That’s David Weinberger to whom I’m referring, who asked this question in a comment to my post about the passionless Passion.
I ask this as a Jew who hasn’t seen the movie. And I ask it sincerely. If this movie were all you had to go on, what would you think of Christianity? Does it do a good job representing the meaning of the religion?
In my review of the movie, I purposely avoided that issue because I wanted to review the movie as a movie and not as propaganda. Having done that, however, David’s question gives me an excuse to share my answer to that important question — which is unequivacally NO!
The model of tolerance and compassion that the figure of the Christ is supposed to be for Christians is not reflected in the movie. The main message this movie gives about the Christ is that he was tortuously martyred by Messiah-denying Jewish religious leaders. The model of political and philosophical courageous rebellion that the Christ is for lots of us others isn’t there either. The point of the movie is that he said he was the Messiah, and the Jewish leaders said he wasn’t, and there more more of them then there were of him and they won out.
This is not a movie about any of the aspects of Christianity that might make it a valuable path to follow, that might give insight into its potential power to those who don’t know much about it. This is a movie made by a man who looks at the world through a two-inch pipe.
The mindset that made this movie is the same one that caused feminist Monique Wittig to write: