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This morning and early afternoon I watched all four parts of The Passion, downloaded from BBC at Easter.
I thought the first episode was excellent - recounting the events of Jesus' last few days, and making a lot of the text very plausible - changing stilted 'holy' words into conversations, dialogues, believeable discussions. That was very effective. Great production values too.
It also fleshed out the political situation between the Jewish temple and the Romans very well - everyone has plausible motivations, and reasonable responses to their situation - doing what they feel is best, just with tragic results (vs. simply being evil).
It presented a 'social gospel' aspect to Jesus' ministry - he was feared/hated/suspected by Jewish priests because what he suggested was threatening to their role in society, and social standing (ie. why do we pay temple taxes? why is it keeping pure is more important than caring for the poor/sick? etc.).
This interpretation makes the most sense to me: we still find it hard to treat everyone equally - we still have a monarchy and class system, after all, no matter how watered-down its power. And those who suggest change to status quo are always threatening, and draw venom and criticism out of even mostly-reasonable people.
I also liked that Mary Magdelene was not a whore - she's simply shown as another follower, and generally as one of the gang, which is a nice touch. A different woman, who remains mostly nameless, is the whore who bathes his feet with oil.
I thought it broke down a bit, though, in part 2, where he explicitly states that he's God's only son.
While traditional, this ventures into statements in the bible that modern scholars find the shakiest, and least well attributed by the sources we know about.
Aside from a couple of those lines, though, the production continued very well. The death scene wasn't overdone, but was explicit enough, and the bickering and arguing between the followers was very believeable and sort of satisfying - not terribly saintly at this point!
I thought the choice of actor for Jesus was clever - he was not traditionally handsome, but fitted the beard-and-long-hair look - but he had beautiful almond shaped eyes, that suggested Byzantine icons to me. A nice touch.
I thought the first episode was excellent - recounting the events of Jesus' last few days, and making a lot of the text very plausible - changing stilted 'holy' words into conversations, dialogues, believeable discussions. That was very effective. Great production values too.
It also fleshed out the political situation between the Jewish temple and the Romans very well - everyone has plausible motivations, and reasonable responses to their situation - doing what they feel is best, just with tragic results (vs. simply being evil).
It presented a 'social gospel' aspect to Jesus' ministry - he was feared/hated/suspected by Jewish priests because what he suggested was threatening to their role in society, and social standing (ie. why do we pay temple taxes? why is it keeping pure is more important than caring for the poor/sick? etc.).
This interpretation makes the most sense to me: we still find it hard to treat everyone equally - we still have a monarchy and class system, after all, no matter how watered-down its power. And those who suggest change to status quo are always threatening, and draw venom and criticism out of even mostly-reasonable people.
I also liked that Mary Magdelene was not a whore - she's simply shown as another follower, and generally as one of the gang, which is a nice touch. A different woman, who remains mostly nameless, is the whore who bathes his feet with oil.
I thought it broke down a bit, though, in part 2, where he explicitly states that he's God's only son.
While traditional, this ventures into statements in the bible that modern scholars find the shakiest, and least well attributed by the sources we know about.
Aside from a couple of those lines, though, the production continued very well. The death scene wasn't overdone, but was explicit enough, and the bickering and arguing between the followers was very believeable and sort of satisfying - not terribly saintly at this point!
I thought the choice of actor for Jesus was clever - he was not traditionally handsome, but fitted the beard-and-long-hair look - but he had beautiful almond shaped eyes, that suggested Byzantine icons to me. A nice touch.
