When I first heard about the Gibson film I felt as though I had been thrust back into a timewarp.  In 1999 I began to collaborate with Otto Huber, the script writer of the year 2000 version of the Oberammergau Passion Play. I was not only the official translator of the text into English, but also had the opportunity to contribute to Huber's effort to strip the play as much as possible of its potentially antisemitic elements. For me this was a labor of love, a small contribution toward reducing the debt I had felt myself called to repay ever since I discovered the Shoah as a child in my native Austria and promised myself that I would dedicate my life to helping build a better world, a world in which racial and religious hatred and violence would eventually be nothing but a distant memory of a barbarian past. 

I was born in 1939 in Innsbruck, Austria, and became obsessed with the Holocaust some three or four years after the war when I discovered death camp photographs in a magazine and, without ever having knowingly seen a Jew, asked my mother, "Why did the Nazis kill the Jews?" I did not believe her protestations that no one knew and wouldn't leave her alone. She finally yelled at me that I would understand when I had children of my own; that even if people had known they would have done nothing in order to keep the Nazis from deporting and killing them and their families. 

That moment changed my life. In my young mind I saw myself and all the children I knew as somehow owing our lives to those anonymous victims who were tortured to death because our parents had been unwilling to risk our lives to protect  the innocent. I continued to be haunted by the Holocaust as I began to practice and study my Catholic faith in earnest and came to see the swastika as the crooked shadow cast by the Christian cross, its evil twin, inextricably joined to it at the base--as are all shadows--and the Jewish people affixed to its twisted frame. I simply cannot comprehend any Christian not understanding how deeply modern antisemitism is rooted in the antijudaism of the Christian tradition including parts of the New Testament.  I walked out of a Good Friday service when I was a teenager because I was deeply offended by that ghastly petition (now no longer part of the liturgy, thanks to Pope John XXIII) for God to convert and have mercy on the perfidious Jews! 

It is incomprehensibly irresponsible to present an old-style passion play on the Big Screen to a worldwide audience without making sure that it will not precipitate the kind of mass hysteria passion plays used to foment in the past. Have we forgotten the many centuries of Holy Week violence against Jewish communities inspired by watching and taking part in such plays?  Four years ago, the afternoon I completed my translation of the Oberammergau Passion Play, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on a cot in my study. I will always remember what happened next.  Suddenly I was a teenage girl in the dark front hall of a two-storey house, terrified of the approaching mob outside.  I wore a long, off-white gown and some kind of cap with ribbons tied under my chin. In my hand was a lit candle in a pewter holder. The flame flickered, casting ominous shadows. The plank door of our home was secured from the inside with several large wooden bolts. A heavy chest was pushed against the door. The small windows were shuttered tight. I could smell smoke seeping through the cracks. The shouting and screaming came closer and closer.   Would the door hold? I called for my father, "Why do we have to hide every year.  Why do they come to kill us again, and again . . .."  I woke up totally disoriented, shaking, weeping, covered with perspiration, still expecting my Christian neighbors to break down the door and set our home on fire. 

Personally, I have no intention of watching the film.  The ancient Greeks were right when they banished violence to the back stage area. Graphic violence is truly obscene. It does not ennoble the audience.  It inspires hysteria and begets more violence. All over the world, people of different religions can recall martyrs and saints who were slain by their enemies, their innocent blood screaming out for vengeance. In this way, in the guise of seeking justice,  those remembered murders will continue to poison the present and occasion more hate-engendering memories unless and until all of us, no matter what faith, learn to stop holding on to the injuries of the past and make a fresh start, working towards a better future, the kind of future envisioned by Yeshua the Jew as he told the Good News of the Father-Who-Is-Love.

Ingrid H. Shafer
22 February 2004

TWO

Introduction to Mahlon Smith’s Gibson Agonistes:
Anatomy of a Neo-Manichean Vision of Jesus
(Ecumenical Press, 2004)

