More material has been added to the BBC's The Passion website. New today is an article on the crucifixion, discussing the topic by using the Telegraph and Daily Mail articles as a springboard:
BBC Portrayal of the Crucifixion
The piece is pretty well done, I think. Also new on the articles page is a section in which Nigel Stafford-Clark (producer) and Frank Deasy (writer) answer viewers' questions. There are lots of interesting comments here, and I strongly recommend it:
Your questions answered
The questions answered include one about the lack of miracles in the story, one about the use of regional accents, one about the use of animals, one about the casting of Jesus, one about the shooting of the drama, one about the research for the drama, and lots more.
The new content seems to have knocked off my article, The Passion and Its Historical Context, I hope by accident!
3 comments:
I didn't realize it was filmed in Ouarzazate. I was there in, oh, 1988 I think. Took a taxi across the mountains to Agdz.
Quite the experience.
There are doubts about the length of Pilate's term of office - a nice round figure of 10 years apparently. Almost everything in the writings attributed to Josephus about Pilate doesn't make sense, but would be more appropriate for the king Agrippa I. I therefore suspect that it was Agrippa I who was persecuting the prophets and was ultimately responsible for the death of The Prophet. With a king in place, the sentence and execution of the prophet would have been under Jewish law. The prophet was accused of being a false prophet and he would have undergone a traditional stoning procedure which meant being pushed from a high place before the first stone was dropped on the fallen victim to stop the heart.
That a popular prophet was crucified in full view of crowds, with death after a prolonged period of suffering, before Passover seems most unlikely. If the authorities did this to avoid trouble they went about it exactly the wrong way. A more feasible discrete procedure would have been to execute the prophet after The Feast (I have suggested after the last great day of the Feast of Tabernacles) by a swift traditional stoning. I don't believe Pilate was involved at all. Romans would hardly have been so crass as to risk any unrest.
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