LETTER EMAILED TO DERRY JOURNAL, Tuesday, 13th April, 2004

Dear Editor
 
I was alarmed at Patrick Clarke’s letter in Tuesday’s Derry Journal regarding The Passion of the Christ which defended the film for being anti-Semitic and said that we should have bad feelings towards Christ’s killers.
 
It is totally certain that it is most unjust to the Jews to have their ancestors accused of the crime of killing the Son of God even if the gospels do it. Accusations like that are very serious and we need proof before we can make them but we have none. Nobody can prove who wrote the gospels which are anonymous. And it is not fair to condemn the Jews without having their side of the story.
 
The Jews, according to the gospels, arrested Jesus secretly for they feared the people. Then why didn’t they dispose of him themselves? If they were so corrupt this should not have been a problem. The Romans alone were to blame. The gospels shifted the blame on to the Jews because they wanted to be attractive to Romans.
 
The film takes more from the stories of alleged visionaries than it does the gospels. The gospels say that Pilate had Jesus scourged in the hope that the Jews would see their former idol in a degraded state and relent. If so the scourging could not have been as extreme as depicted in the film. Would Pilate have a man scourged to within an inch of his life to save his life? Of course not.
 
Jesus himself plainly said that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath meaning that true Christianity does not advocate harming others in the name of faith. The gospels and the film are very offensive for implying that he consciously refused to avoid his own execution thereby putting faith before himself and his mother and friends.
 
The Jews are a decent minority in our society and society tends to despise them and anything that encourages that should be opposed.