Number 65
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Reader Q
A grammar question re the article, THE. What is the difference between, "The Passion of THE Christ" and "The Passion of Christ"?
If you worked at THE Goodyear, ... and If you worked at Goodyear, ...
At the next session of THE Congress, ... and At the next session of Congress, ...
Excuse me for using the examples of Goodyear and Congress with Christ. Nothing is intended nor implied more than a question of usage.
Moi A
I checked with Fred about "the" because he's very well read in theology. He said "Christ" from Greek (Indo-European) roots means "anointed". Since we have articles in the English language, we sometimes throw in "the" (e.g., "Are you the Christ?" means "Are you the anointed one?") It's not a personal name like "Jesus."
"Congress" sounds like a name, but "the Congress" also means "the gathering" or "the council" or something like that, and of course can also suggest "the Congress of the United States," for example.
"The Goodyear" almost makes Goodyear into a sort of iconic employer, although it could also imply "the Goodyear plant" or "the Goodyear factory." Somehow I can't hear "the Firestone" in my mind, can you? Nor "the Goodrich." Have you heard either of those?
Q
Even more interesting as neither of these ["the Firestone", "the Goodrich"] "sounds right", which really means, something that I've never heard.
A
There's no reason why Goodyear should have been called "the Goodyear" when the other rubber factories of Akron didn't get "the" tacked on. We Anakronisms would know.
I have seen Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" twice, the second time because someone gave us extra tickets. A reader asked what I thought about William Safire's column criticizing the movie.
Historically, of course, Passion plays were at times used to whip up anti-Jewish feeling. Now people are using this movie to whip up anti-Christian feeling. It's even been compared nonsensically to the Nazi propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl.
I'm not qualified to pronounce on the movie's theological or historical accuracy, though I did notice that in the scene where the soldiers are gambling for Jesus' seamless robe, the robe appeared to have a seam in it. I'd like to know whether that was an accident or not.
But as for the accusations of anti-Semitism, the movie clearly shows bad Jews and good Jews. The main characters are good Jews ~ the best characters are good Jews: Jesus, his mother Mary, his followers and sympathizers, as well as many compassionate bystanders and witnesses in the crowds. Those critics who see only evil Jews must be identifying only with those characters, and blind to the others. Some Jewish leaders saw Jesus as a threat and wanted rid of him. That's historical fact, but it's a story not unique to those people.
The Romans ~ referred to by an angry rabbi on TV as "Christians" ~ weren't a sympathetic lot either. Some of the soldiers were sadistic brutes, while a few displayed some compassion. Pilate looked like a more humane character than any of the Sanhedrin, but he simply represented a different kind of evil.
And that's what this story is about. First, it had to show someone (even if you don't think Jesus was God) being condemned and destroyed by his own people. That's the point. Remember the recent news story about the black kids on a school bus beating on a little black boy, while other kids in the background looked on and joined in or laughed? What about the white man in Mississippi who just killed his cousin and his cousin's wife and child? (OK, it hasn't gone to trial yet, but how many people kill their own family members?) What about the Irish and English and their ancient bloody feud, so-called Christians against so-called Christians? Do you need more examples? The lesson is that we kill each other, because we think each other is "the other" even though we are the same people, the same family. This "Passion" event happened to take place when and where it did, but it could have been any group of humans, anywhere, anytime. It would not have had the same meaning had the prophet or god figure been an outsider.
Also, evil takes different forms. The Sanhedrin looked pretty ugly in this movie, although a few of them objected to that disgraceful proceeding. Politics is like that. And mobs are the same everywhere. Pilate was simply a more attractive man in the movie, but the real Pilate was responsible for many, many crucifixions, only he didn't have to do the bloody dirty work himself. He was worried about his own skin. He was weak. The expression, "to wash one's hands of something," i.e. to absolve oneself from responsibility, has become part of the language because of Pilate. It's the evil of failing to take responsibility for one's own decision or lack of decision. In a way, this is the New Testament version of the Cain and Abel story ~ "Am I my brother's keeper?" There are sins of omission as well as sins of commission. I know a woman, who professes to want to become a Christian, who says she doesn't understand all this talk about sin (she was not referring to the movie), because she herself has never done anything wrong in her life.
The bloody beatings in the movie shocked a lot of people (like Safire) who may admire the "artistic" violence of moviemakers like Peckinpah, John Woo, Tarantino, and the Coen brothers (I'm not saying Safire does, I don't know). I think the suffering of Christ, and the evil that caused it, are easier to depict in the physical beatings (which were probably fairly accurate historically if Jesus took only about three hours to die on the cross), compared either to the suffering of the crucifixion itself, which is internal, a slow, painful suffocation, or to his spiritual suffering.
So which evil is the worst? Judas the betrayer, the Sanhedrin, the sadistic soldiers who beat and mocked Jesus, the morally flabby and inept Pilate? Which of these would you prefer to be?
I've never known any real Christians of any spiritual maturity who think "the Jews killed Christ;" Christians think they did it themselves, and that's why Gibson used his own hand in the movie as the hand that drove the spike into Jesus' hand. You don't have to be a Christian to interpret this movie and this story as the eternal story of human evil vs. love. The fear borne of history is understandable, but unfortunately that history is simply more evidence of that simple truth ~ the veritas that Pilate questioned.
By the way, the movie Lost in Translation, which I disliked in PO 53, was attacked by a Japanese anti-defamation spokesman for stereotyping the Japanese. Everyone else was unpleasant in that movie too, except the putative protagonists. Usually only a couple of characters are really developed in any story, and writers resort to generalizing about the others. If any generalization is other than perfectly flattering, or if one character is of a different ethnicity than another, someone's feathers get ruffled, and by "feathers" I do not mean to exclude fur, scales, or skin, nor do I mean to imply that feathers inevitably ruffle, nor that ruffling is a bad thing.
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