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Reviews and analysis of the movie from time of release to present.
Articles are alphabetized by title, and more are being added regularly.
Last updated 8/17/2004. |
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Americans Cling to the Faith
Mark Steyn, March 28, 2004
The other day, the guy on my local radio station mentioned that The Passion of The Christ was the No. 1 movie in America. "So congrats to Mel Gibson," he said. "And it'll probably hold on to the number one slot until the new Starsky and Hutch opens." Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe's radical secularists despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion.
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Anti-Semitism and The Passion of the Christ
This link goes to our web page with background on this topic.
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Becoming Rational About Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,
by Christopher J. Patton (the webmaster)
Many in the Jewish community are legitimately concerned about the possible social consequences that might be inspired by Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion of the Christ. History is on their side. In fact Christians would do well to reflect a little on the history of religious warfare and persecution between themselves over issues of passionate faith. A little mutual understanding might go a long way on this topic.
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Berit Kjos’s Concerns about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion”
[Berit’s commentaries present exceptional understanding of how modern culture and its entertainment affect the practices and beliefs of active and passive participants.]
Andy and I have only seen the short promotional clip of The Passion, not the whole movie. Like many of you, we long for deeper understanding of the suffering that Jesus willingly endured for our sake. If we could be certain that it would draw us closer to our Lord, and help us to better "know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings" (Phil. 3:10), we would look forward to opening day with fervent, heartfelt and sober anticipation. More than anything, we want to walk with Him in obedience to whatever He assigns us of pain or pleasure, peace or persecution.
We have more questions than answers. And we wonder if the subtle but potentially negative influences might be stronger than the positive ones -- especially in the long run. For additional movie versions of the Biblical account are sure to follow in the wake of Mel Gibson's phenomenal success. We wonder how such visual images -- based on a blend of truth, legend, imagination and artistic license -- will change the church and its understanding of God and His ways.
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A Film to Excite Passions
By John Leo, 2/28/2004
Two brief and minor scenes in Mel Gibson's movie stick in my mind. During the long torment of Jesus, a flashback shows stones dropping slowly to the ground. We are not sure what we are seeing. Is this some sort of boccielike game? As the camera pulls back, we understand. It's the stoning of the adulteress, halted by Jesus's words "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." The placement of the flashback draws a contrast between the punishment Jesus recommended for the woman (none), and the punishment he suffered.
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German Churches Join Jews in Attack on 'Passion',
Mar 18, 2004
Germany's Roman Catholic and Protestant churches joined the Jewish community Thursday in a rare joint declaration to warn that Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" could fan anti-Semitism in Europe.
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The Gospel According to Gibson
By Jane Lampman, The Christian Science Monitor, 3/1/2004
Mel Gibson's aim with "The Passion of the Christ" was "to have a profound effect on people, to change them." For many crowding into theaters in the early days of his film's release, he succeeded, at least in the first part of that goal. In some theaters, audiences sat in stunned silence after the film; in others, people sobbed and applauded.
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Interesting Times: The Difference
By SAUL SINGER, The Jerusalem Post 3/4/2004
I am happy for the millions who, like Novak, will have their faith strengthened by this film. Christianity provides a powerful religious model that has attracted two billion adherents. It engenders a fear of God that is much preferable to common alternatives such as atheism, nihilism, and paganism. Recently, moreover, the more relevant threats to Jews have come not from the medieval Christianity Gibson seems to favor, but from Nazism, communism, and radical Islam, against which believing Christians are staunch Jewish allies.
But the Christian model is not for everyone. Jews believe that everyone is born with both a good and an evil inclination, that we must struggle to reinforce our good side, and that we can atone for sins through prayer and correcting what we've done. Though faith and actions are important to both religions, Christianity is more faith-centered and Judaism more action-centered. We believe that God judges us more on what we do to bring a better world than on what we believe.
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Interview of Jim Caviezel on purpose of the movie.
Fr. Mario Knezovic asked the star who plays Jesus in Mel Gibson's Passion movie: "How to bring Our Lady’s message to today’s world, how to open human hearts for God’s word?"
Jim Caviezel: "Through one’s own life. It is not what we say but what we do. I dedicate my work to Her Son, I dedicate all that I do to Her Son. I ask Mary to guide me and my career. You can convert people only by living your life. This film is something that I believe was made by Mary for her Son. Because it was made by her, it will be attacked by the enemy. In the USA, this film is under major scrutiny because of the truth that it brings. By living the truth, you will also be persecuted, the enemy will attack you, but have no fear, Our Lord will send his help and give you strength. And you will inherit heaven."
