The FINAL Word On The Passion

It is bewildering. U.S. foreign policy is tied to the Middle East. Zionism. B'athism. Shi'ites. Sunni. How to make sense of the bewildering maelstrom. And Mel Gibson steps in with another salvo in the culture wars. If this is (fair & balanced) disgust, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
Who Killed Jesus?
by Jon Meacham

It is night, in a quiet, nearly deserted garden in Jerusalem. A figure is praying; his friends sleep a short distance away. We are in the last hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in the spring of roughly the year 30, at the time of the Jewish feast of Passover. The country—first-century Judea, the early 21st's Israel—is part of the Roman Empire. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, is Caesar's ranking representative in the province, a place riven with fierce religious disputes. Jesus comes from Galilee, a kind of backwater; as a Jewish healer and teacher, he has attracted great notice in the years, months and days leading up to this hour.

His popularity seemed to be surging among at least some of the thousands of pilgrims gathered in the city for Passover. Crowds cheered him, proclaiming him the Messiah, which to first-century Jewish ears meant he was the "king of the Jews" who heralded the coming of the Kingdom of God, a time in which the yoke of Roman rule would be thrown off, ushering in an age of light for Israel. Hungry for liberation and deliverance, some of those in the teeming city were apparently flocking to Jesus, threatening to upset the delicate balance of power in Jerusalem.

The priests responsible for the Temple had an understanding with the Romans: the Jewish establishment would do what it could to keep the peace, or else Pilate would strike. And so the high priest, Caiaphas, dispatches a party to arrest Jesus. Guided by Judas, they find him in Gethsemane. In the language of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, there is this exchange: "Whom do you seek?" Jesus asks. "Jesus of Nazareth." The answer comes quickly. "I am he." ...

As moving as many moments in the film are, though, two NEWSWEEK screenings of a rough cut of the movie raise important historical issues about how Gibson chose to portray the Jewish people and the Romans. To take the film's account of the Passion literally will give most audiences a misleading picture of what probably happened in those epochal hours so long ago. The Jewish priests and their followers are the villains, demanding the death of Jesus again and again; Pilate is a malleable governor forced into handing down the death sentence.

In fact, in the age of Roman domination, only Rome crucified. The crime was sedition, not blasphemy--a civil crime, not a religious one. The two men who were killed along with Jesus are identified in some translations as "thieves," but the word can also mean "insurgents," supporting the idea that crucifixion was a political weapon used to send a message to those still living: beware of revolution or riot, or Rome will do this to you, too. The two earliest and most reliable extra-Biblical references to Jesus--those of the historians Josephus and Tacitus--say Jesus was executed by Pilate. The Roman prefect was Caiaphas' political superior and even controlled when the Jewish priests could wear their vestments and thus conduct Jewish rites in the Temple. Pilate was not the humane figure Gibson depicts. According to Philo of Alexandria, the prefect was of "inflexible, stubborn, and cruel disposition," and known to execute troublemakers without trial.

So why was the Gospel story--the story Gibson has drawn on--told in a way that makes "the Jews" look worse than the Romans? The Bible did not descend from heaven fully formed and edged in gilt. The writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John shaped their narratives several decades after Jesus' death to attract converts and make their young religion--understood by many Christians to be a faction of Judaism--attractive to as broad an audience as possible.

The historical problem of dealing with the various players in the Passion narratives is complicated by the exact meaning of the Greek words usually translated "the Jews." The phrase does not include the entire Jewish population of Jesus' day--to the writers, Jesus and his followers were certainly not included--and seems to refer mostly to the Temple elite. The Jewish people were divided into numerous sects and parties, each believing itself to be the true or authentic representative of the ancestral faith and each generally hostile to the others.

