Plot
The film opens in Gethsemane as Jesus prays and is tempted by Satan, while his apostles, Peter, James and John sleep. After receiving thirty pieces of silver, one of Jesus' other apostles, Judas, approaches with the temple guards and betrays Jesus with a kiss on the cheek. As the guards move in to arrest Jesus, Peter cuts off the ear of Malchus, but Jesus heals the ear. The temple guards arrest Jesus and the apostles flee. John tells Mary and Mary Magdalene of the arrest. Peter follows Jesus at a distance. Caiaphas holds trial over the objection of some of the other priests, who are expelled from the court. When questioned by Caiaphas whether he is the son of God, Jesus replies "I am." Caiaphas is horrified and tears his robes and Jesus is condemned to death for blasphemy. Three times Peter denies knowing Jesus but then runs away sobbing. Meanwhile, the remorseful Judas attempts to return the money to have Jesus freed but is refused by the priests. Tormented by demons, he flees the city and hangs himself with a rope he finds on a dead donkey.
Caiaphas brings Jesus before Pontius Pilate to be condemned to death, but after questioning Jesus, Pilate sends him instead to the court of Herod, as Jesus is from Herod's ruling town of Nazareth. After Jesus is returned, Pilate offers the crowd that he will chastise Jesus and then will set him free. Pilate attempts to have Jesus freed by giving the people an option of freeing Jesus or the violent criminal Barabbas. To his dismay, the crowd demands to have Barabbas freed and Jesus killed. Pilate washes his hands and proclaims he is not guilty of Jesus' punishment, but in an attempt to appease the crowd, has Jesus brutally scourged and mocked with a crown of thorns. The crowd continues to demand that Jesus be crucified, and Pilate reluctantly orders Jesus' crucifixion.
As Jesus carries the cross along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary, Seraphia wipes Jesus' face with her veil. Simon of Cyrene is unwillingly pressed into carrying the cross with Jesus. Jesus is then crucified. As he hangs from the cross, Jesus prays forgiveness for those who did this to him and redeems a criminal crucified next to him. After Jesus gives up his spirit and dies, a single drop of rain falls from the sky, triggering an earthquake which destroys the Temple and rips the cloth covering the Holy of Holies in two, to the horror of Caiaphas and the other priests. Satan is then shown screaming in defeat. Jesus is taken down from the cross. In the end, Jesus rises from the dead and exits the tomb.
Read more about this topic: The Passion Of The Christ
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)