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Ha. Today's Passion Post is Completely Improbable.
You know the type. They will just not let you enjoy a show. They are the ones that will tell you, while you're trying to watch Captain Kirk figure his way out of another predicament, "Ha. Absurd. If Tribbles really reproduced at that rate, they would have to consume the equivalent of five times their own body weight in food every day. The Enterprise would run through it's entire food supply in less than a week." They'll tell you "Ha. That's preposterous. If Freddy Krueger's arms were to extend to that length, the blood flow would be so restricted that he would pass out within just a few seconds."
Yeah, those people. Classic nerds. There's just no way to please them. And in the spirit of these folks, we go now to the Israel Insider for this very nerdy piece by Emanuel A Winston entitled 'Mel Gibson's fake "Passionate" effects'.
Let us deal with a few small things first. Take a look at the lumber being carried by the Jesus actor. Any carpenter - or even lay handyman - will tell you that the Jesus player is carrying a saw-mill produced 6-inch x 6-inch x 10-foot timber. In the news clips on Fox News you can see that it is neatly trimmed and squared timber which is usually displayed in churches and medallions of the cross.
The Jesus actor. I just love that. Emanuel, I'm sure, would make reference to 'the Superman actor', just to let you know that he wasn't fooled for a minute. See, he knows that the real Jesus would never work with Mel Gibson.
The problem is that the Romans had been crucifying rebellious Jews for many years and didn't commit the man-hours needed to take a tree trunk and hand craft it to a neatly squared and smooth timber, merely to crucify another Jew. The best they could do would be the familiar technique of building a log cabin where two sides of a tree trunk were laboriously chipped with a mattock on two sides so they could be stacked somewhat flat on top of each other. The Romans would not have bothered to square timber and besides, having already crucified thousands of rebellious Jews over 30 years, they had plenty of posts standing and empty, the bodies having rotted away.
As experienced crucifiers of rebellious Jews, the Romans would never commit that many man-hours to making crosses. Who knows? Maybe it was part of a jobs program.
Long before Jesus was added to the hundreds of thousands (some 220,000 of crucified Jews), the surrounding forests were chopped down for their Roman torture instruments which the Christians subsequently adopted as their symbol, the cross. The posts would have been raw trees with bark - no fancy mill work.
I have no idea where that figure came from, but you can almost hear Emanuel say "Ha. That's ridiculous. In order to crucify 220,000 Jews, the Romans would have denuded all of the forest land in their empire by the year 22AD.
Next: Notice the cross lintel so carefully mortised into the main timber. One would need an excellent saw device to make the cut and fit the cross member. Did Gibson forget that the cross member was usually merely lashed with rough hemp rope, just in order to stay in place?
Then: Take a look at the length of the cross that Jesus was supposed to have dragged down the 'Via Dolorosa.' Any farmer could have told you that, even to keep an eight-foot fence post upright, you would need to dig down at least three feet. Since there were no post hole diggers at that time, each hole would have to be hand dug - which would mean that a hole had to be at least four-feet wide at the top to go down four feet at the bottom in order to keep the loose soil and rock from sliding into the hole as it was being dug.
This goes on and on like a Monty Python routine, and is well worth reading. All good things must come to an end, however, and Winston makes a hard right into the second section of his article entitled (I kid you not) "Gibson makes the Jews look bad"
Honestly, I do empathize with the fact that many people (not just Jews) are very concerned about the anti-Semitic potential of this film, and rightly so. By and large, people are not all that bright, and I think it's not unrealistic to expect that at least some of them will act very badly as a result of seeing this movie. Let's hope not, but let's not be surprised, either. But the fact is, Winston hasn't even seen the movie, and is basing everything he writes on hearsay and movie stills. Some of what he writes next is authentic paranoia, such as this section.
The Jews in Gibson's film were made to look grim and threatening, all in accordance with Christian literature of what they call "the perfidious Jew." Gibson was very careful to follow early Church doctrine in demonizing the Jews which recommended murder as a solution to their "Jewish Problem."
Now that, for my money, is quite a leap, as is his final denouement.
I keep getting the feeling that Gibson, in his real life role as an early Christian, wants to be whipped and hung on a cross so he, too, can be a martyr like Jesus. Well Mel, first you would have to study the laws of Torah and become wholly Jewish like Jesus. Then you have to adopt the role of a charismatic Jew, preaching to his people to follow the laws of Torah as given to the Jewish people by G-d through Moses. Only then could you volunteer to be one of the Jewish crucifixion victims.
Mel, I am sure that once you became an authentic Jew, the Church of Rome would be glad to hang you on a tree trunk or - at least - go to Home Depot for a neatly trimmed Post and Post Hole Digger.
Ha. That's totally ludicrous. Mel's agent would never allow him to play a part like that. |