Given these rivalries, we can begin to understand the origins of the unflattering Gospel image of the Temple establishment: the elite looked down on Jesus' followers, so the New Testament authors portrayed the priests in a negative light. We can also see why the writers downplayed the role of the ruling Romans in Jesus' death. The advocates of Christianity--then a new, struggling faith--understandably chose to placate, not antagonize, the powers that were. Why remind the world that the earthly empire which still ran the Mediterranean had executed your hero as a revolutionary?

Copyright *#169; 2004 Newsweek Magazine

From The Left: Paul Fredriksen (Again) On The Gibson Film

Mel Gibson's films are routinely violent. There is a pornographic quality to all of the violence; senseless, sensational violence. If this is (fair & balanced) point counter-point, so be it; both sides have been heard.

[x The Responsive Community]
Responsibility for Gibson’s Passion of Christ
by Paula Fredriksen

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ came into my life last April. It was then that Dr. Gene Fisher, the ecumenical officer for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, convened a small group of scholars to offer an ad hoc assessment of Gibson’s script. Fisher asked us to attend to a variety of issues: the script’s historical fidelity, its use of New Testament materials, and its consonance with Catholic magisterial instruction.

Why did Fisher care? This was, after all, just a movie. The answer, in part, lay with Gibson’s own publicity efforts. In numerous interviews, Gibson had presented his movie as an act of God. (“The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film,” he repeatedly claimed, adducing on-set miracles in support of his view.) He insisted that it was the most historically accurate depiction of Christ’s passion ever filmed. (“This is what really happened at the time.”) He paraded his own Catholic piety as some sort of authentication of his movie. (“We heard Mass every day. We had to be squeaky clean for this.”)

But in the course of these same interviews to publicize his film, Gibson had revealed some of its significant historical gaffes. Further, one of Gibson’s sources for his story came not from the first century Gospels, but from the revelations of Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), a stigmatic nun whose visions enunciate an anti-Semitism typical of her time and place. (She believed that Jews used the blood of Christian babies for their rituals.) And, finally, website stills of the movie paraded images marked with Gibson’s signature Hollywood gore: what he thought of as “realism” had less to do with history than with celluloid violence.

All this was cause for concern to Fisher, and to his counterpart at the Anti-Defamation League, Rabbi Dr. Eugene Korn. And it was of concern to us as scholars who work to promote interfaith dialogue and good relations between Christians and Jews. We volunteered our time and our professional expertise to compose for Gibson a confidential report. We concisely reviewed the problems, historical as well as (from a Catholic point of view) doctrinal, with his script. And we framed our presentation by naming one precise source of our concern, specifically, the long and toxic Christian tradition that Jews were (or are) particularly responsible for the death of Jesus, and the ways that this had led to anti-Jewish violence. I quote from the introduction of our report: We begin this task with an awareness of the tragic impact of Christian “passion plays” on Jews over the centuries. We know that their dramatic presentation of Jews as “Christ killers” triggered pogroms against Jews…and contributed to the environment that made the Shoah [the Holocaust] possible. Given this history, and given the power of film to shape minds and hearts, both Catholics and Jews in this ad hoc group are gravely concerned about the potential dangers of presenting a passion play in movie theaters.

The rest, as they say, is history. Icon Productions leaked our report to the press, presented our assessment as an “attack,” and has worked hard to keep the controversy alive until the movie’s release in February 2004. Icon and its supporters have proclaimed that criticism of the movie is tantamount to an attack on Christianity itself (check out www.seethepassion.com). Right-wing Jewish pundits have been lined up to report that they see no problems with the movie, and that criticisms of it “lack moral legitimacy.” Catholic concern has been deemphasized, Jewish concern emphasized, to enhance the idea that the controversy is a Christians vs. Jews argument. Free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religion: Gibson’s critics, say Passion apologists, attack Gibson’s rights, and thus the rights of all citizens. To voice concern about this movie is virtually un-American. Let us be clear. We are talking about an action flick here. Aficionados of the genre, and of Gibson’s stellar contributions to it, know that realism is not one of its (or his) hallmarks. Actors routinely “bleed” in visually striking, medically remarkable ways, thanks to the makeup artist’s skill. Moral subtlety is also in short supply. Bad guys are very bad, good guys good: anything more complex would risk interfering with the story line.

