{"id":7819,"date":"2004-03-01T08:08:25","date_gmt":"2004-03-01T08:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/details_details.html"},"modified":"2004-03-01T08:08:25","modified_gmt":"2004-03-01T08:08:25","slug":"details_details","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/details_details.html","title":{"rendered":"Details, Details"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before you start reading my thoughts, you should probably go read what Charlotte Allen has to say in the LA Times<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\nMel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” may well be the best movie about Jesus Christ ever made. Yet, though he claimed to be striving for historical fidelity \u2014 to the point of re-creating ancient Jerusalem in the southern Italian town of Matera and insisting that all dialogue be in Aramaic or Latin \u2014 the film contains so many minor but distressing historical and linguistic inaccuracies that the overall effect is one of cognitive dissonance for anyone who has deeply studied the Roman and Near Eastern world of the 1st century. That includes me, although I am a medievalist by academic training.<\/p>\n

I loved “The Passion,” but I wanted to love it even more….<\/p>\n

These are all niggling mistakes, to be sure, but they come up constantly in “The Passion.” Furthermore, there are academics who combine sophisticated New Testament scholarship and genuine Christian faith and could have helped Gibson make a more persuasive film. To name a few: Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic; N.T. Wright, an Anglican; Ben Witherington, an evangelical Protestant. But their voices have been drowned out, leaving Gibson to follow his own misapprehensions about Jesus’ world, by the John Dominic Crossans who have managed to persuade us that faith and scholarship don’t go together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before you start reading my thoughts, you should probably go read what Charlotte Allen has to say in the LA Times. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” may well be the best movie about Jesus Christ ever made. Yet, though he claimed to be striving for historical fidelity \u2014 to the point of re-creating…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nDetails, Details - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/details_details.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Details, Details - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Before you start reading my thoughts, you should probably go read what Charlotte Allen has to say in the LA Times. 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Yet, though he claimed to be striving for historical fidelity \u2014 to the point of re-creating…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/details_details.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-03-01T08:08:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Details, Details - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/details_details.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Details, Details - Via Media","og_description":"Before you start reading my thoughts, you should probably go read what Charlotte Allen has to say in the LA Times. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7819\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}