Been watching Zeffirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth" all this week. Great movie, although the actor portraying Jesus doesn't exactly look like he was born in the Middle East! Still, might be the best Jesus movie. Great acting -- really evident in this scene.

Interesting trivia:

• Franco Zeffirelli considered both Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino for the part of Jesus and Robert Powell to play Judas.

• Yorgo Voyagis, who plays Joseph (Mary's husband), can be seen speaking in English, but his voice is dubbed by an uncredited actor. Voyagis' real voice can be heard in the Diane Keaton film The Little Drummer Girl (1984). Franco Zeffirelli also used this technique with a few of the actors in his film version of Romeo and Juliet (1968/I).

• Banned in Egypt after religious leaders objected to its content.

• Rarely during the movie do any of the actors portraying Jesus blink their eyes. Director 'Franco Zeffirelli' decided on this as a means of creating a subconscious visual mystique about the character that not only differentiated him from all other characters, and is eerily effective. The boy Jesus in the Temple blinks twice in the Temple, and the adult Jesus blinks only once on film.

• The eye makeup for 'Robert Powell (I)' consisted of a thin line of dark blue eyeliner on the upper lid of the eye, and a thin line of white eyeliner on the lower lid. This had the effect of highlighting the piercing blue of the actor's eyes, thus giving him a penetrating stare, when combined with very little blinking, made the character appear surreal and supernatural.

• Peter O'Toole was cast as Judas, but had to back out of the project due to illness.

"It's not about you."

That sentence from the first page of The Purpose Driven Life may be the best opening line of a non-fiction book in history. Tigers Woods would do well to memorize it -- with his hands cupped around his eyes like he does when he's lining up a putt but instead, focus on that sentence: It's not about you.

Of course everyone's got two cents of advice. What I think he doesn't understand is that this life is not about him. It's not about you or me. It's not about our happiness or our pleasure. It's about God and his purposes. to understand that is his only way out of the mess he's in.

Sure, he needs counseling and he needs to be honest and many other things but those are tactics to an ultimate purpose. The real question is: What on Earth are you here for? It's not about golf and pleasure.

His problems are nothing new. Consider Solomon, a king with much more power and fame than TW, who lived more than 2,000 years ago. He tried to discover the meaning of life through everything imaginable and wrote about it in Ecclesiastes:

I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my work,
and this was the reward for all my labor.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.

Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

Now that's my 2 cents. What's yours?

Judas was a good guy? That's what Joan Acocella tries to point out from her analysis of the Gospel of Judas in the August 3, 2009, edition of The New Yorker. It's revisionist history at its best -- or maybe worst.

It's almost assumed by Acocella and others that this Gospel of Judas is simply fact. It is not. The canon of Scripture which became the New Testament exists as we have it today because of the very fact that these other writings were not reliable and false.

In the early centuries of The Way, which is what Christianity was first called, there were plenty of incorrect teachings being written. Many of the New Testament letters were written to correct those errors.

I suggest reading this great book on the early movement known as The Way, which became Christianity.

Acocella even admits the unreliability of the Coptic text of the Gospel of Judas: