BEFORE: James Faulkner carries over from "Final Portrait", and it's Easter Sunday, which means I have to issue my occasional and/or bi-annual manifesto on religion. I was raised Catholic, which means that the stories of Jesus and the apostles (and to a lesser degree, all those damn saints) were very real to me for the first 17 years of my life. Every Sunday and also one night during the week, this was my reality, all the stuff in the Bible really happened, Jesus performed miracles and died for our sins and then he rose from the dead, which somehow didn't negate the whole "died for our sins" thing. I went to college and immediately stopped going to church, because I'd been a practicing Catholic for so long I figured I'd practiced enough, and I was eager to see what my life would be like if I could sleep in on the weekends, maybe I'd be more productive. Anyway film became my religion over time, instead of the Catholic thing.
Since then I've identified as agnostic, more or less, I think that probably something went down in 33 A.D., but perhaps based on my experiences with film, I don't think that any story that's been told and re-told by so many different parties over two thousand years could possibly be reliable, they can't even keep Batman's story consistent for more than two movies, how could Jesus' story possibly be believed after it's passed through so many different hands? It's the Greatest Story Ever Retold, and Retold and Retold, and it's like the kids' game of Telephone, every time you relay a message you change it a little bit or put your own spin on it. I've spent decades thinking about what really happened (or didn't happen) in the Biblical times, and how stories change over time, and I've determined that we're just never really going to know - and that anybody who claims that they DO know has an agenda, usually they want you to donate money, so how can I take that seriously? I'm not even going to get into all the other problems with organized religion, especially the Catholic one, but let's just say I don't put my trust in them or their version of historical events.
Anyway, there are some good stories in the Bible, with important morals and life lessons, but that's all they are to me, stories. And "True stories" is something of an oxymoron usually - if it's true, then it's not a story and vice versa. The simplest explanation to me is that the miracle parts of the story developed over time, and there's probably a germ of truth somewhere in them, but we can never be sure, but people are going to believe what they want to believe, and those people aren't interested in my take on history. I'll still watch the stories, but as a skeptic - and it took me TWO years to link to this film for Easter, I put it on a DVD with "Mary Magdalene" maybe three years ago, and man, it was tough to get back here. The actors in this film just don't make a lot of movies, I guess, or at least not ones that I've put on my watchlist, so that explains why I have to take a thematic wide left turn tomorrow, to put me on the road to some Mother's Day-themed movies.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mary Magdalene" (Movie #3,798)
THE PLOT: Luke travels Roma looking for apostle Paul, turned in as Nero's prisoner, to tell his story before his execution.
AFTER: I like to think that I'm not very gullible, my B.S. meter is very sensitive and that I'm not inclined to fall for any scams - but that's due to experience. We gave a $500 deposit to a window company last year to get all the window hardware in our house fixed, you know, in case we ever wanted to open our windows when the weather is nice (and in NYC, you get about one week in the spring and another in the fall when it's neither too hot or too cold to do this) but after two months had gone by with no window repair taking place, we called the company only to hear that their voice-mail was full - of angry message from other people who'd given them money without any services provided. The company vanished or shut down, and somebody took off with all the cash. We complained to the Better Business Bureau, but they insisted on getting in touch with the company to hear their side of the story, and they were unable to do that, so the case was marked as unresolved.
Since then, I've been on high alert, which is not a bad thing, because it means that, ideally, I'll never make that mistake again, or be susceptible to any false claims of making my life better for a small fee. My wife and I got roped into a time-share sales pitch one time in Atlantic City, we had no intention of buying, but we were offered a free gift for an hour of our time, but in the end we barely escaped with our lives due to their high-pressure sales tactics. (She had seen "Glengarry Glen Ross" so she spotted the scammy practice of having a phony couple signing a fake contract right in our line of sight...) But organized religion is the ultimate scam, you give them a few dollars a week in the collection plate, and what do you get in return for this? A piece of stale bread and a sip of cheap wine and the assurance that those items are going to turn into Jesus's actual body and blood inside your body. Umm, yeah, sure. Also there's a promise of eternal salvation down the road, but, well, let's just say that by the time you determine if that shit is real or not, you won't be in a position to do much about it.
I love the story about Emperor Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. His mother, Flavia Julia Helena Augusta, aka Saint Helena, had access to the Imperial Treasury and made frequent trips to the Holy Land to search for ancient relics. She funded the construction of churches in Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives, the sites of Jesus' birth and ascension, allegedly. Then she set her sights on finding the temple that was built over the supposed site of Jesus' tomb, and also finding the "true cross". Bear in mind this was all taking place around the years 325-327, and please, show me the piece of wood that would still be standing, outdoors, in all kinds of weather, for three hundred years straight. Still, she found three crosses, and to "prove" which one Jesus had been crucified on, the locals brought out a woman from the city who was near death, and after touching the third cross, she suddenly recovered. Helena declared this the "True Cross", and naturally took big chunks of that back with her to Rome, because that's what Romans did.
Are you freaking kidding me? She fell for the old "True Cross" scam, the locals got a big payday and a HUGE laugh out of this, and they got some pretty nice churches built with Roman money to boot. How do we know the woman was really sick? How do we know the locals just didn't nail up a couple crosses and set St. Helena up from the get-go? And then all of the saintly relics from St. Stephen's toe to St. Patrick's eyeball, it's all a bunch of hooey and scams within scams. St. Helena also brought back alleged pieces of Jesus' tunic and pieces of the rope that tied him to the Cross. Again, it was THREE HUNDRED years after the fact that they "found" all of these things. There was no chain of provenance for any of these materials, and zero accounts that the apostles or early Christians thought to preserve Jesus' cross in any way, so I call bullshit. But by all means, if somebody needs to see a piece of wood to believe the story is true, I see the value - however if you put all the pieces of the "True Cross" out there together, I bet you could build at least 17 crosses from them. For more storytelling fun, look up "The Golden Legend" which traces the wood for the cross from the Tree of Knowledge in the garden of Eden through Moses' rod and a bridge that the Queen of Sheba walked over. Again, it's a story that is on some level not believable in any way.
