The Passover Plot

If I read the calendar correctly, yesterday evening was the first night of Passover. With that in mind, I decided to watch a movie that I'd first read about several years ago, but never got around to watching since I didn't really have any streaming options at the old house. That movie is The Passover Plot.

Pretty much any American of whatever Christian denomination will know the basic history of the Holy Land around Jersulam at the time when Jesus (played here by Zalman King) is said to have lived. Judea and Samaria, along with everywhere else around the Mediterranean Sea, had been taken over by the Romans, who were most decidedly not Jewish. The Jews felt subjugated, with the result that there was a rise in messianic, end-of-days fervor among Jews. Part of the belief was that a new King, descended from King David, would return to save the Jewish people. This would obviously be a threat to Roman authority, so when Jesus (called Yeshua here since the movie was filmed in Israel and produced in part by Golan-Globus) arrives and presents himself as a sort of political dissident, it's no wonder the Romans want to deal with him.

The Passover Plot takes these basics and weaves them into a story that deals a lot more with Jesus as he would have affected the political situation and less with the miracles that believers believed he was performing. British biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield did a lot of research into both the Bible and the history of the era, and came up with some conclusions that lead to the plot of this movie and its mildly controversial thesis.

In this telling, there's the obvious debate we've seen over and over among the oppressed over how much to resist peacefully and how much the resistance should be direct and physical. Yeshua has decided that he would be the peaceful resistance, while his brother Yaocov (Dan Hedaya) would foment the more violent resistance. They still need outside help, however, which is where Judah (Scott Wilson), the 13th apostle who would betray Yeshua, comes in.

But in addition to the resistance, there are also always those who collaborate with the authorities. Pontius Pilate (Donald Pleasance), whom the Romans have sent to quell the Israelites, knows this, which is why he works with the Jewish high priests led by Caiaphas (Hugh Griffith). He knows that once Yeshua has entered Jerusalem and declared himself King, that should give the high priests an opening to have Yeshua declared a blasphemer so that Rome doesn't have to crucify him.

But Yeshua here is extremely calculating, which is really the most controversal thesis of Schonfield's book and this movie. Yeshua as presented here isn't the Son of God, and frankly knows it. He is, however, a canny political operator. Indeed, he's timed his whole entrance into Jerusalem and later betrayal so that he'll be crucified on a Friday morning. By Jewish and Roman law, Jews were not allowed to be crucified over Shabbat. Crucifixion wasn't immediately fatal the way that a conscientious, non-sadistic hangman's noose was. Instead, those crucified suffered until they could no longer hold up their heads, suffocating to death when this closed their airway. (They also weren't nailed to the cross through their palms, as there wasn't enough support in the palms to keep them naied to the cross. The nails actually went through their wrists.) Yeshua has planned to have himself drugged so that it will look to everybody like he's died on the cross, only to make a miraculous recovery once one of his connected supporters is able to get him down from the cross.

It's an interesting, if obviously controversial theory. Nobody knows anything close to what really happened because, as the film informs us in a scrolling text at the end, there are no extant sources from the time that Jesus was actually alive. The Gospels were only written 40-80 years after his crucifixion. I do think it highly likely that there was one (or more likely more than one) man who was the real life inspiraton for the Jesus as resistance figure. As for the miracles, well, I'm not going to get into them here.

Having said all that, it's a bit of a shame that the movie doesn't present any of this material fairly well. The acting is mostly wooden, other than of course Donald Pleasance whom you would never expect to be anything less than over the top, bringing a spark every time Pontius Pilate shows up. And I don't think the script helps much. Perhaps this is material that needs to be told in a more academic tone. But even with all those flaws, The Passover Plot is worth watching and probably deserves to be better known.