I finally got to see The Passion of the Christ last week. It is compelling, brutal, and uncompromising—and it is a movie that lives up its name. "Passion" is not an intellectual understanding but a powerful emotional feeling, and Gibson deftly exploits the medium of film to evoke just such a response in his audience. "Passion" is also an apt description of how Gibson poured his heart and treasure into the project, holding little back from a graphic portrayal of both the Passion and the Christ.

In fact, it is probably the intensity of viewer's unavoidable emotional reaction that is responsible for stridency of some of the reviews to the film. I have not read all or even most of the reviews on the film, but I am concerned that many of them, especially by academics, seem to have missed the mark on aspects of the movie. I am going to address three allegations about the film in tree separate parts: the movie’s violence, its historical accuracy, and anti-Semitism.

A popular word to describe the violence in The Passion was "pornographic," but the word is so wrong in so many ways that I have to wonder how well those commentators have watched the film, how well they are familiar with contemporary movie violence (or sex), and how rampant is plagiarism in reviewing. Unlike many modern, violent movies, even those critically acclaimed like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and the Coen brothers’ Fargo (both of which I liked), Gibson's Passion was much less disturbing to me than either.

In contrast with Pulp Fiction's nonchalance over the death of a young man in the back seat of the car, The Passion did not focus on senseless acts of violence on an utterly helpless victim. Yes, Jesus was brutally scourged in the movie, but after one round Jesus stood up for more. When the trials appeared stalled and looked like Jesus might have gotten off in a mistrial, Jesus only then opened his mouth to make sure his fate was sealed. The viewer got the sense that the only person fully in control during the Passion was the Christ.

Despite the viciousness of what happened to Jesus, Gibson's approach did not indulge in that violence in a prurient way. Showing sensitivity to his audience, Gibson faithfully moved the camera’s focus away from the violence, just when his viewers couldn’t take it anymore. Furthermore, The Passion's flashback scenes helped to relieve those watching when the brutality would have gotten too much. This is in stark contrast with a movie like Fargo in which scenes of comedy and murder were juxtaposed, in the opposite order, so that one began laughing from the hilarity of the previous scene only to witness a terrible act being committed while still in a carried over state of glee. As a result, I found the Coen brothers' approach of using comic relief to intensify the violence much more unsettling than Gibson’s use of flashbacks to give the audience a break.

Some flashbacks in The Passion, however, did powerfully increase the pathos. For me, one flashback in particular was the one that occurred when his mother Mary saw Jesus stumble carrying the cross and remembered back to the time when Jesus was about four years old, tripped, and fell then. Back then, she could run up and comfort him, but now helping her son was impossible. I couldn't help it either.

Next: Historical Accuracy in The Passion of the Christ.

Eusebius (early 4th cen.) may have preserved some evidence that the Gospel of Thomas had been used earlier among the followers of Simon Magus and Helen (late first century, Samaria and Syria): "Their [scil. Simon and Helen] more secret rites, at which they say that he who first hears them will be astonished, and according to a scripture [λόγιον ἔγγραφον] current among them will be 'thrown into marvel' [θαμβωθήσεσθαι], truly are full of marvel and frenzy and madness; ..." (Hist. eccl. 2.13.7; trans. Lake).

This was noticed by Robert M. Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian (1980), 137 (citing his earlier work), who suggested that the "scripture" (Lake) or "written oracle" (Grant) that Eusebius referred to was Thomas 2 or maybe a similar passage in the the Gospel according to the Hebrews known to Origen (early third cen.) or Clement (late second cen.). Grant also mentions that Origen used sayings from Thomas cited as "I have read somewhere" at Jos. hom. 4.3, Jer. hom. 1 (3).3.

Naturally, ecclesiastical writers like Eusebius were not interested in reporting much information about "heretical" literature or being accurate about what they report, so one has to be very careful about sifting through what little evidence they've left us. But these are some leads.

For more information about the Gospel of Thomas, please see Steve Davies's Gospel of Thomas Homepage and Mike Grondin's The Coptic Gospel of Thomas in Context.

I'm always interested in ways of making my own writing more effective and helping others do the same. That's why I liked this article entitled Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay by Timothy Burke of Swarthmore College at his "easily distracted" weblog. Extract:

The most important fundamental issue I see again and again is a paper which is largely descriptive rather than analytical, which proves that a student has "done the homework" but not taken ownership of the material and crafted an argument of their own. Sometimes I see an argument in the first paragraph or in the last paragraph (the latter often appearing to be a last-minute discovery) that is cut off from the rest of the essay, unexplored or unsupported. I often comment that papers lack what I call "flow", a sense that they are moving relentlessly and naturally from one assertion to the next, building towards some goal or overall point.