Originally Posted By starventure (16 MAR 2004 12:33am)
I thought it was powerful, but I wouldn't see it again. I heard somewhere that a teacher took her sixth grade class to see it without even telling the parents. Umm, can you say fired? or at least suspended. That is NOT a sixth grade movie. >

Apparently parents and boys are expected to attend the evening class.  The teachers then run through EVERYTHING, even personal hygiene for girls

I heard somewhere that a teacher took her sixth grade class to see it without even telling the parents. Umm, ..............

VIOLENCE/GORE 10 - Jesus of Nazareth is chained to a tree stump and two guards begin to flog him with canes for an extended period of time (we see red slashes and welts appear on his skin). Then the guards use straps with hooks (cat-o-nine tails) on the ends and we see the man's skin tearing open: at one point the hooks are stuck in the man's side, the guard yanks and tears his skin away, blood splatters on the feet and faces of the guards, and the man is covered with blood. Also, his skin is open and bleeding everywhere, his face is slashed, and the guards roll him over and begin on his chest and stomach, the ground around him becomes puddles of blood, and the man trembles and moans with every strike. Jesus, trembling, bruised and very bloody, crawls onto a cross, his hand is lashed to one side, a spike is placed in his palm and it is nailed through his flesh: blood sprays, we hear crunching and see his fingers flopping with each blow of the mallet, and the other hand is lashed and stretched to the point of dislocating his shoulder (we hear a loud crunch and pop and he screams). Then the other hand is nailed into the wood in the same manner (we see blood dripping from the back of the cross when the stake is driven through). The man's feet are nailed onto a block of wood, the cross is turned over, the end of the stakes are pounded flat, the cross is turned back over (the man moans in agony with each move), the cross is lifted upright and it slides into a hole in the ground with a loud thud and jolt, blood pours from the man and he moans, and blood runs down the cross to the ground. Guards place a crown of thorns on Jesus' head, press it into his flesh (blood streams down his forehead), then punch him several times and hit him in the head. A guard stabs Jesus in the side to see if he is dead and water sprays from the wound. A man on a cross is pecked at by a crow, it hits near his eye, on his forehead and head (we see bloody holes and he screams). Guards break the legs of two men hanging on crosses, we hear crunching with the blows of the mallets, hear the men scream, see their bloody legs and see the men die.
Jesus is shown dead, and he is lowered from a cross (he is covered with blood and gaping wounds) and we see blood covered stakes and a crown of thorns. Guards surround Jesus in dark woods, they grab him, other men with him shove the guards, punches are exchanged, one man grabs a sword, slashes at guards, and slices the ear off one; we see blood dripping from the wound, blood covered flesh, and the ear is pressed back in place. The man with the sword is held against a tree by two guards, Jesus is tied with ropes and chains and led away. A man is punched repeatedly and whipped while being forced to walk in chains, he is knocked over a stone wall and is caught by the chains (he moans and suffers and we see his very bruised and bloody face) and pulled back up. Two men are lashed to crosses and are forced to carry them as they walk some distance, Jesus has a cross placed on his shoulder and he is whipped and shoved as he walks, and he stumbles and falls on several occasions; once the cross lands on top of him, he is whipped and kicked, people in crowds around him throw stones and jeer him, and blood drips from his hair. ………………………………………………. ..............AND  MORE …….........................……….

Originally Posted By Caroline (17 MAR 2004 12:54am)
This is gross.  I found it offensive just reading it.  Did Mel write the script or just direct it from his head?  yuk, yuk, yuk.

Besides.  I don't believe they did all that to him.   Where is it written, eh?  Mel, where is your proof buddy.?  I shalln' be watching this movie.  What the hell's the point?

C'mon ... they probably DID watch the film "in order".

I know, I was just kidding LenG.

Mel is a product of his time. He was probably beaten by Catholic nuns while his agnostic father rejected the whole concept.

Mel Gibson is a member of an extreme Catholic sect called "Holy Family" which has distanced itself from the main body of catholicism and is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese.

His father, Hutton Gibson, is a notorious Holocaust denier and anti-semite, who claims that the World Trade Center was destroyed by remote control and not by Al-Queda; that the Second Vatican Council was a Masonic plot backed by the Jews and that all popes going back to John XXIII have been illegitimate "anti-popes".

Hutton Gibson rejects the changes that Vatican II (1962-65) brought about, including a decree condemning the view that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ who ironically was a Jew himself.

