Introductory comment by Ingrid Shafer: Before posting my reflections on the Web I sent a draft to Professor Leonard Swidler.  This is his response both to my reflections and the fiml itself.

I have seen only the trailers of the Gibson film, and from them and everything I have read about the film, I gather that it apparently focuses on the sadistic violence inflicted on the Jew Jesus during the last twelve hours of his life. This, I am convinced, is a seriously distorted profiling of what the Christian meaning of Jesus is all about. 

The four documents which are almost the only sources we have about Jesus are for good reason called by Christian tradition "Gospels," "GOOD News." All humans will experience death. Nothing new there. Even horrible deaths from torture are legion throughout the history of the world, so again, nothing NEW. 

The message of Jesus is not torture and death, but LIFE: "I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly," he is recorded to have said. For the first over one thousand years of Christian history  the Christian Cross was not depicted with a broken corpse on it. Rather, the Cross was simply plain, or bejewelled, or at times with a triumphant resurrected Christ figure on it. It was only in the high and late Middle Ages that the tortured corpus appeard on it -- this during the time of the Plague, Totentanz (Dance of Death), Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) -- when, as Thomas Hobbes later said of human existence, human life was "short, nasty, and brutish." 

Unfortunately, Gibson's film seems to pander to that human itch for the gruesome for its own sake - exactly the opposite of Jesus' teaching -- Life, not Death. Not only is this like the tail wagging the dog, it is very much like the smile of the Cheshire Cat, just existing in the air and related to nothing. Jesus's life, and the point of the Good News, are resurrection and life. His suffering and death are moments on the way to that end. If we knew nothing of Jesus' teaching of life, but had only a recounting of his last twelve hours (Gibson's film), we would have nothing, for the telling of that agonizingly extended moment would  not at all have been remembered by anyone beyond his mother and friends. It is only in the context of his teaching (love of neighbor, and thereby God) and his living his teaching that his tortuous death on the path to greater life has meaning.