The power of 'The Passion'
Joseph Farah
Farah looks at the precedent for this film's impact in Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927):
Like "The Passion of the Christ," it faced enormous opposition when it was released, sparking fears of anti-Semitism that, fortunately, were never realized . . . .The article goes on to connect one H. E. Wallner, who committed his life to Christian ministry after seeing this film, with the conversion of a German officer who helped Jews to escape from a concentration camp:
. . . . "In spite of excellent reviews ... what was harder to comprehend and cope with was the organized opposition of certain Jewish groups to the filmed history of the greatest Jew who ever lived," wrote DeMille.
Wallner told DeMille in 1957: "If it had not been for 'The King of Kings,' I would not be a Lutheran pastor, and 350 Jewish children would have died in the ditches."
Some have ridiculed Gibson for suggesting the Holy Spirit guided him in the making of his film, but DeMille made a similar comment: "If I felt that this film was my work, it would be intolerably vain and presumptuous to quote such stories from the hundreds like them that I could quote," he wrote. "But all we did in 'The King of Kings,' all I have striven to do in any of my biblical pictures, was to translate into another medium, the medium of sight and sound, the words of the Bible."
No comments:
Post a Comment