“Joaquin Phoenix grew up in a pseudo-Christian cult that seems to have soured him toward religion. While we should be sensitive to that experience, we have to admit he’s no expert. Even so, his unfounded statements and the false story this movie tells will strike many as convincing, in the same way Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” did a few years back.”
(Christian Headlines) Remember that 1980’s cough syrup commercial when Chris Robinson said, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”? I wanted to paraphrase these immortal words when I read what actor Joaquin Phoenix of “Gladiator” fame said about his role as Jesus in the upcoming movie, “Mary Magdalene.” Phoenix is not the Son of Man, but he plays him on the big screen. His is a very different Jesus than the one we meet in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Judging by the trailer and the press roll-out, the movie will draw heavily on a second-century Gnostic text known as “the Gospel of Mary.” In a recent interview with Newsweek, Phoenix slammed early Christianity for not canonizing this and other apocryphal writings about Jesus, saying: “Why was Mary’s book not included in the Bible? The stench of blatant sexism,” he says, is “inescapable.”
Phoenix went even further in another interview: “Somebody made that decision to exclude [Mary Magdalene’s] observations and feelings about the life of Christ and her experience. There seems to have been an overt intention to exclude women from that process.”
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