Everybody's Talking Jesus
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley
Topic: Religion
This week's Newsweek asks, on the cover, Who Killed Jesus? I'm getting a little tired of that question, especially since people seem to want to treat it as some Raymond Chandler whodunnit. Like 2,000 years later we're gonna find the single culprit, smear his (or her) name, and put everything right with the world.

Please.

I can tell you who killed Jesus, and you can take it or leave it. There's the easy answer: The world killed Jesus. The whole shebang. The total shooting match. All of us from the beginning until whenever we end in some distant future. We all killed Jesus, just like we killed all the other prophets and holy men throughout history. The blood is on all our hands. Mea culpa.

The harder - and I think more honest - answer is that Jesus died a suicide. Think about it. Jesus was God, right? And God is immortal. So even in a human body, the only way Jesus could die was to agree to it. So Jesus was complicit in his own death. We call that suicide.

Interesting.

Anyway, it's interesting to watch a Hollywood movie made by a pre-Vatican II Catholic being heavily marketed to fundamentalist Christians. It'lll be even more interesting to see what happens when it actually starts to hit theaters.

In the meantime, there's some interesting reading about it. Here's one of the more interesting ones I've read.

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P.S. For lovers of the language, here's a terrific column from The Boston Globe.
At a Loss for Words