I have the feeling that no one actually reads those sensationalist, lightning bolt-defying "Vah! Vah! What Shall We Do to Him Called Christ?" cover stories which TIME and NEWSWEEK do every Easter and Christmas.
I myself read not only them but many of the Startling and Controversial New Books on Jesus which they refer to. Just for the record, the academic consensus in the 21st century is getting to be that anyone who believes that Jesus was BURIED (yes, you read right, BURIED) is some kind of a fundamentalist wacko.
I liked THE BODY very much. Despite its first-glance silliness I found it deeply moving and utterly captivating in many ways for many reasons. (Okay, above all, I'm always a sucker for solemnly wistful musical scores which are heavy on the strings but generous with the ancient flutes too.) Perhaps what I found most touching was the sophomoric naivete of its Franklin stove-era understanding of what modern assaults on Gospel Truth as traditionally understood by the Popes of Rome and the parsons of Texarkana are all about.
We should be so lucky to have proof that the Gospels are right at least about the Burial pericope! And that evidence of the Skeleton's side having been pierced with a Roman lance? Disturbing, of course, from the Bodily Resurrection angle, but most, most reassuring from the Historicity of John angle. "If the body of Jesus were found" under the circumstances delineated in THE BODY the very Devil of Modernism would be losing a lot in the bargain too!
One last bit of Mr. Smarty Pants pooh-poohing. Any reader of ancient history knows that it was NOT only the poor and the slaves who were crucified by the Romans, and that thousands upon thousands of Jerusalem Jews of all classes were crucified by the Romans in the days before the Holy City's fall in AD 70. Neither the French Dominican nor the American Jesuit knew any of this? They didn't at least take the trouble to bone up, so to speak, on their 1st century Holy Land history once the archaeological find came to their attention as a possible worldwide threat to faith in Christ? In the late 1960s the skeleton (we'll give the novelist a pass for using the inaccurate but more allusive word "body" in his title) of a crucified Jew in an ELEGANT (rich man's?) ossuary marked "Johanan" was found near Jerusalem. Details of the find in THE BODY clearly allude to that unfortunate fellow. It goes beyond literary license into something darkly tendentious to evoke the reality of poor Johanan only to twist it perversely into a 110 minute long crown of thorns for believing but not too scholarly heads... I wouldn't be the first one to point out that, his delusionally self-flattering claims to the contrary, it's actually the UNbeliever who never allows facts to interfere with his skepticism...
What makes THE BODY an important movie milestone for me is its all but unique effort to achieve some sort of contact with post-1960s Roman Catholic reality. Talk about touching. The last time this happened on screen was in 1968, and Rosalind Russell as the Mother Superior was chiding Stella Stevens as a defiantly hip and happenin' young nun in the midst of all the wacky schoolgirl adventures in WHERE ANGELS GO TROUBLE FOLLOWS. "Sister, a new wind may be blowing in the Church, but it need not be a hurricane!" A little lame, no?
In THE BODY, the Vatican II subtext is more serious stuff. It's like Helen Keller's Wah Wah scene in THE MIRACLE WORKER. Still gibberish, but you know just what she's trying to say, and it's electrifying. At one point the good Jesuit (as played by Antonio Banderas one of the most appealing and believable movie priests I've ever seen), quite believably for a NEW Pentecostalist-type of alter Christus, uses the word "bulls**t" to the lady archaeologist "who started all the trouble." Despite the fact that she had spat out something far worse minutes before, she takes exception. "Is that the language of the new ecumenical Church?" In the book it's probably sarcastic tit-for-tat. In the movie the actress plays it like Ingrid Bergman hearing Bing Crosby say "bulls**t" to Barry Sullivan in THE BELLS OF ST MARY'S.