Jesus "didn't suffer for as long as many other people who were crucified in those days

the bible doesn't go into all the violence

THE HISTORY OF CRUCIFIXION ........ by  Professor Michael Cook.       Crucifixion was widely practiced in the ancient Mediterranean and Babylonian worlds by most of these civilizations, except the Greeks and the Jews. The laws regulating crucifixion had been codified by the king and lawgiver, Hammurabi 1700 years before Jesus.  Men and women were crucified for a wide variety of misdemeanors, from adultery to insurrectionary activity. Since traditionally women have been punished preeminently over men for adultery, Babylonian women no doubt bore the brunt of this punishment for sexual misdemeanor.
        In the history of torture techniques, crucifixion remains among the cruelest because of the protracted and incremental agony of the victim. Death on the cross took three and a half days to complete.  The victim died of multiple causes: broken bones, lacerated limbs, asphyxiation when the weight of the hanging body crushed the lungs, strangulation and exposure. Often, while left hanging in this decaying state, the victim's organs were dragged from his body by roaming animals and eaten in front of him.  But the final cause of death
was dehydration, and after three days without water, the victim descended into madness.
        Jesus, who hung on the cross for six hours, was spared these agonies, and it was the thrust of a spear from a Roman soldier which killed him. Nor was the crucifixion of Jesus a focus of Christianity for its first three or four centuries, during which time the cross lingered as a symbol of Jewish death.  
       From the time crucifixion was introduced into Judea to the fall of the temple in 70 C.E. thousands of Jews were crucified, often as many as five hundred a day.  Some historians have claimed that the stony landscape around Jerusalem owes its appearance to the fact that it was denuded of trees to make crosses.  The sight of the crucified, the sounds of their dying, the smell of their decaying bodies pervaded the hills, and generations of Jewish children grew up beneath these shadows and smells.  So common was crucifixion, many legends grew up about it.
A coterie of behavior developed about the crucified.  Under such circumstances as the dying on the cross experienced, there could be no "moment" of death. Mostly, it was a sliding towards death for three and half days, while the victim's family and friends gathered around the site, sometimes even pressed by the victim to make arrangements about his final effects, sometimes to bargain with or attempt to bribe the Roman soldiers about when they could claim the victim's body, hoping to spare him hours of pain. (Such bargaining is depicted in the Gospels.)

It's perfectly possible the whipping etc, were written in to add a bit of dramatic tension....   oops, there's my scepticism showing again..

So Jesus wasn't actually up there very long.  

Did the nuns explain that the shroud of Turin has been carbon dated to 1500?

Jesus, who hung on the cross for six hours, was spared these agonies, and it was the thrust of a spear from a Roman soldier which killed him.

Interesting stuff LenG.
      <<<< Quote:------ Jesus, who hung on the cross for six hours, was spared these agonies, and it was the thrust of a spear from a Roman soldier which killed him. >>>>
     First the author obviously doesn't believe scourging caused agony or he doesn't believe it ever happened.  Secondly he must have some interesting sources about the death of Jesus.
     "But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead  they did not break his legs but one soldier thrust his lance into his side" John
"and when he said this he breathed his last" Luke
"Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last" Mark
"but Jesus cried out again in a loud voice , and gave up his spirit" Matthew
Only John even mentions the spear thrust and that says he died before the soldier stabbed him.
Where did he get differing accounts of Jesus' death?
Maybe the gospels not in the bible? Has anyone here read them that could comment?

It is often the function of symbols to streamline historical content, but in becoming the symbol of the Roman's barbarous method of punishment, the figure of Jesus absorbed and erased the collective memory of the thousands of Jews, Druids and Pagan slaves, who died with greater  agony.  This is an instructive instance of the peculiar and not uncommon  tendency for the symbol of an historical era to redirect or even to reverse its  original meaning, which is what happened by the time the Church fathers put  together the New Testament.  Pontius Pilate, that most bloody of Roman procurators  

by Rome's standards) emerges as saintly from the New Testament, and the  Jews, themselves victims of crucifixion, emerge as the villains who committed  deicide.  The symbol of the cross, as it has come down to us, not only erased a part of early Jewish history, but became the instrument for further persecution of the Jews.

The Swastika did NOT originate as a Nazi symbol of hatred.
SWASTIKA is derived from the Sanskrit word:
SVASTIKAH, which means 'being fortunate'.