Introductory comment by Ingrid Shafer: The following essay was posted on Sat, 28 Feb 2004 01:27:45 -0600 to Vatican2@listmail.temple.edu by Dwayne Lanclos as part of an ongoing discussion of the film and in response to the Tablet article  (Austen Ivereigh, "Christ in the crossfire" [The Tablet: 21/02/2004] ) posted by another list member. Vatican2 was founded in 1994 by Leonard Swidler and is loosely associated with The Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church

My wife and I watched Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" this afternoon at 1:30pm. We live in a suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth. For an afternoon feature, the large theater was mostly full. All the evening shows were already sold out, not only for Friday night but for Saturday night as well. Last weekend, a member of a local Baptist church had knocked on the door and given my wife a flyer urging us to see the film, so the Christian community is definitely making a big push, using the film as an evangelization tool.

So, unlike many on this list who feel blissfully free to make comments about a movie they have not seen -- and proud to announce that they will never see the movie -- at least I can make my own judgments, having just seen the movie.

   Christians on both sides of the
   Atlantic who can stomach it face an unusual Lenten exercise: to decide
   whether The Passion of the Christ is a cinematic milestone which will
   allow people as never before to contemplate the Crucifixion, or an
   unbiblical, gory depiction by a quirky traditionalist which could fuel
   anti-Semitism.

If asked to sum up my opinions of the movie, I would call it, as the Brits say, "a bloody mess". And I mean that in both senses of the term. It is certainly unbiblical -- despite Gibson's assurances that it is historically accurate, which it is not -- definitely gory, and while not anti-Semitic, it clearly pins the blame for the death of Jesus on the Jewish authorities. This may be something of a subtle point for the average viewer, however, as my wife did not pick up on it. Indeed, the words "let his blood be on us and our children" is not translated on screen, but you still here Caiaphas saying it in Aramaic. In the movie, Pilate explains to his wife, Claudia, that if he doesn't crucify Jesus, there will be a riot and if he does crucifies Jesus, his followers will riot. He seeks to appease Caiaphas and his bunch by "severely chastisting" Jesus, but they will accept nothing short of crucifixion. And, when you see the "chastising", you know that in the real world, the man would be dead anyway in a short amount of time.

   The film is shot in the mostly dead languages of Aramaic and Latin,
   with obscure actors, and with a gritty realism never before seen in
   Jesus films.

The "gritty realism" is there in other films like "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Last Temptation of Christ". Despite being a lousy movie, "The Last Temptation of Christ" has what I consider the most historically accurate depiction of a real crucifixion. What is different from this film, however, is that neither of those two movies wallow in the blood and gore of Gibson's movie.

   It also contains numbing brutality: an uninterrupted
   25-minute scourging scene is not for the faint-hearted.

Certainly not for the faint-hearted. My wife doesn't like see operating scenes in "ER" and hid her face a few times, particularly when nails were being driven into Jesus's hands and feet. But the scourging scene is not uninterrupted in that the camera does pull away from the scourging from time to time to look at the reaction of Mary and Mary Magdalene. And there is a moment where Jesus is looking at the shoes of one of his torturers and is reminded of the time he save Mary Magdalene from being stoned as an adulteress -- yes, despite the popularity of "The Da Vinci Code", Gibson still portrays the Magdalene as the woman caught in adultery, a sin shared with "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Jesus of Nazareth" which portrayed her as a prostitute. In the much better film "The Gospel of John", she is portrayed as neither a prostitute nor an adulterer and was even present at the Last Supper.

   But the
   question marks are less over the film's use of violence than Gibson's
   direct use of Scripture, unmediated by biblical scholarship.

Hoo, boy, does he ever! And there are plenty of non-scriptural scenes as well. The non-scriptural scenes -- Jesus being tossed off a bridge, Judas beset by demonic children, a crow pecking out the eye of the bad thief, etc. -- are usually portrayed in an over-the-top fashion consistent with the type of stories found in apocryphal gospels. In this case, the origins are not apocryphal gospels but mystic visions of Catholic visionaries like Anne Catherine Emmerich whose "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" was one of the "authorities" Gibson used for his film. And since her visions are a pastiche of the gospel Passion Narrative scenes, it is questionable if Gibson actually used the gospels as source material at all.

   The portrayal of the Jews in The Passion of the Christ is taken from John's
   Gospel, the account which has traditionally been used to pin the blame
   for Jesus' death on the Jewish people as a whole.

