Jewish leaders dislike Gibson's PASSION...

[Zenster]

*Originally posted by TheRealJohnPeat *
… “Historically accurate” is an impossibility in itself as anyone with ANY sense will realise - we can’t accurately describe what happened to some people 100 years ago, let alone 2000 …

I seem to recall that the Hebrew people have some of the oldest continuous written records of any Western culture. The Dead Sea Scrolls predate the oldest surviving Bible manuscripts by nearly one thousand years. While the crucifixion of Christ wasn’t exactly front page news at the time, there is a wealth of information from that era.

I can only hope that all of you have had the chance to watch the PBS show Frontline and their documentary From Jesus to Christ. I found it to be an intensely interesting and extremely fact based investigation into the life of Christ and the church that sprang up around his teachings. It does a lot to debunk the Nativity myth and much else of the window dressing that interferes with an honest understanding of the man.

Christ did indeed exist and he was very different from the person depicted in the Bible. He was not born of low origins. Instead, he may have been a cabinet maker. Christ was conversant in several languages and probably a very persuasive speaker. Much of the modern day image of Christ is at variance with what can be gleaned from documents from that era. If you have not seen the Frontline program, I strongly urge you to do so.

Here are some samples from material related to the program:

"What’s the traditional account of what Jesus did?

According to the traditional story, Jesus came to the Temple during the Passover season, and going up into this mob scene that you can imagine up there, proceeded to do something quite odd. He started to take the tables of the money changers in the Temple. People who would have been selling animals for sacrifice, or doing money changing, as it were, in order for people to buy their proper contributions for the Temple… Jesus is portrayed as taking these money tables, turning them over, kicking the people about, driving them out, even in one case with a whip, and claiming that to buy and sell in the house of the Lord is a transgression against God.
What are the problems with [this traditional account]?

The difficulty with the story of Jesus and the money changers in the Temple is that the story is told in slightly different ways in different gospels. For example in Mark’s gospel and in fact in Matthew, Mark and Luke, all three, this event occurs in the last week of Jesus’ life and is clearly the event which brings him to the attention both of the Temple leadership and the Roman authorities. It is in effect what gets him killed. John’s gospel, interestingly enough, though, puts the story of the cleansing of the Temple as the very first episode in Jesus’ public career. More than two years earlier, and no mention is made of it near his death. So there are a few problems with the story itself, although it is one of the stories that appears in all the gospels, so something is going on there in terms of interest in what Jesus did at the Temple.

But let’s think for a moment what Jesus might have been doing if we take the story seriously as told in the gospels. To cleanse the Temple of these money changers is an act of protest against something apparently, but what? Now there’s no reason to say from a perspective of the way the Temple was run that there’s anything wrong with the money changers in the Temple, of buying and selling things that are part of the religious activities of the Temple. In fact it was an absolutely necessary activity within the way the Temple was run. So whatever the protest represents it must be a protest against some sort of idea of what the Temple should be, that they represent as having gone awry. It may be the case that Jesus represents the same kind of criticism that the Pharisees themselves would have brought against the Temple, that in fact the kind of piety that happens only once a year at Passover is something that ought to happen every day and every week in your private lives. In that sense, Jesus’ criticism of the Temple sounds very much like the Pharisees wanting to bring piety home. Wanting to make it much more personal. Another possibility though is that Jesus sounds more like the Essenes who were really criticizing the whole way the Temple is run as having become too worldly. Too caught up in the money of the day, or maybe just too Roman, and if that’s the case then his actions look much more like an act of political subversion."

"These are like three completely different ways of reading the same event.

Jesus comes across differently depending on which way you look at the story…

Now what kind of evidence do we have for what really did happen?

What happened to Jesus after the Temple incident is a bit unclear. It appears he’s actually arrested, perhaps by the Temple guard or perhaps by Roman soldiers themselves. He probably had a trial but whether it was an extensive courtroom hearing or just a quick and dirty justice before the tribunal of the governor is not clear as well. But I think we have to realize that the evidence that we have by the mode of execution, by virtue of the trial stories as told in the gospels and by virtue of what appears in the story of his actual death, suggest that it ultimately fell to Pilate and Pilate alone to make the decision on what would happen to this figure Jesus.
Is it likely or plausible that the Jewish authorities did hand him over to the Romans?

What the role of the Jewish authority is in the actual arrest and execution of Jesus is difficult to say. Clearly from the traditional stories in the gospels they have a heavy role, and it might very well be that the Temple leadership were concerned with the kind of unrest that Jesus might cause. My own feeling is that there’s very little role by the Jewish authorities. Maybe the Temple leadership at most but there’s probably no direct historical evidence for an actual trial before the Sanhedrin and the Jewish leadership and clearly the decision to execute on a capital crime was a Roman decision. Certainly it is the case that the idea of the masses of the Jewish people gathered around the Temple had some voice in the death of Jesus is not part of history but a legacy of some later tradition."

[sup]BOLDING ADDED[/sup]

I have not seen the film and may well not see it at all. What I will say is that if Mel Gibson has done anything in his movie to perpetuate the old “blood libel” myth of Jews as the killers of Jesus, then he is both irresponsible and contributing to one of the oldest and most heinous misrepresentations in history.
NOTE TO MODERATORS: While a bit lengthy, these excerpts are by no means a substantial portion of the material presented at the website noted above. I have posted them in the hopes of providing crucial clarification concerning an important issue that I find to be a source of great misunderstanding. If it is deemed that these passages are of unacceptable length, please delete them.

[Marley23]

I seem to recall that the Hebrew people have some of the oldest continuous written records of any Western culture.

For whatever it’s worth, Zenster, my understanding is that for a long time, oral records were preferred to written ones. Anything that’s written down was likely passed on orally for a long long time and collected later. That may not bespeak a lot of accuracy.

[FriarTed]

Michael Medved & Dennis Prager btw are Jews who do NOT believe Mel nor the film to be anti-Semitic, tho Prager has expressed concern that anti-Semites could find justification for their contempt for Jews in the film.