When I saw The Passion, last December, I wrote here about the "who crucified Jesus?" question. I think that there are at least two big answers to this big question:
-- The historical answer, in a René Girard perspective: The Pharisees and their High Priest Caiphas blackmailing Pilato, and strangely adopting this one's roman-pagan (dyonisian) sacrificial point of view, instead of the traditional Jew-victims perspective (since then followed by Christians).
-- The real full answer for all seasons and all times to the question about who crucified Jesus is simply this one: "each one of us". There are no outsiders from the mankind redemption.
I do not want to damage the simplicity of this point saying more about that. In the meantime some friends and readers asked me for more on "The Passion" and the René Girard perspective. Unfortunately, being a reader of some of his books, I am not an expert on Girard, and I do not want to be pretentious in evauating his whole perspective. But fortunately, I found a (French) Two-part long critic on The Passion written by René Girard (& other). It will be helpful to know more about his wiew on the collective violence, the distance between the Old and New Testament and the Greek myths, and about the realism depicting violence:
-- Mel Gibson : une violence au service de la foi. - (I) Par René Girard, Jean-François Mongibeaux et Etienne de Montety - Le Figaro Magazine (Mercredi 31 mars 2004):
"Philosophe français enseignant aux Etats-Unis, René Girard a vu le film de Mel Gibson pour "Le Figaro Magazine". Il salue le travail du cinéaste pour inscrire "la Passion du Christ" dans une tradition esthétique et théologique."
-- Mel Gibson : une violence au service de la foi. - (II) Suite de l'article.
** If you have any problem downloading from Le Figaro Magazine site, you'll find here a .pdf version of the René Girard text.
On Saturday, April 17, 2004, I found an article on "The Passion and Rene Girard: the sacred violence of the crucifixion" (The Daily Star), by John Laughland. If you do not want to read the whole text, you will find interesting this brief quotation extract:
"(...) Girard's anthropological framework also helps to overcome the bogus division between Jews and Gentiles and, more specifically, between the old law and the new. (...) Christ's plea for forgiveness for his tormentors on the cross, and his injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to love one's enemies are, Girard says, nothing but the fulfilment of the meaning of this ancient Jewish law. If we read Girard, we see that reproaching the film for its bloodiness is as complete a misunderstanding of Christ's self-sacrifice as the accusation of anti-Semitism."
By the way, if you read Spanish and if you want to read a very clever "scapegoat" interpretation related to the Girard's themes on the cultural, social and political outputs of the execrable Madrid's terrorist horror, read here the post René Girard y Los "Cuatro días de ira" de Alejandro Llano.
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