Mel Gibson's Sequel



The original film was called "The Passion of the Christ" cost $30 million to produce and grossed $300 million at the box office. Gibson, whose estimated net worth is $425 million, is making a sequel which should be named "The Passion of Profit."

In the link, Gibson says dead people coming back to life is not all that unusual. He said 17 events of this have been "verified by historians." His task, he says, is making this one believable to skeptics. This will be all the more difficult if there are historians, like New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman who don't think the coming back to life story ever happened. 

Believeability would be higher if one person had seen Jesus come back to life and wrote the he or she had seen this happen. No one, even in the Bible, claimed to have seen Jesus come back to life. Many religions have stories of the hero dying and coming back to life.

Bill Moyers' several hours of interviews with the famous author Professor Joseph Campbell. The latter wrote a famous book called The Power of Myth. The hours were available on cassettes for years. I recall watching one segment in which Campbell talked about one of his many adventures listening to religious stories of indigenous people. He was sitting around a fire at night, he said, and asked one group who was to most important person in the world? The people began talking about that person. He was ridiculed and beaten. At one point he was killed. His enemies wanted to make sure he did not return so they tied his body to a water soaked pole and sent it down the river. "At this point in the story," Campbell said, "I leaned forward to hear what happened when he came back to life. I knew he would because I had heard variations of that story from many indigenous people."

The "Passion of the Christ" sequel would be at least a bit educational if there were a disclaimer on the screen before it starts that said, "This story is similar to myths shared by religions around the world."

Since Mel Gibson believes the story is history rather than myth this disclaimer will not be included.

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