He also used the theme of innocent blood from Matthew's gospel -- Judas hanging himself, the dream of Pilate's wife, Pilate washing his hands, the heard but untranslated "blood guilt" uttered by Caiaphas -- to squarely pin the blame of the death of Jesus on the Jewish authorities. The Jewish authorities found Jesus guilty of blasphemy. Caiaphas gives this as the reason they are asking Jesus to be executed. When Pilate is unconcerned by this religious charge, a flunky of the high priest explains that the charge is really one of disloyalty to Rome. Pilate is rather nonchalant about investigating charges of treason and more than ready to let Jesus go -- actions completely inconsistent with what we know historically about Pilate.

   In 1998, the US bishops issued a set of criteria to be
   followed in dramatising Christ's passion, warning that mixing the four
   Gospel accounts and "extra-biblical records" offered "the widest
   possible latitude for artistic creativity and insight, but also for
   abuses and prejudices".

And that's exactly what you have in this movie.

   Preview
   reports suggest that at least one scene is recognisable from The
   Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ - after Christ is scourged,
   Pilate's wife takes towels to a grief-stricken Mary so she can wipe up
   the blood.

Yes, this was a very curious scene. I guess the idea is that, since the Blood of Christ is precious, you just can't leave it lying around. But I really have to wonder if ordinary Jewish women would have this sort of access to a Roman military post.

   Another example which alarmed them: as Jesus is pulped to a
   bloody mass by a cat-o'-nine-tails, the eyes of the high priest,
   Caiaphas, are described in the screenplay as "shiny with breathless
   excitement".

No, Caiaphas did not appear to be taking sadistic enjoyment in the scourging. He seemed rather unemotional about it or emotionally detached from the suffering. One good point, however, is the scene with Simon of Cyrene. He was unwillingly pressed into service to carry the cross. After seeing first hand how Jesus is being tortured, he refuses to carry the cross any further unless the Romans stop beating him. His heart is moved to pity and, one would think, he became a believer in Jesus. And, after reaching Golgotha, he is brusquely ushered off the scene by a Roman calling him "a Jew". So Gibson is clearly showing that some Jews -- and non-Jews as well -- came to believe in Jesus by seeing how he suffered and died -- a theme strongly manifest in the first passion account, that of Mark. Curiously, however, there is no utterance of the Roman centurion who said, depending on the gospel, "Truly, this man was the Son of God" or "Truly, this was an innocent man".

   The violence to which Jesus is subjected - he
   takes up his cross when he is almost dead from scourging - "serves the
   purpose of the movie, to show how deeply Jesus suffered", he believes.
   If the violence is so disturbing, he adds, it is because people are
   unaccustomed to the naked, real brutality of the Crucifixion.

Yes, Jesus's flesh is turned to hamburger by the scourging. I'm not a medical expert, but I don't see any human being taking that sort of punishment and be able to stand, let alone carry a huge wooden cross. In contrast, the two thieves barely have a scratch on them and are only made to carry their crossbeams. Jesus seems to be singled out for cruelty. Were I making the film, I would show Jesus being scourged alongside the two criminals to make the point that he was not punished any more than other Jews of his days -- except maybe for the mocking touch of a thorny crown.

Oddly, however, I was unmoved by the violence simply because it was so over-the-top as to be unbelievable. A little restraint would have made the same point a lot more effectively.

   The Passion does not make
   use of the chapters in John which have fed anti-Semitism, he points
   out, adding that in the infliction of violence, "no Jews touch Jesus".

Baloney. Jesus is constantly beaten and even thrown off a bridge as the Jewish Temple guards hustle him to trial at the Temple precincts. And Jesus is further abused during the "trial" before the Jewish authorities. He's already something of a mess by the time he appears before Pilate, and Pilate even comments on it!

   Christof Wolf is convinced that The Passion of the Christ has the power
   to touch people beyond the Christian family. "A non-Christian seeing
   the film would ask himself, 'so why did he choose to undergo all that?
   What was it for? What is happening here?'" he says. "They will see the
   responsibility we all have for Jesus' death. That is what Mel has
   managed to convey."

I agree and disagree. A non-Christian or thinking Christian *would* say: "What was it all for?" Sure, mention is made in the film that "by his stripes we were healed" or "one man taking on the sins of the world", but does this really explain anything? Exactly how does Jesus being beaten to a bloody pulp heal us of our sins? Why is the violence necessary at all?

What I don't agree with is the comment that non-Christians will see the responsibility we all have for Jesus's death. Any non-Christian watching the movie and unfamiliar with the gospels would be at a complete loss to understand why Jesus was arrested in the first place, let alone sentenced to die. They may get the idea that Jesus did something that was considered blasphemous and that is why he was killed. They'd see Pilate as someone trying every strategem he could think of to release Jesus, but beset by Jewish religious authorities who would accept nothing short of the death sentence. And then they'd see Jesus mangled and tortured by sadistic Romans carrying out his execution. Somehow this is all supposed to be for our benefit, but I don't see how the movie demonstrates that that any of us living today bear responsibility for the death of Jesus.