3nity (ei kirjautunut) kirjoitti:Löytääkö Meilon supermuisti lisää tietoa tästä? :)
Ei muista, eikä tässäkään muistamista kysytty:
Bible Movie Exposes Bible Illiteracy
THE Biblical accuracy of Hollywood’s “The Ten Commandments” has been trumpeted abroad by producer-director Cecil B. DeMille. Many clergymen have leaped to his side and like Hollywood yes-men add their praises. Movie critics in general join in the chorus.
But the facts force you to conclude that these men are either indifferent to the truth or ignorant of it.
The first half of the film is largely fictional, though it claims some historical backing. The second half, concerned with the period of Moses’ life that the Bible covers, is advertised as faithful to Scripture. DeMille says: “All these things are as I have found them, in the Holy Scriptures.”
Rabbi Magnin of Los Angeles declared: “I don’t know when I have been so moved and inspired. . . . The whole subject is treated with reverence, dignity and spirituality.” Rabbi Pressman of Los Angeles said this history “has received its most powerful and reverent narration,” and added: “I pray that the Supreme Maker may accept this your offering as a genuine tribute upon the altar of serving and spreading his truth.”
Methodist Bishop Kennedy of Los Angeles told DeMille: “Your contribution to this generation through that picture will be one of the significant ones of our time.” George Heimrich, affiliated with the National Council of Churches of Christ, wrote: “God has truly used Mr. DeMille at a time when spiritual understanding among peoples all over the world must have an added emphasis if we are to escape complete chaos. . . . Mr. DeMille, your picture can and will influence world peace.” President McKay, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, approved it as “a sacred story treated masterfully and reverently.”
Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York said: “Mr. DeMille’s moving portrayal of The Ten Commandments will spiritually enrich the lives of all who see it.” Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles said: “We take it as being a great mission given to Mr. DeMille. . . . I’m sure that the Lord in his goodness and mercy will be bountiful upon him and those who have helped him in this great production.”
Dr. William Lindsay Young, vice-president of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, wrote: “From time to time in history men have emerged who have made lasting and significant impact on the moral and spiritual life of their time. The apostle Paul in the first century, St. Francis in the 13th century, and Martin Luther in the 16th, each in his own way stabbed awake the conscience of his generation. It may well be that Cecil deMille, through the production of ‘The Ten Commandments,’ will stand out as one of the great prophets of the 20th century.”
REVIEWS OF MOVIE CRITICS
Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote: “It is conspicuous that Mr. DeMille and his corps of researchers and writers have hewed to the Old Testament for the details of the fundamental happenings and the dramatic guidance of their plot. They have followed the story of Moses, as it is told in the Book of Exodus, with absolute faith in the occurrence and the literalness of the incidents.”
Just the opposite is what is conspicuous. It is conspicuous that DeMille has not followed the Bible account. It also seems conspicuous that this reviewer and the majority of other reviewers have not taken the time to read it. If they had spent an hour reading in the Bible after spending nearly four hours sitting through the movie, the critics would not blunder and expose their Bible illiteracy.
Crowther was not content to stumble as a movie critic. He tried his wings as a Bible critic and took a tumble there also. He said that the Bible books are “pocked with contradictions and, in many details, do not agree with archaeological knowledge, but that we won’t go into here.” He does not know the simple Bible account well enough to know that DeMille contradicted it many times, but still he sets himself up as a Bible critic.
Like so many persons today, he thinks he must prove he is a modern intellectual too educated to gullibly believe God’s Word. Too many persons today disbelieve without a solid foundation for their disbelief. They parrot a set of expressions that have become standard, a kind of party line. The facts are that archaeology confirms the Bible and the more that is learned the more supposed Bible contradictions are dissolved. But Crowther makes his smear and then dodges any burden of proof with the glib dismissal, “But that we won’t go into here.” His column is headed, “Lesson for Today.” He is a very poor teacher.
Another reviewer, Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News, says: “The latter half of the film, which has to do with Moses as the Hebrew patriarch, follows the Biblical line to the letter.” She is very unlettered, Scripturally speaking. It seems that movie critics should take the few minutes necessary to read the Bible account involved when they review Bible movies. Do they not owe this to their reading public? Is it not a part of their work to criticize intelligently rather than merely spread the assertions of the film’s publicity agents? Otherwise, what are their qualifications to review Bible movies? Nevertheless, most of the critics emoted about the supercolossal grandeur and spectacular impressiveness of DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments.” It is impressive and it is entertaining, but it is also riddled with fiction and errs as to the Scriptures. Both sides should be told.
NOT ALL CRITICS GULLIBLE
Not all the movie critics were dazzled and led astray by DeMille’s publicity claims or by the clerical beating of the drums. Even if these more penetrating ones did not single out the Bible inaccuracies of the film, they did smell the odor of Hollywood glitter and glamor and mammon that more than neutralized any fragrance of spirituality that might be present.
Newsweek, November 5, 1956, wrote: “DeMille, a man of deep religious feelings, has taken Old Testament passages, made a variety of conjectures which seemed reasonable to him (after a look at the ancient historians, Philo and Josephus), and developed a story which is occasionally faithful to Biblical history and often faithful only to DeMille’s own vision of a ‘religious movie.’ He takes most of his Biblical material from Exodus. The story he tells is chiefly the life story of Moses, from the bulrushes to the tablets on Sinai. A typical aspect of his works is the fact that, of the many stories which ‘The Ten Commandments’ tells, none gets more attention than the foredoomed—and hypothetical—love affair DeMille has cooked up between Moses and the seductive Egyptian princess, Nefretiri.” After further criticism the review concludes: “If he is to take the credit for what is impressive about his works, he must accept the responsibility for what is not. Each is quite a handful.”