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Is The Passion of the Christ Good Because It's Accurate? Is It Accurate?,
By Jeffrey Overstreet, Christianity Today, 02/12/2004
The period of speculation, worry, warnings, assurances and hype over The Passion of the Christ is coming to an end. The film is finished, and some audiences have seen it. An original soundtrack has replaced the music that supported early screenings of director Mel Gibson's rough drafts. The final cuts have been made. Here it comes, along with reviews. [This article gives a survey of reviews with summary quotes.]
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Jesus at Midnight, The Passion's portrayal of Christianity as a Cult of Death
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
The pagan religious cults of the ancient world were focused almost entirely on death. Ancient Egypt, with its pyramids as Temples of death, its worship of the god Hades, and its mass embalming of mummies, saw the purpose of life as gaining entry into the afterlife.
Judaism and its daughter religion Christianity were a radical departure from the earlier cults of death. Both emphasized the idea of moral and righteous action on this earth...Even in the New Testament, the passion of Christ occupies at most a chapter or two in each of the gospels, while the life of Jesus is spelled out over about ten times that number.
There are two ways to understand Christianity. One is as a religion of life, the other is as a religion of death.
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Jewish Remains Give Clues on Crucifixion
By Megan Goldin, April 5, 2004
Jesus is the best known victim of crucifixion. But thousands of other Jews were put to death on the cross by the Romans, trying to quash Jewish rebellions in the Holy Land in the first century.
Yet strangely the remains of only one victim have ever been found. He was Yehohanan Ben Hagkol, a Jewish man whose heel bone, excavated by archaeologists near Jerusalem in 1968, still had a nail embedded in it.
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"What I'm concerned about is that Jews who see this film will identify deeply with Jesus - the movie's heroic 'good guy' - and will dis-identify with their own G-d-given identity as the Jewish people."
Rabbi Weinreb contrasts the differing paths to redemption in Christianity and Judaism: "In Christianity redemption is by faith; in Judaism it comes via actions, namely, the fulfillment of G-d's commandments. In Judaism, grace does not come from without, rather from within... The special role of the Jewish people, through fulfillment of the commandments, is to bring the universe closer to a God Who commands us to distinguish good from evil." He notes the teachings of the Rambam (Maimonides) that the role of Christianity is to disseminate, throughout the non-Jewish world, Jewish concepts such as prayer, repentance and family values.
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The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic,
By George Will, 2/25/2004
It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals. Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison into the intelligentsia — always so militantly modern — is much more pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia, which has leaned left for two centuries.
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MOVEABLE FEAST - The Passion Puts Mel on the Map
By Thane Peterson
I doubt that the movie will foster anti-Semitism, as many critics have suggested it might. The overwhelming impression I came away with is the one I think Gibson intended: the extraordinary sacrifice and torment Christ endured on behalf of mankind, and the relentless, almost gleeful cruelty of the common Roman soldiers who scourged him during his final hours.
SEQUEL-BOUND? One can only hope Gibson isn't an anti-Semite, because my guess is he's going to be a very influential filmmaker from here on out. This movie is likely to be a blockbuster that will make him tons of money...The movie's success could give Gibson an independent, Christian entertainment franchise, if he chooses to play it that way -- similar to George Lucas' hugely profitable Star Wars franchise. I don't know what sort of sequel Gibson could do, but the New Testament has plenty of pages, and I'm betting he'll do one (or several).
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Movie Review: The Passion of the Christ
By Michelle Anderson, Feb 29, 2004, 17:31
"The Passion of the Christ" was not a movie about His resurrection, or even the vast majority of His ministry. It was about the extent of His torment for the last twelve hours of His life. It did not make me hate Jews...or anyone else, for that matter. It has, however, forever changed the way I think of the Crucifixion and the sacrifice Christ willingly made. It made me want to be a better Christian. It made me realize yet again that His love for all mankind is infinite and incomprehensible.
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Of Things Unseen - Mel Gibson's 'Passion' - What makes this film different?
By Jack Miles
As a cinematic matter, the boldest innovation in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ," is its use of language and subtitles to create, in a religious film, the illusion of documentary...These reminders and others like them hover, by choice or design, just below the threshold of visual consciousness.
