Again, it’s stupid to be talking about this so much until I see it. But regarding the depiction of Caiaphas et al, who probably weren’t swell people in real life any more than religious authorities with temporal power tend to be swell people in this day and age: I’m so used to viewing people’s actions as just that–those people’s actions, not the actions of the collective group to which they belong–that maybe I’m glossing over the potentially anti-Semitic resonance that making these guys into ugly villains might have. I’m so convinced of the stupidity of deriving anti-Semitism from the story of Jesus (if he’d been born in Norway, the Vikings would have killed him; if he’d been born in China, the Chinese would have killed him, etc.) that it’s tough for me to see that other people would draw a different conclusion from these images.
It’s like the “controversy” about the dark-skinned orcs in The Lord of the Rings. To me, it’s idiotic–they’re ORCS, people. They’re not real. They represent only themselves. That’s how I interpret the Gospels, in a sense–they’re AUTHORITY FIGURES, people. Their Judaism (which is shared by Jesus and his mother and father and his disciples and everyone who protests his crucifixion) is irrelevant. They represent only themselves. But the difference between the two cases is that for thousands of years, Christian authority figures have based all sorts of horrifying pogroms and inquisitions and holocausts on that particular misinterpretation. If people were going around harrassing and killing dark-skinned people because that’s how they interpreted LotR, I’d be a lot more wary of that book/those movies than I’d otherwise be. I think that’s why people are so wary of this film/this religion. (The fact that Mel Gibson hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to be pro-Semitic doesn’t help either.)
Okay, I’m done for now.