The real taboo which is broached in THE BODY (POSSIBLE SPOILER: I saw the reassuring "David" version)has to do not with the possibilty that the bones of the supposedly Risen Jesus might one day be found, and that the first thing a devout celibate man of God is going to do when that happens is to start caring more about the state of affairs of HIS flesh, but rather with the possibility that one day a Catholic believer might suddenly see the dry bones of the MYSTICAL Body of Christ -the Church, as represented by the dome of St Peter's- lying about a hopelessly wicked world in one great horrific heap. Believing on the basis of historical evidence that of all the children of Eve Rabbi Yeshua be Yosef alone left neither bones nor dust nor ashes behind in this vale of tears is merely the skeleton, necessary but in itself dead, of what traditional Christianity means by faith in the Risen Christ, "our hope of glory." An orthodox Jesuit (all the Jesuits I know put fixation on the prospect of spooky doings involving corpses in Judean sepulchres 2000 years ago on the level of snake handling- must have been some quirky Opus Dei input with the would-be orthodox stalwart played by Antonio) would know that cut off from the Life of Christ in His Mystical Body, the fact of the continued bodily life of Galilee's proud if problematic answer to Judea's Hillel is of no more value to the orphaned soul than the fact of the furthest star one can see in the night sky an hour before dawn...
What THE BODY gets right so surprisingly is the diffidence with which the Physical Resurrection doctrine is treated by ALL the Churchmen involved. People have been attacking the Catholic Church as coercively authoritarian and Machiavellian and cynically controlling for centuries. It's a new one to present Catholic Churchmen as not even BELIEVING (not too strongly anyway) in the tenets and dogmas they lie and cheat and kill to uphold and protect. But The Primate Cardinal of England, the late Basil Hume, was once asked if Christianity could survive the discovery of... Jesus' bones. (Really now though, you could never be SURE, just as, on the other hand, you can't be SURE about the Shroud of Turin.)He said yes. "But it would take me a long time to explain why..." The late Father Raymond Brown, a Catholic Biblical scholar whose word is Gospel in the American church, who was honored and praised by the Pope himself, wonders aloud in one of his books if modern Christians should feel obligated to maintain the ancient outlook on the Resurrection of Jesus... Not exactly "Jesus rots!" (or rather, rotted), but enough to frighten the horses of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse...
THE BODY revolves around current Catholicism. Baptists and Jews, pagans more or less Godly and Vatican II-unconscious Catholics need not apply. If you're an orthodox Catholic pure and simple your reaction to THE BODY will be along the lines of "He who is not with Me is against Me." If you're an orthodox Catholic impure and complicated your reaction might be along the lines of "He who is not against me is with Me."
First and last, the priest character here speaks of Jesus as his Friend with unashamedly childlike devotion and seeks to continue that friendship though the heavens fall and the bones of God Himself rattle... The way he keeps saying, "God has no place in politics" makes sense only if this extends not only to the Vatican and the Israelis and the Palestinians but also to the LEFTIST agenda of the revered and beloved Liberation Theology priest who clearly exploited a boy's confusion as to what being "a soldier of Christ" means. This and more combined make him a complex and extremely sympathetic hero. (I doubt if any American actor could have attained Banderas' winning combination of passionate boldness and courtly humility, overwhelming spiritual distress and natural self-control and balance...)
So, all in all, Idiot Plot, stupid dialogue ("Now I get those Jews For Jesus!" gushes the archeaologist's yenta of a babysitter upon learning that the hunky Banderas is a priest), "meet cute" cliche, and dumb shoot-'em-up action aside, THE BODY is, or rather, can be, fascinating (though painfully so) on an intellectual level and profoundly moving on a religious and just plain human level. But even that will be, for people with certain mindsets and experiences as religious believers, secondary to the rare delight of utterly unexpected congenial discovery. It's embarrassing to feel this strongly about a movie which in some ways is so poor, but there it is... Banderas is great,the supporting players are better than you'd expect, (only the creepy blue-eyed ringleader of the Arab terrorists seems to know he's in a cheesy B picture) the tour of Jerusalem is as elegantly evocative as anything ever in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC,a certain potentially offensive scene is delicately ambiguous, and the music is both haunting and inspiring.
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