Sensationalized violence substitutes for much else, from character development to plot. Gibson has taken the skills honed in Lethal Weapon, Conspiracy, and Payback, and used them to construct his take on the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life.

Anyone who has seen the final half-hour of Braveheart (a medieval action flick) has essentially seen The Passion already. This time, Caiaphas is Longshanks. Again, so what? It’s just a movie. But this movie—unlike, say, The Last Temptation of Christ, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre—risks more than religious offensiveness, and does more than simply entertain with senseless, sensational violence. The Passion stands in the echo chamber of deeply traditional Christian anti-Judaism. That tradition at its most benign has excused, and at its most malicious has occasioned, anti-Jewish violence for as long as Western culture has been Christian, from the fourth century to the twenty-first. Jews viewing the Scorsese movie were hardly going to feel enraged at Christians. Someone over stimulated by Massacre, if tempted to act out, would act out on his own. Christians enraged at the supposed Jewish treatment of Jesus—such as that anachronistically and luridly featured in Gibson’s first-century action flick—have often acted out against their Jewish neighbors in their midst, and felt morally and theologically justified in doing so.

Will The Passion of Christ, once released, have a negative effect on society? Might it promote anti-Jewish violence? I hope not, but I think it well might, for the reasons I sketch above. Long cultural habits die hard. The debate around the film, made public and promoted by Icon, has already occasioned ugly anti-Semitic slurs. My colleagues and I, via email, have received them. Both I and my university have received ominous threats from a furious Christian Passion-fan (“I am telling you now that if this woman continues to be employed as a professor, you will be putting your university at risk, with major problems to come…I speak with a powerful voice and with strength that comes from our Heavenly Father,” from an email of November 10, 2003). If the contrived, publicity-oriented “debate” stirs such feelings, will the movie stir fewer, once true public debate can ensue? I do not know, but I doubt it.

Gibson just re-shot some scenes a few months ago, in the wake of the pre-release attention that he has sought. Will he actually follow some of the scholars’ suggestions? Will he make his presentation of his Bad Guys—in this movie, the Jewish high priest, most of his council, and most of Jerusalem’s Jews—less extreme? Again, I do not know. Perhaps, perhaps not.

Will the anti-Semitism, which Gibson’s movie has already enabled, lead to violence? Despite the violence of American culture, I think not. Anti-Semitism just has not had the defining role here, historically, that it has had elsewhere. What about violence elsewhere? I do not know. But the long respectability of anti-Jewish violence in European culture, and the current climate of violence against Jews—in Istanbul, South America, Great Britain, and especially in France in the course of the past several years—inclines me to be much less sanguine about the effects of Gibson’s Passion with
foreign-language subtitles.

In the past several years, in Europe, violence against Jews—if those Jews are Israelis—has been explicitly excused by appeal to the toxic tradition that “the Jews killed Christ.” Horrific suicide bombings during the current intifada inspired a church in Edinburgh, over Easter 2001, to display a large oil painting of the Crucifixion with Roman centurions and officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) depicted at the foot of the Cross. The Italian newspaper La Stampa commented on the IDF’s cordon around armed Palestinian gunmen holed up in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity with a political cartoon: baby Jesus, crouching in his manger at the sight of an Israeli tank, crying out, “Oh, no. They don’t want to kill me again?!?” I could cite 20 more examples. My point, simply, is that the Toxic Tradition—The Jews killed Jesus; all Jews everywhere are culpable; when something bad happens to them, it is no less than they deserve—is still very much alive, very current, very powerful.