I was born in Innsbruck, Austria, one month before Hitler marched into Poland, and have been haunted by images of the Holocaust ever since I was old enough to read magazines and interrogate adults.  In my teens I began to seek a rational explanation for what seemed the unconscious, knee-jerk anti-Jewish prejudices of so many good people I knew--teachers, other children, even my father.  One day, as part of the study of regional history, our class hiked up the mountain to the nearby village of Rinn to visit Judenstein (“Jew-stone”), the shrine of the “Blessed  Anderle,” the final resting place of a  small boy whose throat, the teacher told us, had been slit by a band of Jewish merchants centuries before.  In the chapel, we saw the large grey boulder on which the toddler had been slaughtered, and marveled at the imprint of the tiny body, miraculously left behind, a silent witness to a crime so heinous it softened the very stone. We listened to the story of Anderle’s martyrdom, how on this stone altar his tormentors had torn pieces of flesh from his body, stabbed him numerous times,  and cut his arteries, catching the blood in containers. Later the Jewish monsters planned to use the blood to prepare the dough in order to bake bread for their heathen ritual, mocking the Eucharist. We looked at the pictures of the crime being committed on the chapel walls, knelt for prayer in the pews, and imagined the child’s agony and his mother’s grief when she discovered her son’s lifeless body hanging from a birch tree.

In the months and years following that class outing, in the recesses of my mind, doubts began to stir. Initially, I was  repulsed by the teacher’s story and the gruesome pictures of the murder. Eventually, and more importantly, the entire tradition, especially the miraculously imprinted stone, began to make no sense and seemed fabricated in order to terrify Christian children, malign Jews, and attract pilgrims.  This suspicion was reinforced by a fine priest, Professor Anton Egger, my religion teacher at the Realgymnasium, who was clearly not impressed by the cult, and who told me years later that he had doubted the legitimacy of the devotion all along. Especially when I discovered that a folk drama version of the Anderle murder by a Norbertine canon, Gottfried Schöpf, was still regularly performed,  I began to connect the ways Jews of the past were depicted in pious tales with the ways ordinary Christians continued to view their Jewish contemporaries.  

Between 1985 and 1994, due to the efforts of Bishop Reinhold Stecher, the blood libel story was officially debunked, little Anderle was debeatified, and the shrine was turned into a memorial to the victims of anti-Semitism with the following inscription on a plaque: "This stone reminds us of a dark deed of blood  as well as, by its very name, of the many sins Christians have committed against Jews.  In the future it shall serve as a sign of our reconciliation with the people who have borne us the savior."  However, until the veneration of Anderle was officially prohibited, the shrine had continued to attract pilgrims and, with its graphic depictions of the murder, helped shape the imagination of countless visitors, especially children, even after World War II, as it had for hundreds of years before.  On my last visit to the chapel in 1998 I overheard a group of local residents complain bitterly about the desecration of their shrine and demotion of their “saint.”  The power of image and imagination to shape one’s understanding of reality and especially one’s pre-conscious, intuitive assumptions cannot be overemphasized.

For centuries Christians had been whipped into a Jew?hating, Christ?avenging, murderous frenzy by watching the crucifixion re?enacted in passion plays. Eventually, after I started my academic career in the United States, I discovered that in 1934 Hitler had praised the Oberammergau Passion Play as a valuable tool to help eradicate Jews and Judaism. I came to the conclusion that passion plays should never be presented without placing the genre of passion play into historical context and paying careful attention to the potential dangers of including elements that can pit Christians against Jews.  In addition, the audience should always be reminded  that passion plays are plays -- dramatic presentations that reflect the interpretation of playwrights, producers, and actors; no passion play can depict what “actually happened.”  There are as many interpretations of the events as there are people reading or hearing the gospels, and it is not possible to dramatize the gospel story without major extra-biblical additions.

Since times immemorial, artists have shaped the ways we visualize, interpret, and understand our worldsBpast and present.  As for the crucifixion, it was first understood primarily as occasion of the resurrection. Hence, in the early medieval period when  the cross was depicted at all, it was empty or decorated with jewels to symbolize Christ’s victory over death. Later on, stained glass windows, paintings of scriptural events, and dramatic presentations of the Passion shaped the way most Christians understood their faith, through the “eyes” of imagination and emotion rather than of rational analysis. During and after the Black Death, a tortured corpus came to be affixed to the cross and was particularly important in Cistercian and Franciscan piety.  The Christ of Mathias Grünewald’s Crucifixion, for example, covered with flagellation wounds,  could help patients in the Isenheim monastic hospital, their own bodies covered with lesions caused by a variety of skin diseases, to meditate on the suffering of Christ and imagine divine empathy for their own suffering.

