Religious Hysteria

"The Passion of the Christ" is the crucifying of Jesus on the cross in effigy one more time for the sake of money.

The movie dialogue is supposedly in Aramaic. There are a few words here and there that come close to the original Aramaic, but most of the Scripture is faked, like the theatrical blood that half the movie's budget must've been spent on.

This movie is a hysterical rendition of the Anti-Semitic bias against the Jews in the Dark Ages of Europe during the days of the Black Plague, when the Jews, who fared better against the epidemic because of their dietary laws, were blamed for the disease that killed millions.

The retelling of the last twelve hours of Jesus on earth leads to a renewed hatred for the Jews at a time when Arab fanatics are blowing themselves up as suicide bombers and shedding the blood of innocent people.

The movie is based on an old Anti-Semitic nun's account of a vision she had a few centuries ago. I don't think the vision of a nun is equivalent to one of the Gospels. A movie depicting the life of Jesus Christ should be based on the Bible, and not just any Bible, because there are Bibles that are totally distorted. The screenplay of this movie is not an exception. Co-authored by Mel Gibson himself, it has some good points, one of which is that Jesus spoke the Ancient Aramaic language; however, most of the Scripture that it quotes is from the same old distorted Bible of the Catholic Church and the Protestants.

Just by faking Aramaic-sounding dialogue in the movie does not make "The Passion of the Christ" an authentic story of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In fact it has the opposite effect. It belittles the significance of the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures in this insufferably violent film in a language that supposedly makes the story more credible.

When I watched the movie and heard the broken Aramaic dialogue, I thanked the Lord that it hardly sounded like the native Aramaic that I speak with my mother. It sickened me when I heard the Jews in the movie speak it correctly here and there, because for the first time I understood how maligned the Jews feel today about being called the killers of Jesus Christ. And the fact that Mel Gibson feels that he too is personally responsible for killing Jesus Christ doesn't make me feel any better.

According to my translation of the Scriptures the story of Eashoa the Messiah is not to be regarded as a diatribe against the Jews. It's not supposed to be a call to arms to defend Christianity. It's not supposed to be a shocker to whip people into donating money. The story of Eashoa the Messiah is a balanced, edifying expression of the love of a redeeming Messiah who taught us how to live a joyful life and to face death without the usual fear, because He promised that just as He was resurrected so will we be resurrected, and that we must endure in faith to the very end. That means never quite losing our hope.

Religious fanaticism and hysteria are not the mark of a good Christian. It's one thing to feel the wounds of Christ, but another thing to rip them open. This movie fans the fires of prejudice against the Jews at a critical time in history.

Finally, the Oscar-winning director of "Braveheart" attempts to re-establish his version of the old Roman Catholic Church as the true faith by incorporating a falsified version of Aramaic into the story of Jesus Christ. It's as if he's saying, "Look, whether it's Greek, Latin or Aramaic, let's not fight over it; Christ died for all of us, so buy a ticket and let's enjoy the show." And if it only went that far, in other words if it were only entertainment, it would've been alright; but it doesn't end there.

Despite the clown's red nose that Mel Gibson wore on the set of the movie while directing, the movie falsifies key passages in the Scriptures. I've described some of these elsewhere on this website. From the falsified account of the Jewish hatred for Jesus to the blasphemously-rendered utterance on the cross, there are just too many lies and too much gratuitous violence to make this film anything but a horrible mélange of Satanic deception with Biblical proportions.

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