Monday, April 12, 2004

Passion of the Christ misrepresented again

Also on Textweek, Jenee Woodard points to this article on Sojourners:

Bloody Purim & the Bloody Passion
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

The part that catches my attention is the misrepresentation again of The Passion of the Christ:
For centuries - and now again, in the wake of the film The Passion of the Christ and its pointing at "the Jews" as killers of the Christ - Jews have insisted that Christians look also inward for the impulse toward that killing . . . .
As often, this gives the impression that the film speaks of "the Jews", in inverted commas, as a body hostile to Jesus and who killed Jesus. The film does not speak in this way. There are two people in the film whose Jewish identity is particularly stressed, Jesus and Simon of Cyrene. The term "the Jews" only appears in the expression "king of the Jews". As I have mentioned before, there is no chance of a sensible discussion about the very important issues that surround this film if elements that are not present are imported into it.

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