Posted by PS on October 08, 2003 at 11:31:39:
In Reply to: Re: Mel Gibson's THE PASSION posted by giveawayboy on October 08, 2003 at 10:10:58:
The gospels are a peculiar genre-encompassing genre of literature indeed, and (without spending ten pages doing an appropriate preface to my point) have one major common feature--the passion account is the largest, slowest moving, and most detailed part of every single gospel. Most all scholars believe that it was the passion accounts that were the most preserved and communicated part of the gospels, and that they were the sacred story upon which Christianity was founded, by which all of the symbols in the tradition symbolic worlds of Judaism were reinterpreted. The assembling of the various teaching and healing pericopes came later, hence their lack of detail and agreement and the arbitrary chronological arrangement.
In the gospels, the aforementioned oral traditions were compiled to be a vehicle to bring us through the ministry of Jesus to the point where the Passion Story could be told in its more-greatly preserved detail. By the time the gospels were published, the Passion story had been interpreted and understood by the Christian community (largely through the writings of Paul) so that explanation/interpretation was not offered nor needed in the gospels; the gospels were written to communities already familiar with the Passion story (and at least some versions of some of the other pericopes) to put this foundational teaching in context with the wisdom sayings, miracles, and Christological revelations, thus creating the first written unified stories of the life of Jesus.
How much of the life of Jesus can you find in the writings of Paul? Paul wrote all of his letters (and died) before the first gospel was written. You cannot find the nativity, nor the life, nor any (pre-resurrection) miracle of Jesus in Paul's letters, and almost none of the wisdom teachings. The only feature of the gospels that is prevalent is Paul's teachings is (you guessed it) the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and Paul's revelatory interpretations of the meaning of these events to the believers in Jesus. This events were the foundation early Christianity and the faith and power of believers.
Most of us today were introduced to the character of Jesus as the loving master who held the little children on his lap and blessed them, or the one who multiplied fish and loaves to feed a hungry hoard. It is hard for us to conceive that the prevalent and foundational understanding of Jesus in the early church was the suffering Messiah--long before most of them knew all the compassion stories. It was Jesus' death as a convicted criminal, his unwillingness to fight, the flight of the believers, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, the remission of sins, and the coming resurrection and judgment that were the points of controversy among the non-believing Jews AND the Hellenists AND the Romans (for different reasons, of course). These are the crucial issues that Paul addresses, indeed, that all the apostles address--much more than the interpretation of Jesus' teachings or miracles. The latter foci are much more comfortable for us today (as they were then) and we would rather not engage the passion out of this context. Conversely, the earliest believers did not engage the miracles and wisdom teaching out of the context of the passion.
We have had 2000 years to creatively blur the original context of the gospels, and our understanding of the significance of Jesus is different today than it was for the early believers. They dealt with the more difficult challenge of the reinterpretation of the symbolic world of both Judaism and Hellenism, and these issues were deeply offensive to both traditions. The martyrdom of Jesus' followers makes much more sense when this is understood. We have no clue what it would be like to learn or believe in Jesus in that context. The story that Mel Gibson's movie presents MAY be (I will of course reserve judgment for now) much closer to that context, and as such, I would expect it not only be challenging to our understanding about the meaning of Jesus but also to be deeply offensive.
I haven't yet seen a "Jesus movie" that I could whole-heartedly endorse. But the problem with most of them that were perhaps worthwhile was not offensiveness--it was the lack of it; it was the euphemistic rewriting of Jesus' life according to our sensibilities. I will see this new movie, with a critical eye as always, and will not spare with my evaluation (as you all know). But on the other hand, whatever rings true both historically and theologically I will embrace in all its offensiveness, if only as a means to move one step closer to the man Jesus I have loved.
PS