for example). However, the miracles of Christ are ENTIRELY congruent in all four gospels, from the names of the people present to the dates the events occured. This is intriguing because not all of the gospel writers were in contact with each while their accounts were being written.
What does this mean, you ask? Well, it DOESN'T mean that he is the son of God, if you don't believe that. I am not trying to persuade anybody into accepting Christ, nobody could persuade me, and for all YOU people know, i might not be a Christian at all, i am just presenting facts. However, as many religious leaders (Siddhartha Guatama, for example) have conveyed, there IS divinity, and Jesus was one of the few men who could display his slight affinity with the divine. Whether you accept him as the Messiah is a personal issue.
Wow, did i get off topic. As I was saying, Jesus said himself that he could have stopped his execution. However, he knew that if he did, he would be going against all of his own teachings: he would be acting out of self-interest, and loving himself above others. He let himself be crucified by wicked men, so that the world (not only the several people who saw him crucified, or Jerusalam, but the entirety of the generations ahead that he knew would follow him) could know his love. He loved the world so much that he accepted their sins, and gave his life so that he could forgive man for the greed and hate which nailed him to the cross in the first place.
According to the Bible itself, The Jews did not kill Jesus. The Romans did not kill Jesus. We, as human beings, the flawed, greedy, and self-concerned creatures we are, were those who killed him. Caiaphas, the high priest of the temple, was a Jew, and he was the one who told Pilate to execute Jesus, but can you not examine yourself, and say that you have never wished harm upon another person for your own interest? That is the sin in every man that Jesus died for, and that Jesus forgave by giving his life.
AS FOR THE FILM: Very well made, visually stunning, and brilliantly acted. I think the portrayal of the Devil was nothing short of brilliant. The entire film was quite emotional, and i'm not going to tell you my exact reaction to it in that regard, because I think it would add a touch of bias to this post that may be unnecessary. I think certain depictions of the violence were a bit over the top (turning him over, Cassius sticking the spear in his side, etc.), but rennaissance painting i have seen depicting the Crucifiction have been of the same calibur of violence, so i was not radically shaken in that sense.
I don't believe it was anti-semitic at all, i think people who don't understand the politics of the era or what truly happened might take a sense of anti-semitisism into the theater with them, and find such motivation within the film. But i saw the movie with my girlfriend, who is Jewish, did not find anything about the film to be anti-semitic. In her words, the movie was "accurate, and probably very misunderstood."
Blogs
Author