After Time magazine, November 12, 1956, had outlined the time and money and effort that had gone into the film, it asked: “And the result of all these stupendous efforts? Something roughly comparable to an eight-foot chorus girl—pretty well put together, but much too big and much too flashy. And sometimes DeMille is worse than merely flashy. It is difficult to find another instance in which so large a golden calf has been set up without objection from religious leaders. With insuperable piety, Cinemogul DeMille claims that he has tried ‘to translate the Bible back to its original form,’ the form in which it was lived. Yet what he has really done is to throw sex and sand into the moviegoer’s eyes for almost twice as long as anybody else has ever dared to.”
Time concludes with a very pointed charge: “There are moments, in fact, when it seems that the Seventh Commandment [“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”] is the only one DeMille is really interested in; to the point where the Exodus itself seems almost a sort of Sexodus—the result of Moses’ unhappy (and purely fictional) love life. Is this blasphemy? Technically not; but it is sometimes hard to determine where the fine line between bad taste and sacrilege is to be drawn. When God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, out booms a big, creamy bass voice that sounds like nothing so much as a TV announcer making a pitch for a local funeral home. At such moments it is impossible to avoid the impression that the moviemaker, no doubt without intending to, has taken the name of the Lord in vain.”
BIBLE ILLITERACY EXPOSED
Dick Williams, in his column in the Los Angeles Mirror-News of November 14, 1956, said: “I am not an expert on Biblical history. So, while highly suspicious of some portions of the film which I have already seen, I am in no position to dispute DeMille’s announcement that the only place in the picture where he does not expect to be Scripturally accurate is in the golden calf sequence. But others, presumably more versed in the facts, are beginning to step forth to disagree with DeMille and not just on minor issues, either. One of these is the religious magazine Awake! published by a society associated with Jehovah’s witnesses.” He then quotes from the article on “Hollywood’s Version of ‘The Ten Commandments,’” published in the Awake! of November 8, 1956. What are the contradictions between movie and Bible there disclosed?
The Bible shows Pharaoh had the Hebrew babies killed to curb increases in Israelite population, but DeMille’s movie says it was to cut off the deliverer Moses while he was a babe.—Ex. 1:9, 10.
The Bible indicates Moses knew all the time he was a Hebrew, and because he knew he was he killed an Egyptian that was striking one of his Hebrew brothers. He fled from Egypt. But the movie has him exiled because when he is grown it is learned he is a Hebrew and loves the same girl as Pharaoh’s son.—Ex. 2:11, 12, 15.
The Bible first tells of the law to be written on human hearts in the prophet Jeremiah’s time, but DeMille runs ahead of God in this by about nine hundred years, having it said to Moses at the burning bush.—Jer. 31:31-33.
The Bible account shows that the Israelites used God’s name Jehovah and that it was specifically discussed with Moses, at Exodus 6:3, but the movie repeatedly refers to God’s name being unknown to the Israelites and it never is disclosed in the film.
The Bible, at Acts 7:23-30, shows that Moses fled Egypt when he was forty years old and was eighty when he returned from Midian. But the movie shows no such passage of time, keeping all the characters involved in love episodes wonderfully youthful, although Moses was allowed to age miraculously all at once, at the burning bush.
The Bible shows that Moses’ enemies in Egypt were dead when he returned, but the movie has his worst enemy sitting on the throne as Pharaoh.—Ex. 4:19.
The Bible tells of God’s determination to bring the tenth plague, the death of the Egyptian first-born. But in the movie this death of the first-born is Pharaoh’s idea, he intending to do this to the Israelites, and only then does God turn the tables on him by doing it to the Egyptian first-born.—Ex. 11:1-5.
The Bible record states that Pharaoh later pursued the Israelites to recover his slave labor, but DeMille says it was because Moses spurned the love of Pharaoh’s queen.—Ex. 14:5, 6.
It may be debatable whether Pharaoh accompanied his troops to the Red Sea or not, but if he did he died there, according to the Bible. But the movie let him survive that watery debacle and return to Egypt.—Ex. 14:28.
Did Dathan instigate the golden-calf worship at Sinai, and did the earth swallow him and others for that? DeMille says yes, but the Bible says no. Did those calf worshipers die that way at all? No, but by sword and plague. Dathan was not among them, for he and other rebels were swallowed up by the earth at a much later time and for an entirely different sin.—Ex. 32:27, 28, 35; Num. 16:1-3, 12, 25-32.
Ironically, where DeMille said he would depart from the Bible he actually did not. He said the people danced naked at the worship of the golden calf but he would clothe them; modern translations accurately show they did not dance naked but merely broke loose in unrestraint and unruliness.—Ex. 32:25, NW, RS, AT, Le.
Now answer the questions for yourself. How faithful was DeMille to the Bible record? How correct were the clergymen that lauded the film as moving, reverent, spiritual and inspiring? Did God truly use DeMille and give him this mission to perform, as some of them said? And is it not more than slightly ridiculous to put him in the same class as the faithful apostle Paul, as one of these clergymen did? What about the movie critics that wrote that it was conspicuous how he hewed to the Bible with literalness and followed the Biblical line to the letter?
This Bible movie has certainly exposed Bible illiteracy! (w57 Jan 15 p. 40-43)
Pyrkimykseni olkoon kaikkia miellyttävän keskusteluilmapiirin luominen.