But then the Jewish crowd takes up the same cry in a slightly different grammatical form. They scream in unison a single, terrible word that happens to be identical in Israeli Hebrew and in Aramaic, and they scream it again and again as if it were a football cheer: Yitstalev! Yitstalev! Yitstalev! “Let him be crucified!”
The result approaches a revision of the “Apostles’ Creed” that every traditional Catholic like Mel Gibson learns by heart as a child. The Creed summarizes the earthly life of Christ as follows: “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.”
Nowhere in this film, surprisingly enough, is there any dramatic suggestion that "Christ died for our sins." There are, on the contrary, repeated suggestions that the divine Christ is engaged in a life-and-death battle with Satan.
I refer to the astonishing fact that in their embrace of “The Passion,” Evangelical Protestants are celebrating a portrayal of Jesus that visually and theologically—in every way...is flamboyantly, counter-Reformationally Roman. This film is awash in Catholic piety and Catholic imagery that the forebears of today’s evangelicals would have found religiously and esthetically repugnant. As I write, “The Passion” is being embraced most warmly by Bible Belt churches where, down to this day, the faithful kneel before crosses without corpses. What has come over them?
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The Omission of the Christ, by Aaron J. Shuster
Most importantly, I was shocked that Mel Gibson had Jews in a movie set in a period two thousand years ago. Why, for at least one hundred years, the Arabs and Moslems have been telling the world that the Jews don't come from Israel and have never lived there. They have been telling everyone who will listen that the so-called "Palestinians", or Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel, are the genuine inhabitants of Israel and that the Jews are nothing more than foreign invaders, or as they like to call them, "colonialists."
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The Passion and the Fury, by William F. Jasper, 3/22/2004
Why has a reverent movie about Jesus Christ become one of the most controversial films in history?
Perhaps no affair more potently delineates the battle lines in the struggle for the soul of America than the year-long raging furor over The Passion of the Christ. The critics who have been so savagely attacking the movie and its creator would have us believe they are righteously combating the bigotry and violence that they claim saturates the film’s every frame.
Their charges, however, are a smoke screen for a very different agenda. The people sending up the smoke screen are the cultural elitists who hold sway in Hollywood and in the major media. They are anti-Christian and anti-God. They are nihilists and hedonists who shamelessly use their dominance of our cultural organs to undermine basic Judeo-Christian values and to create moral anarchy. They will support, exalt and promote the most degenerate, sadistic and blasphemous "art" conceivable, but they will not tolerate a major Hollywood-type production that approaches the subject of Jesus with respect and faith instead of mockery and derision.
[A good summary of the various controversies to date.]
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Many questions are being asked about Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. Is it biblically accurate? How much Roman Catholic theology is embedded in the film? What gospel, if any, does it communicate? Does it bring glory to the Lord Jesus Christ?
A question that demands an answer is this: "Why are evangelicals promoting a movie produced by a man who has been deceived by Roman Catholicism and is now deceiving others?" Gibson delivers a lethal message that blurs the lines separating the truth of Christianity with the errors of a sacramental gospel.
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PASSIONATE THOUGHTS
By William F. Buckley, 1/28/2004
Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, comments, as reported by The Christian Science Monitor, that "a tremendous number of Jews never turned against Jesus during Holy Week," and records that "the Gospel use of the phrase 'the Jews' referred to Jesus' Jewish opponents, not all Jews. It was a common construction of writing of the time."
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The Passion of the Christ
By Peter T. Chattaway, Christianity Today, 02/25/04
Lethal Suffering: The Passion underlines Christ's humanity like no film before.
(Links to other articles follows it on that site.)
But The Passion also dwells, at considerable length, on the physical pain inflicted on Jesus. Has Gibson found a way to baptize, as it were, the sadistic or masochistic impulses of his other films? Is it possible he is indulging himself under the cover of religious piety?
At times it does seem so. Much has been made of The Passion's adherence to Scripture, but in the rough cut shown to pastors and ministry leaders a month before the film's release, it was clear that Gibson often goes beyond the text. Jesus, played with inspiring sincerity by James Caviezel (Frequency, The Thin Red Line), is not even out of Gethsemane yet when the Temple guards knock him about and hang him over a bridge by his chains, swelling shut his right eye. During scenes like this, you cannot help wondering whether Gibson, as the one who conceived and directed all this simulated torture, is more complicit in the horrors on display than he would like to admit.
