Easter
The BBC has a mini-series about Jesus’ last days it’s airing called “The Passion” (the same as Gibson’s original title for his film, The Passion of the Christ). I watched quite a bit of it, and I actually quite liked what I saw. They did quite a good job of showing the kind of conflict and strife Jesus and the people around him would have gone through, and explored the characters much more than you might see in a more pious film. It also skims over vital points of the plot - things like miracles - and I haven’t seen the last portion, so I don’t know how they treated the resurrection.
It could be that it treats it as the many Jesus documentaries airing right now treat the Jesus story - as pious rubbish. There’s been a barrage of documentaries about Jesus and the Bible, and most of them are focused on debunking every aspect of the traditional story they can manage. Tradition says Jesus was a carpenter, but we’ve found a stone mine near Bethlehem, so there were probably lots of stone masons, so we think Jesus was a stone mason. Tradition says Herod had the male children of Bethlehem killed, but he couldn’t possibly of been as cruel as that! (no mention of the fact that we know that he had his own wife, children and the rest of his own immediate family slaughtered in an obsessive attempt to keep power for himself). These are real examples of the kind of knit picking they do. If it’s in the Bible it’s probably not true, by virtue of its being in the Bible. We don’t trust any other ancient document this way - if we did we’d believe the opposite of everything we know about history. Annoys me.
