I have just returned from seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. As I expected, it was an extremely moving film that deserves the support of the Christian community. I did not expect the fact that it would be the best film about Jesus ever made, but that is what it is. By focusing on the final few hours of his life instead of trying to tell the story of his whole ministry and by having an unparalleled commitment to realism, the movie achieves a level of effectiveness and genuine affect that is not found in any other film about Christ.
There are things in the film that one can quibble with. I wouldn’t have made all the dramatic choices that Gibson did, but the ones he made were in the main creative, interesting, and illuminative of the gospel story. The realism of the film also is greater than in any prior film about Jesus. True, the city in the background during the Crucifixion doesn’t look quite like first century Jerusalem, but it’s a good facsimile, and this film more than any other gives you a sense of what it would have been like to actually witness the Passion firsthand.
See it.
I personally can’t wait to get a copy on DVD. I just hope that the DVD has a feature that will let me turn off the subtitles so that I can focus on the languages the film uses (Latin and Aramaic) without the distraction (and help) of subtitles. People may know that I am a student of these two languages, and soon after the film was announced I started getting questions about what it would be like for me to watch the film and understand what was being said. I always told people that I doubted I could follow along in these languages at conversational speed (especially the speed of anxious, fearful people watching the last hours of their Savior’s life).
When I finally saw the film, I found that I could follow more than I expected. Aramaic is the dominant language in the film, but it is a different dialect than I’m used to. That wasn’t too much of a problem, though, as the differences often had to do with pronunciation (in other words, the actors are portraying a different Aramaic accent than I’m used to), but the grammar was what I expected, many words were familiar, and it often only took me a few extra moments to decode what had just been said. I was pleased with how much I could follow, but want the chance to go over the movie several times on DVD as a study aid.
I found the interplay between Latin and Aramaic interesting. You may not notice some of the subtleties that are involved unless you are familiar with one of the languages, but if you are then it becomes clear that real thought was put into which language should be used at any given moment. As you would expect, the Romans speak Latin among themselves but try to speak Aramaic when they are talking to their Jewish subjects. The Jewish leaders try to speak Latin when addressing Pontius Pilate but then quickly and understandably lapse back into Aramaic when they need to say something complicated. This sets us up for a scene in which Pilate begins to address Jesus in Aramaic and then Jesus replies in sustained Latin (at which point a surprised Pilate switches to fulltime Latin, too).