I do not know Mel Gibson. I have read his script, and it seemed to me then a combination of enthusiastic piety, historical ignorance, poor reading of New Testament texts, and action-flick idioms. His response to the confidential report that my colleagues and I sent to him was belligerent and self-serving. (He and Paul Lauer, his marketing executive, have both commented appreciatively on what terrific publicity they have derived from all the flap.) The film, if unaltered, is in my view inflammatory, and therefore potentially dangerous. How Gibson lives with his responsibility for this affair is ultimately his own business.

My responsibility, meanwhile, is to speak up and speak out—not against the film so much as against the ignorance, and the unselfconscious anti-Judaism, that it so dramatically embodies and presents. Gibson has given myself and numberless colleagues in colleges, universities, and seminaries across the nation, a priceless opportunity for public education. Out of the ivory tower, past the Cineplex, into the churches and interfaith communities that have asked us all to come to speak. This teachable moment now serves as the silver lining that shines within the looming dark cloud of Gibson’s Passion.

Copyright © 2004 The Responsive Community

From The Right: Michael Medved On The Gibson Film

Cruxifixion was a Roman execution procedure. Stoning was a Jewish execution procedure. Who was crucified? Who was stoned? If this is (fair & balanced) point counter-point, so be it; Paula Fredriksen is next.

[x The Responsive Community]
The Right to The Passion of Christ
by Michael Medved

Any honest discussion of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of Christ (he recently changed the title from The Passion due to a copyright dispute) must begin with unflinching recognition of a few undeniable facts: the movie has been made, and other than minor adjustments in editing, it will be released in its current form. A distribution deal (involving Newmarket Entertainment) has been secured, and the movie will play in thousands of theaters around the world in February 2004. The film will draw eager audiences and will become a substantial box office hit—due in part to all the pre-release controversy, the “must see” factor has reached an almost unprecedented level of intensity among both committed Christians and the cinematically curious.

Most importantly, mainstream Christian leaders of every denomination will embrace the film as the most artistically ambitious and accomplished treatment of the Crucifixion ever committed to film. Some critics and scholars will criticize Gibson for his cinematic and theological choices in shaping the film, but any attempt to boycott or discredit the movie will, inevitably and unquestionably, fail.

No one who has actually seen the movie (as I have) would seriously challenge any of these conclusions. This means that all the debate about allegedly anti-Semitic overtones misses the point: the organized Jewish community and its allies in interfaith dialogue may not welcome The Passion of Christ, but hysterical overreaction to the film’s release will provoke far more anti-Semitism than the movie itself.

Gibson financed the film on his own (to the tune of $25 million) precisely due to his determination to realize his own vision of the Gospel story, without compromise. He could have involved a major studio (obviously, his star power remains potent and undiminished) but he wanted to avoid the need to adjust his Catholic traditionalism to suit the sensitivities of profit-oriented accountants or enthusiasts of other religious perspectives. Jewish leaders feel wounded that Gibson never consulted them in writing his script or re-creating historical details, but he also left out contributors from the Protestant or Eastern Orthodox tradition.

In the context of the forthcoming film, the focus (by the New York Times and other influential voices) on alleged Holocaust denial by Gibson’s 85-year-old father stands as both irrelevant and unfair. Hutton Gibson, an aging curmudgeon and crackpot, played no creative or consultative role in The Passion of Christ.

Meanwhile, the possibility of anti-Jewish violence in response to the film has been irresponsibly emphasized and has become, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy. In parts of Europe and the Islamic world, anti-Semitic vandalism and violent attacks occur every day, and hardly need a film by a Hollywood superstar to encourage them.

In this context, Jewish denunciations of the movie only increase the likelihood that those who hate us will seize on the movie as an excuse for more spasms of hatred.

