Comparing Balzac And The Passion Of The Christ

In The Death of the Author Barthes opens up with the following quote from Balzac’s story, Surrasine: “It was Women with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling” (2). Barthes then poses the question of who is speaking the sentence (2). Many readers could easily eliminate Balzac as the voice of the sentence and seek out a deeper meaning to the text. Readers do this all the time. Hamlet is not just limited to the mind of Shakespeare. Readers take many different divergent paths of interpretation through yellow wood of poetry. However, if Balzac was a Muslim and the sentence about women evoked the Koran then some readers might have trouble separating …show more content…
In 2004 Gibson released The Passion of the Christ. The movie was Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. The movie utilizes all four canonical gospel accounts of the Passion story, but also includes many details that are not written in any of the four gospels. For example, Satan is shown in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to many who have seen the movie, Pilate, the Roman governor in charge of the that the story is situated in, is portrayed as having no other choose then to do as the Jews is wanting him to do, and kill Jesus. Pilate is even told by his wife that he should not kill Jesus. He is shown to have sympathy towards Jesus, and only does what he has to do to prevent a rebellion against the Roman Empire. The same viewers would also see Gibson’ portrayal of Caiaphas and all the other Jews as anti-Semitic. They say Caiaphas and the rest of Jews that are the villains of the story have big noses and yellow teeth. Gibson also fought to keep a controversial sentence spoken by Caiaphas in the film. Caiaphas said “His blood is on us and on our children.” This sentence has been used as a historical justification for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites have interpreted the sentence to mean that all Jews should be punished for the deicide committed by Caiaphas and his followers. Gibson defended keeping the line in the movie, because he saw it as the truth and interpreted it to mean that the sentence applies to everyone not just Jews (Lawson). In his personal life, Mel Gibson identifies as a Roman Catholic, a religion that in the last 50 years has started to publicly denounce any anti-Semitic interpretation of the Passion story, and apart from The Passion of the Christ Gibson has not carried out any personal actions against