Are those accounts in "Passion of the Christ" accurate?

Albion said:

but this was just a statement of fact.

Click to expand...

Yeah so was mine

curious mike said:

Hey guys, I looked at this movie for the first time over the w/e and it simply horrified me. Just checking to see if Mel Gibson used accurate info from the bible for everything in there?

Click to expand...

Not sure Michael. But I always prefer the gospel narratives to Hollywood. Happy New Year .

Another thing I though neat in the movie, although not a matter of scripture, was the depiction of the Samaritan woman attempting to get to Jesus the cup of water she never got around to giving Him at the well.

curious mike said:

Worse than that? How could Jesus have been tortured any worse than what was shown in that movie?

Also that led me to thinking that the Jewish sages were blamed for the crucifixion and rightly so but since it was the Romans who done it, why would they be exempt from blame and why would Rome in particular be the center of Christianity?

Click to expand...

Being crucified in real life would be worse. Most likely Jesus carried the cross naked and was most certainly naked on the cross. Your clothes would be stripped of you to humiliate you, your enemies would come up to you and spit in your face. Once on the cross you would slowly die of asphyxiation. That means your bodily functions would go, urinate and defecate in yourself while dying with onlookers. This is not including tortures and assaults.

curious mike said:

Great info guys, thanks! The above statement I have heard before but can't recall seeing it in either the OT or NT, can you or anyone link me to that please?

Click to expand...

I do not believe I have seen this fully answered yet but I have not read the entire thread. The oldest 'prophecy' concerning the sacrifice of God's only begotten Son is to be found in Genesis 22.

In this chapter God prompts Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac. In the story, as Abraham and Isaac are walking up Mount Moriah (ordained of the Lord---anointed, set apart, christened), Isaac asks his father: "Where is the lamb for the offering?" Abraham responds: "God will provide Himself a lamb for the offering". Abraham proceeds to bind up his son and prepares to slay him, a voice then comes from heaven and says: "Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me." Then the voice continues: "By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son"... "in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice."

So in return for Abraham's faith in that little Voice in his head, God, through Abrahams seed which would become the nation of Israel, gave up His only son in order to bless the inhabitants of the world with redemption and eternal life.

Quite a powerful prophetic "type", especially when you begin to look at the rites and rituals of the ancient Hebrews you will find many that represent a sort or foreshadowing of the Messiahs life and sacrifice. Remember also Christ was ultimately given over to be slain by those who claimed to be (and ultimately were) God's representatives. They rejected Christ just as Abraham was fully prepared to reject his own son.

Interesting stuff to which the depths seem to be unfathomable.

buzuxi02 said:

Being crucified in real life would be worse. Most likely Jesus carried the cross naked and was most certainly naked on the cross. Your clothes would be stripped of you to humiliate you, your enemies would come up to you and spit in your face. Once on the cross you would slowly die of asphyxiation. That means your bodily functions would go, urinate and defecate in yourself while dying with onlookers. This is not including tortures and assaults.

Click to expand...

Pontius Pilate was the cruelest proconsul ever sent by Rome to Judea. He crucified hundreds perhaps thousands of innocent Jews for the most minor infractions. King Herod Agrippa I wrote a letter to the Emperor Caligula about Pilate’s "acts of violence…. provocations, corruption… continual murder of persons untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, endless and unbelievable cruelties." Philo wrote of Pilate’s "violence, robberies… continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties." Josephus, in Antiquities, shows that Pilate’s excessive murders and brutality were so severe that they eventually got him recalled to Rome in the year 36.

The Romans carried out an extremely harsh "justice". Crucifixion was by law reserved for only rebellious slaves and political agitators of the lowest social classes. Only the Romans were allowed this form of execution but the Jews did not lose their right to execute by stoning for blasphemy until AD 39. Pilate was severely criticized for his frequent excesses including crucifixions without trial and extreme brutality and was in fact actually removed from office for these excesses. Crucifixion was designed to be as painful and as humiliating as possible both for the victim himself and any onlookers. The victim was naked and onlookers were kept well away from the site. No one was permitted to provide any sort of comfort to the victim. Depending on the actual form of crucifixion and on the physical condition of the victim, death could take as long as a week. Burial was seldom permitted --- only one is known to history. The body was usually discarded into a shallow grave to be consumed by the carrion birds and wild dogs. Tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands were executed in this way. There were several mass crucifixions --- the 6000 survivors of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 71 BC, the 2000 survivors of the AD 6 rebellion in Galilee, and at the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 captured escapees were crucified at 200 or more a day.

curious mike said:

Hey guys, I looked at this movie for the first time over the w/e and it simply horrified me. Just checking to see if Mel Gibson used accurate info from the bible for everything in there?

Click to expand...

Not even close.

...which may raise the question: Has there ever been a movie that used/presented only information that can be verified from the Bible? I doubt it.

The movie saw Jesus arrest, scourged and crucified.

How was he arrested? Was it very amiable, after the initial ear-chopping, or was it brutal?
When he was scourged, how many times did the whip fall? What was the whip made of lace, or leather, or some other materials? Where on his body was Jesus scourged?

Did birds torment any of the crucified?

Does Satan show his face to Jesus at any time during his life, or are those kinds of verses meant to be taken symbolically and psychologically?

It has been a few years since I saw the movie, but it would seem to me that if Mel Gibson erred, he erred toward realism and literalism when it came to depicting the Biblical story.

Jesus was a good Lutheran, of course!

He preached the Two Kingdoms doctrine 1500 years before Luther. Jesus was preaching in an era when there was no separation of church and state, so making a religious claim had political consequences.

The notion that Jesus was a political revolutionary and that the biblical accounts are not trustworthy rests on liberal mainline assumptions about Jesus message that are rooted in materialist assumptions. The notion that somebody could be passionately motivated by spiritual truths is alien to that mindset. So of course, some want to assume the biblical account is just unreliable.

That, and reading the Bible through an overwrought post-Holocaust theology that wants to ignore every politically incorrect bit of the Bible. It's a myth that traditional Christianity exonerates Pilate and only blames Jews for Jesus death. In the Creed we remember that he "suffered under Pontius Pilate".

It's noteworthy some early Christians believed that Pilate ended up being a repentant sinner and converted to Christianity, a story that was reported by Tertullian around the third century. According to the stories, Pilate died as a martyr. In fact he has a feast day in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. But the truth of the stories may be down to pious frauds, and Tertullian may have had the motivation of trying to ingratiate the Roman state.

But it's not hard to understand why those stories were popular. Stories of radical conversion are wildly popular among Christians, such as Saul of Tarsus, all the way up to the present day.

FireDragon76 said:

It's noteworthy some early Christians believed that Pilate ended up being a repentant sinner and converted to Christianity, a story that was reported by Tertullian around the third century. According to the stories, Pilate died as a martyr. In fact he has a feast day in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. But the truth of the stories may be down to pious frauds, and Tertullian may have had the motivation of trying to ingratiate the Roman state.

But it's not hard to understand why those stories were popular. Stories of radical conversion are wildly popular among Christians, such as Saul of Tarsus, all the way up to the present day.

Click to expand...

Hey, Jane Fonda is now a Christian.