The problem with traditional “Passion Plays” was always the unmistakable association of contemporary Jews with the oppressive Judean religious authorities depicted on stage. The high priest and his cohorts often appeared with anachronistic costumes including European prayer shawls, skull caps, and side curls. Gibson pointedly avoids such imagery in his film—the costumes and ethnicity of the persecutors make them look far less recognizable as Jews than do the faces and practices of Jesus and his disciples in the film. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” scarcely appear in the subtitles to his movie (the dialogue is spoken in Aramaic and Latin). By agonizing so publicly about the purportedly anti-Semitic elements in the story (which closely follows the Gospel account), the Anti-Defamation League and its cohorts make it vastly more likely that moviegoers will connect the corrupt, exotic first century figures on screen with
Jewish leaders of 2004.

Of course, rabbis and teachers will feel an almost irresistible urge to respond to the explosion of public interest inevitably inspired by The Passion of Christ, and will comment on ways in which the Gospel story (particularly the Gospel of John, which heavily influenced Gibson) probably distorted the history of the execution of Jesus.

Many Jews understand that the canonized accounts came into existence at a time when early Christians had begun to despair concerning conversion of the Jews, and instead focused their attention on proselytizing Romans—hence, orthodox Jews come out looking very bad, while Pilate and other Roman authorities receive reduced blame.

Putting the New Testament account into this perspective may make sense with Jewish audiences, but insisting on this approach with our Christian neighbors represents outrageous arrogance. We may not welcome the stories told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but Christians have cherished that record for nearly two thousand years. The fact that anti-Semites through history have used these accounts as the inspiration for their depredations may prove that those stories can be dangerous, but does not prove that they are untrue. In any event, Jewish organizations must not attempt to take responsibility for deciding what Christians can and cannot believe. If those community agencies insist that Christian traditionalists must disavow their own sacred texts because of the shameful persecutions of the past, then they force a choice between faithfulness to scripture or amiable relations with Jews. The notion that committed Christians cannot have one without spurning the other does no service to Jewish communal interests, nor to the harmony of the larger community.

Does it truly contribute to interreligious understanding for Jewish leaders to insist that they know more about the truth of the Gospels than do Christians? Do we feel comfortable when some evangelical observers insist that they know more about the real symbolism of our rituals (emphasizing their supposed anticipation of Jesus the Messiah) than we do? I enjoyed a stimulating interchange with a pastor in Michigan who emphatically argued that the details of the Passover seder all related to Jesus of Nazareth—with the three matzos representing the Holy Trinity, the broken middle matzo symbolizing the broken body of Jesus Christ, and the Afikoman (half of the broken matzo) eaten at the end of the banquet indicating the second, triumphal coming of the Messiah. In our pluralistic society, this Pastor enjoys perfect freedom to teach his own unhistorical and eccentric interpretation of Jewish ritual, but he makes no attempt to insist that we include such versions in our homes, synagogues, or public explanations of our holiday. In other words, he offers a Christian understanding of Judaism without demanding that our own teaching must be accordingly adjusted.

By the same token, we remain free to teach a Jewish understanding of the New Testament story but we should make no effort to suppress or attack Christians who put forward their own traditionalist interpretations of their scripture. That’s especially true for Christians like Mel Gibson who, despite his personal involvement in a dissenting, traditionalist Catholic sect, provides in The Passion of Christ a vision of the Crucifixion that falls unequivocally within the Christian mainstream.

In fact, from a Jewish perspective, the most unfortunate aspect of the entire dispute regarding Gibson’s project involves the renewed focus on Christian scripture at a time when most Americans—emphatically including most American Jews—remain painfully ignorant of even the most fundamental Jewish teachings. Other than a general sense that Jews respect Moses and refuse to accept Jesus as Messiah, what do most members of the Jewish or general communities know of the essentials of our faith? The interests of Jewish continuity and vitality can hardly be served by a huge battle over a movie which will succeed with the public regardless of our discomfort. Rather than wasting energy and good will over a doomed, misguided effort to discredit an artful and ambitious film, we would do more for the cause of Judaism in America to emphasize the positive and productive aspects of our own sacred tradition.

Copyright © 2004 The Responsive Community