Remember that other controversial film about Jesus, the Last Temptation of Christ? Well, the screenwriter of that one, Paul Schrader, has some very interesting comments about The Passion. For example:

My guess is that Mel has a problem with the Enlightenment because his film really does go back to the visceral blood cult origins of Christianity, and the fervour it’s created is more akin to a Gospel tent meeting than it is to a motion picture.

Well, Schrader, not surprisingly, is very modernist. Notice the notion that his version of Christianity is better than even the original. But wait, there’s more!

The Gospels were rigged for political reasons from the get-go. They were written 30-40 years after the fact to curry favour with the Romans and separate the Christians from the Jews. So the Pharisees were made to seem much worse than they were and Pilate was shown to be more agonised.

So where, one wonders, does Schrader get any reliable information about the origins of Christianity? How can he determine that anything anyone says about it is true? To the point, how can he be sure that his view is the correct one? A good thing that he says is that the gospels were written 30-40 years after the fact. There are critics who claim they were written 100 year later, especially the Gospel of John which is sometimes pushed to 250 AD or so. At least liberal theology has allowed the Gospels to move back a bit. What is really curious is that the Gospels were slanted for political favor and yet that move utterly failed. The Christians faced persecution first in Jerusalem but later from local governors and later by Roman Emperors. Furthermore, if the Gospels were “rigged for political reasons from the get-go” why not rig them even better? Why not make Jesus into a Roman apologist and have him persecuted and killed by the Jews for being too Roman? That would have really scored points with Rome especially after the destruction of Jerusalem in 72 AD (when Schrader claims they were written.)

Modernism isn’t an answer to this. It proceeds based on disbelief in the trustworthyness of the Bible and then try to prove their case. If you look at modernism since the 1870s it has repeatedly gotten black eye after black eye. It is amazing that it survives to this day.