Word: messiahs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dramatic centerpiece of the film is a half-hour segment in which the dying Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, hallucinates about the devil's final temptation: come down from the Cross, renounce your role as the Messiah, marry Mary Magdalene and live a long and ordinary life...
...form of revolution? Or did he instead look for heavenly intervention to establish the kingdom of God? What did it mean for Jesus to be tempted by sin? When did he realize that his mission would end with death upon a cross? Did he view himself as the promised Messiah? Did he understand himself to be both God and man, and what imponderable struggles of the soul would that have meant for him during his sojourn on earth...
...Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah. Such assertions represent the church's later belief, which Gospel writers inserted into the life of Christ...
...example, an inscription unearthed in 1961 at Caesarea confirmed for the first time that Pilate was a 1st century Roman governor, as the Bible reports. More significantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, demonstrate a deeply ingrained 1st century Jewish belief in the imminent arrival of a Messiah-like figure and the need for spiritual renewal -- teachings that anticipate Christ's message. "After the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, you could no longer say there was no historical Jesus," says Theologian Otto Betz of Tubingen, once a redoubt of Bultmannian doubters...
While the Jewish members of the school do not accept Jesus as the Messiah, they do believe that the man from Galilee might well have seen himself in that light. In fact, a number of lesser religious figures of Jesus' era also believed this about themselves. As for Jesus' death, Flusser interprets it within a motif of martyrdom that stemmed from the Maccabees, rather than from the belief that the Crucifixion would take away the sins of the world. "I am sure," says Flusser, "that there were many Jews, when Jesus was crucified, who believed this innocent victim of Roman...