EASTER - GO WITH THE ORIGINAL PLOT

I promised a student of mine that I'd go to see The Passion with her, despite the bad reviews, as she had only ever been to see one film in the UK before and is a devoted Christian. Just like when I was a boy, I found it hard not to cry; the suffering of Jesus remains moving - and, in Mel Gibson's version, disturbing - to watch. It has the same power as any of the great tragedies (e.g. Shakespeare, Hardy) where the odds are so heavily stacked against the characters.

Oh, except the ending. The story of the resurrection, typically Hollywood, has so clearly been added on by some saboteur who just couldn't confront tragedy for what it is. It's just like a book of fairy tales I once had where Goldilocks went back and made friends with the three bears and Hansel let the witch out of the oven when she promised to be good. In a well-intentioned but clumsy effort to make the stories more palatable, the modern author renders them largely pointless and, for children, a whole lot less fun.

Gibson's saccharine final scene underlines artlessness of the ending after what stands alone as a powerful and instructive myth. Jesus is the greatest martyr of all time. There is no more hard-hitting demonstration of the victory (in the world's terms) of cynical, institutional power over idealism, nor of the eternal justification of idealism in history, which might be called the "God's-eye" view, than the mythologised life of Jesus. So why ruin it with an ending that not only invalidates the terrible sacrifice but adds insult to injury by being downright incredible?

In any case, who today honestly believes that a man came back from the dead? That blood-sacrifice is the only way to expiate sin? That what consititutes sin is disobedience to the arbtrary commands of a Father God? That this God can forgive mankind not in spite of but because of the death, in such a horrible way, of His miraculously conceived Son? (He would otherwise be powerless to forgive, because He cannot contravene His own laws about the just punishment for sin....)

Enough! The ideas here are so tortured, so utterly arcane, that their survival into the 21st Century must rank among the best testaments to that voguish psychological state - "denial" - that I know.

People who recognise the true nature of Jesus' sacrifice - brave, idealistic, final - must see that the real story is preserved from second-rate writers of whatever era.