And this is what the Christian religion is based on, in the end, a bunch of stories that got corrupted over the years by people who were all looking to make a buck. When you start to pick the stories apart you may come to realize, as I have, that it's all a bunch of smoke and mirrors that's based on constantly shifting sands. No logic or facts are actually involved, just people at different times in history who all thought they could enhance the stories by putting their spins on them - so Jesus Christ is no different from Batman or Spider-Man, a whole host of storytellers has been working over the years to shape the character's story for the best possible reception among the current populace. OK, end of Easter rant.
We do believe that Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, was a real person, who lived in the first century, originally as a Pharisee who participated in the persecution of early Christians, in the area around Jerusalem. And we're told he had some kind of revelatory experience while traveling on the road to Damascus, during which he saw a very bright, blinding light and heard the voice of the risen Jesus. We can never really know what he saw or heard, again it's one of those situations where proof would deny faith, so it's up to you whether you want to take Saul/Paul at his word. But he was blinded by the light and had his sight restored three days later by Ananias of Damascus (or, you could posit that he accidentally stared into the sun, the loss of sight was temporary, and his eyes just got better...) but this led to him being baptized, proclaiming that Jesus was the Son of God, and then making countless journeys to spread the Good News to communities in Asia Minor, Greece, Syria, Macedonia, etc.
Don't forget, he also wrote "letters" to the Corinthians, though history is unclear on whether they ever wrote back. (Eddie Izzard did a very great comedy routine on this back in the day...). Look, I"m not saying he didn't do good or important work, clearly he did, like bringing financial support from Antioch to Judea during a famine in 45 AD. And he preached the Gospel, which does have some positive messages, to communities all around the Mediterranean - the guy got around and had an impact on the world, and I'll wager we've got more proof of his good work than we do for Jesus' miracles. (That loaves & fishes thing, it turns out a lot of people in the crowd brought their own lunch...). But I'm also skeptical of any missionary work, because like everything else, charity comes at a price. Missionaries go from HERE to THERE to not just bring financial support, but also to convert more people to THEIR religion - so there's an agenda there as well, and more converts means more money, nobody does anything for free, after all. So even with good intent, missionary work is also part of the bigger pyramid scheme. (What would be funny to me would be learning how the investment scheme worked that funded the ACTUAL pyramids. I bet that was a scam, too.)
Oh, right, the movie - Luke, before he was Saint Luke, was a physician from Antioch and an apostle of Jesus. He wrote like 1/4 of the New Testament, including the Acts of the Apostles, which is how we know so much about Saul/Paul. Here he travels to Rome to visit Paul in prison and get his story down in case anybody should want to write a best-selling book someday. But when the prefect of the prision, Mauritius, discovers Luke he has him imprisoned, too, because he believes they're plotting an uprising to free Paul from prison.
But the prefect also has a dying daughter, and none of the usual sacrifices to the Roman gods seem to be helping her. His wife suggests asking Paul for help, and Paul recommends Luke, the DOCTOR. To get the medical supplies that Luke needs to help the prefect's daughter, the prefect needs to know where the underground Christian community is hiding in Rome. Luke, as a DOCTOR, saves the life of the prefect's daughter (see, it's technically not a miracle, as magic is just science that we don't understand yet...) and Luke is released but Paul is executed anyway, because Nero demands it. Also a bunch of Christians are brought to the "circus" and fed to the lions, so yeah, this doesn't really feel like a win here, but hey, that's Rome for you. They'll chop your friend's head off and make you say "Thanks" for the effort.
This is, however, a solid reminder that Christianity was once the LESSER of the religions, for many years it took a back seat while the Roman Empire officially still had their "pagan" pantheon to believe in. But through missionary work, all that letter-writing and the constant telling and re-telling (and enhancing) of the Bible stories, it took hold and in the last two thousand years a lot of people have spread the Good News and lined their pockets at the same time. About one-third of the global population identifies as Christian and it's the majority religion in over 150 countries. How does it stay on top? Simply by claiming, as all religions do, that it's the "one true religion" - which is a bit funny, because they can't all be that, right? And then it's really funny/not-funny to me when the evangelical Christians decry that all the Buddhists and Muslims are pagan and wrong and evil, because they've clearly forgotten that there was a time when their religion was the upstart and the underdog, also that nothing lasts forever, not even this, so it's at best short-sighted to think that this was always The Way and always will be The Way. Anyway, as I said before, nobody listens to me and by the time everyone figures out the truth, it's going to be too late. So Happy Easter, I guess.
Also starring Jim Caviezel (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Olivier Martinez (last seen in "Taking Lives"), Joanne Whalley, John Lynch (last seen in "In the Name of the Father"), Yorgos Karamihos (last seen in "Ben-Hur" (2016)), Antonia Campbell-Hughes (last seen in "Under the Skin"), Alessandro Sperduti, Alexandra Vino (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Manuel Cauchi (last seen in "13 Hours"), Husam Chadat (ditto), Noah Huntley (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Kenneth Spiteri (last seen in "Risen"), Anthony Edridge, André Agius, Henry Holland, Daryl Luke Vassallo, Vladislav Ilich, Mario Opinato (last seen in "The Promise"), Nora Jolie Eckermann.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Roman candles (umm, it's not what you think)
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