So, just what are we talking about?

[kandrathe]

Hi, I was out digging around and found this. I thought it brought another interesting perspective.

Depictions of Jesus that claim to represent the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but that minimize his Jewishness by an exaggerated separation from his ethnic-religious context cannot be called Christian. Christian faith holds that Jesus as Christian Messiah was born, raised, lived and died a Jewish man. Depictions of Jesus that treat his suffering as the singular triumph of a spiritual hero cannot be called Christian. Christian faith holds that Jesus experienced the same banality of evil and terror that many political prisoners of his day underwent, and that in this way God shared humanly in the unjust sufferings experienced in everyday human life.
“The Passion” cannot be called a Christian film. Moreover, if these depictions of Jesus are taken by viewers to be accurate representations of the meaning and message of Jesus, then the movie is functionally anti-Christian. It is anti-Christian insofar as the overfixation on violence against Jesus provides a dramatic and persuasive escape hatch from the more complicated and demanding witness of the Gospels: that a man whose intimacy with God reverberated through changed relationships that threatened the religious and political powers of his day, and that our own intimacy with God may demand no less. Tom Beaudoin, assistant professor of theology at Boston College, writer for the National Catholic Reporter