I just saw The Passion of the Christ, and I don't have anything to say about it.
Update:
Ok, I've thought about the movie more, and now I have a few things to say. This won't be a review, and it will certainly contain spoilers -- if you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want any of the details given away, stop reading.
First of all, none of the violence really connected with me. I've never been hurt like that, I can't imagine what it would be like, and it was just so far beyond my experience that it seemed surreal. It's unlikely that Jesus was scourged as severely as was depicted, because no one could survive that kind of massive pain and blood loss without going into shock and passing out. I don't doubt there were sadistic Roman torturers who might have done such a thing, I just don't think it happened quite that way in this instance because he survived long enough to be crucified.
The two scenes that impacted me the most weren't directly related to the violence, but to two peripheral character I could really identify with. The first was in the temple when Jesus was being judged and Peter denied to the crowd that he knew him. Jesus looked up at him at just the right moment, and I could feel the same shame inside that Peter must have felt. How many times have I been in the same situation? Denying Christ by my words or actions whenever circumstances get a bit uncomfortable?
The second scene was when the Romans conscripted Simon of Cyrene to help Jesus carry his cross. Simon was understandably reluctant to get mixed up in the apparently awful affair and yelled to the watching crowd, "Just remember I'm an innocent man, forced to carry the cross of a condemned man!" This precisely wrong assessment drove home to me the reality of the situation. Jesus was the only innovent man there, and he was carrying the cross for all of us.
I'll probably go see the movie again in a while, but not immediately. It's well conceived and well executed, and accurate enough to give a viewer familiar with the back-story a full appreciation of Jesus' last hours. Some of the sequences were unnnecessarily long for notably Catholic reasons -- for instance, Mr. Gibson dragged on Jesus' march to Golgotha so that he could include all seven stations of the cross. I'm sure there were other instances as well that I couldn't recognize, since I'm not Catholic, but they didn't detract much from the movie.
The Passion made me think, and I'm not done thinking about it yet. I may have more to say later.
but you did...
NOTHING?!? Good, bad, "wait for the video"? Would you see it again? Would you recommend it to a) Believers or b) Non-believers. I mean there has to be SOMETHING to say about it.
Curiously, I bet they don't end up showing this movie on airplanes....
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I have looked into Roman crucifixion and other Roman executions, and I don't think that it would be possible to make a movie long enough to be historically accurate. The Romans regularly scourged people several hundred (or even a thousand) times with barbed flails before crucifixion. The more you were scourged, the better the executioner liked you -- because the weaker you were when you went up on the cross, the sooner you would die and you would suffer through less of the much more severe torture of crucifixion. In that sense, Simon did him a disservice by taking the burden of carrying the cross from him.
Breaking the legs of the condemned served the same purpose. Crucifixion usually kills by cramping the diaphragm and causing suffocation. To torture the condemned, the Romans would put a ledge just below the feet of the crucified man. He would be able to stand on his tip-toes and take the strain off of his arms, and breathe. Eventually, though, his legs would cramp, and his weight would go back onto his arms, and the diaphragm cramping would be a matter of time. That cycle could and usually did continue for several days.
From a purely forensic view, there was nothing usual about Christ's crucifixion. He wasn't up long enough for the usual death to take place. Not carrying his cross should have given him hours more. That is why the soldiers are so shocked in the Gospels when he doesn't jump when he is pricked in the side with a spear.
On the conspiracy theory side (there is a theory about everything) the idea is that the vinegar sponge was actually a narcotic, and he was taken off the cross alive to recover in the tomb, where he laid healing for three days. A lot of this theory relies on the interpretation of several words in the original Greek, and I don't know enough of it to vet the theory.
Phelps: No one could survive for days after being scourged like that. Did you see how much blood was on the ground? It's simply not possible.