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The Passion of the Christ, Artistic film is a powerful experience
By Jeff Minick
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” also acts as a mirror, not necessarily revealing the interior condition of the soul, but certainly reflecting the spiritual and intellectual baggage of its viewers.
To begin, let me offer a brief inventory of my own baggage. After many years of doubt, I came to believe that Christ died for our sins, that he rose from the dead, and that his promise of eternal life is real. I then converted to Roman Catholicism.
What Gibson has done with “The Passion of the Christ,” however, is to create a work of art that in many ways seems less a movie than an assault on the senses, an event, something unique for which I have no name other than to recognize that this is not a flick to be watched while munching popcorn and swilling sodas. It is not entertainment. In a certain sense, “The Passion” is to the movies as an opera is to a play.
Various visual artists, ranging from the painter Caravaggio to the Italian director Pasolini, clearly influenced Mel Gibson so that there are points in “The Passion” where we feel as if we were watching a living painting. Like some of these artists, Gibson is not afraid to use symbolism to make his point.
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The Passion of Mel Gibson
by David Neff
Why evangelicals are cheering a movie with profoundly Catholic sensibilities.
This evangelical enthusiasm for The Passion of the Christ may seem a little surprising, in that the movie was shaped from start to finish by a devout Roman Catholic and by an almost medieval Catholic vision. But evangelicals have not found that a problem because, overall, the theology of the film articulates very powerful themes that have been important to all classical Christians.
Mel Gibson is in many ways a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. He prefers the Tridentine Latin Mass and calls Mary co-redemptrix.
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"The Passion of the Christ" is More of an Experience than a Film
Rex Buntain/Tribune-Star, March 1, 2004
I'm drained, sullen and stunned...more than a mere film. Somehow it transcends that, it's more of an "experience" than it is a movie, likely because Jesus was more than a man.
I'm no biblical scholar by any means, but from what I know about the Bible the movie was true to the Scriptures and renders a faithful -- albeit exceedingly violent and graphic -- portrayal of the last hours of Christ.
For many, I believe this movie will be life-changing, yielding thousands, even millions, of converts to Christianity. For believers, it will serve to strengthen their faith.
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The Passion Police
By Doug Giles
Is it just me, or did Mel Gibson make Satan out to look like Sinead O’Connor in his latest movie, “The Passion of the Christ”? Coincidence? I don’t think so. And what about the baby with the old man’s face that Lucifer was carrying around in that unholy Madonna-like scene during Christ’s scourging? I swear it was Andy Rooney.
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'The Passion': What's Not in the Bible?
By the Beliefnet Staff
Because scripture is silent on certain details, Mel Gibson drew from extrabiblical sources to craft his 'Passion.'
But because scripture is silent on certain details of the Passion, several scenes in the movie aren't found in the Bible. Many of Gibson's additions are quite plausible embellishments of brief biblical mentions. Some came from other religious sources, like the visions of the mystic nun Sister Anne Emmerich. And a few scenes, apparently, are inventions--often artistically daring ones.
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Scripture Guide to 'The Passion'
By Darrell Bock
A Bible scholar's scene-by-scene reference guide to what's Biblical and what's not
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center has a number of current articles about Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’ on its home page as of 1/29/2004.
Articles from a Jewish point of view, the center’s official statement, and a picture of a church billboard stating, “JEWS KILLED THE LORD JESUS.”
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What's Catholic About 'The Passion'? A Lot
By Jennifer Waters
The Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and Catholic mystics' visions shape Mel Gibson's work.
What's in "The Passion of the Christ" that's not in the Bible? Mel Gibson has said that while drawing most heavily from the Gospels, he also based his movie on extra-biblical sources, many of which fuel his Catholic faith. Scenes corresponding to the Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and visions of Catholic mystics appear in the film.
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“Yahoo!” web sites having anything to do with The Passion of the Christ are "hot." It was among the most popular topics searched-for the week it opened on Yahoo.com, meaning Roman Catholicism just became popular... evangelical Christians packing out theatres, but relatively few Roman Catholics bought tickets, I’m told. And fewer former Catholic, evangelical Christians went, either, I’m guessing. We grew up on “the sufferings of Christ,” bathed on that message from the cradle.
Let twenty million "recovering Catholics" in the evangelical church assure you: that message doesn’t get anyone “saved.”
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Go to www.hollywoodjesus.com for
continuing commentary on pop culture from a spiritual point of view!
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