(May 8, 2017 at 3:20 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Yeah but what is "Ben-Hur" about? It's about Ben who is angry at Romans for occuping them, but at the same time he loves his Roman friend. Then it switches and all his anger is centered toward Messala so that during the movie we see him on the journey getting Romanized (he even met the Emperor) so that he even becomes Roman himself and only Messala seems to be the problem. He kills Messala and then that holy rain falls so that his sister and mother get healed and then what? They live happily ever after?
That sounds more like the first one than the second one. The second film pretty much missed out the whole Romanization storyline; ie he didn't rescue the Roman guy off the galley or get adopted, or any of that side... he just bought his way into the games to race Messala. So that film was more centred on the struggle of Judea, and that's what prompted me to think of Jesus as this other type of freedom fighter
In other words I wasn't saying anything about the accuracy of the film... because the first film was very different... but just that the way it framed it gave me that idea whereas I had no such idea from the first film. Ie the second film focused more on the anger in Judea at the Romans, and the resistance... 'we should be struggling together'... 'we are' (wrong film I know ).Quote:And when it come to Caligula you must understand that during the first two centuries of the Empire the vice was encouraged at Rome only during the very brief reign of the insane Caligula (4 years), the 9 years of the influence of Messalina, and the reign of Nero (54-68); 27 years out of more than 200.
But like I mentioned Seneca, after him there was this Stoic movement for assisting the helpless. From Nerva to Marcus Aurelius the emperors set the example of founding orphanages and homes for the aged, and the wealthier citizens generously followed it. Civic festivals, civic baths and theaters and aqueducts, were established by the wealthier Romans. The municipalities were compelled to provide schools at which every free Roman child could obtain gratuitous education, and poorer youths were assisted to pass to the higher schools. There has been no such humanitarian movement in Europe since those days until the 19th century. Woman's position was relieved of all the old injustice; slavery was so consistently censured that, if paganism had continued, it could not have survived as long as it did; war was denounced by Lucan and others; the gladiatorial displays were heavily condemned by Plutarch and Seneca.
Christianity taught brotherhood and mercy because brotherhood and mercy were familiar doctrines of the age. Eventual triumph of Christianity was political, not spiritual. Indeed if you look up emperor Constantine you can see he was far from a moral man.
Nevertheless Rome had it's moral problems, like war and slavery and it might have looked divine if Christianity demolished those problems as it came to power, but needlessly to say it did not.
Jesus had many opportunities to disavow slavery. He never did. St. Paul reaffirmed the practice. The Bible was widely used to justify slavery in the United States. Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.
Wow, thanks for the education
So on the whole, pretty moral and progressive, apart from a few blips (ie Caligula ).So don't get me wrong, I wasn't speaking about the historical Jesus (and what he actually said or even if he existed) per se. I don't know enough about the history, whereas you clearly do, to make any call on that. I was just making a general observation that the behaviour attributed to Jesus, in the context of that film (the second one), would make sense in perfectly human terms of someone pissed off at Roman occupation, and looking for a better/different way.