In addition, the minimalist Passion narratives of the gospels took on a different sort of life in the elaborations of mystics and visionaries. Gibson's Passion draws on many of these sources, but especially on the work of a Romantic poet, Clemens Maria Brentano, who spent five years of his life at the bedside of Anna Katharina Emmerick (Emmerich), a 19th century Augustinian nun and stigmatic, recording her meditations. He did not publish the book until nine years after her death, and there is no way of telling how much of the text is Emmerick's and how much Brentano's.  At the very least, her local, Westphalian dialect had to be translated into standard German. Both Emmerick and Brentano shared the anti?Jewish bias of the times, and the work is filled with extra-biblical descriptions of Jewish brutality and references to demonic presences among the Jews. While Emmerick is slated for beatification on 3 October 2004, her reported “private revelations” with their theological and historic inaccuracies, actually delayed the case for her beatification which had been suspended by Rome in 1928 and was only recently reopened.

My preoccupation with sources of Christian anti-Semitism and the passion play genre led to my involvement as one of the scholars on the Oberammergau 2000 Jewish?Christian advisory panel. I also served as the official translator of the revised  text into English.  On May 21, 2000, after the premiere performance of the Oberammergau play, for the first time in many decades, I was filled with hope that future passion plays, at Oberammergau and elsewhere, would reflect contemporary scholarship and leave behind centuries of anti-Jewish elements that often marred such productions and, at least in Germany and Austria, had helped prepare the ground for the relative scarcity of Christian resistance to Hitler’s “final solution” even by people who did not turn into active “Hitler’s executioners.” I was especially encouraged by the post-performance press conference in which Professor Leonard Swidler, Dr. Racelle Weiman, and I made several recommendations, including that in future productions “the responsibility and power of the Romans be emphasized further, and that there be more similarities in costuming between Jesus' followers and other Jews” (Catholic News Service), adding that “a Jewish adviser should be available to consult on the staging and costuming, not just on the text” (Catholic News Service).

Given the global reputation of Oberammergau, we assumed that the years of collaborative efforts that had gone into this production would not only be reflected in the Year 2000 season but would represent a major step toward encouraging historically accurate and theologically nuanced depictions of the Passion of the Jew Jesus all over the world. In the future, Judea, with its corrupt puppet king, would be clearly shown under Roman occupation; Pontius Pilate would be clearly shown as the arrogant, ruthless, anti-Jewish  monster extra-biblical sources reveal;  Jesus and his followers would be clearly shown as Jews among Jews, in dress and appearance no different from their Jewish adversaries--a relatively small but powerful faction led by Caiaphas and Annas; and, most importantly, the Passion would not be ripped from the context of the life and teachings of Jesus--his message of love, compassion, and hope. For Christians who believe in the Incarnation, the Passion represents the Good News that God does not reside in serene, immortal equanimity on top of Mount Olympus, observing earthly creatures writhing in agony  from a safe distance,  but loves us enough to become fully human, subject to suffering and even death.  ''Christ,'' as Andrew Greeley writes, quoting Annie Dillard, ''hangs on the cross, as it were, forever, always incarnate and always nailed.''

Then, on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2004, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a depiction of the Passion no more true to scripture or  historically accurate than traditional passion plays, but far more powerful in cinematic effects and the ability to affect the audience, opened in theaters throughout the United States, earning some 26 million dollars the first day.  Web sites celebrating the production sprang to life; Church officials praised it as perfect Lenten devotion; congregations bought out performances and bused people to theaters by the hundreds;  reprints of Emmerick’s  The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ could be purchased on the Internet. Gibson’s interpretation of the Passion was on its way toward becoming a global Oberammergau, infinitely more potent than the original, a grand spectacle that required no travel and could be experienced by anyone anywhere on earth  with access to a movie theater and, eventually, a DVD player. In this contemporary mass medium, one man’s vision could affect or infect the preconscious of millions if not billions of viewers, and do so continuously, year after year.  In a way I felt like Sisyphus, confronting once again the boulder he had just rolled up the mountain, a boulder that had grown to monstrous proportions.  This is the reason for our campaign--to encourage Church leaders to act as both Mater and Magistra by providing the kind of objective information and opportunities for dialogue that should accompany the viewing of this film, and to take seriously the somber warning offered in a joint March 2004 statement by Cardinal Karl Lehmann, President of the Catholic German Bishops’ Conference, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, the head of the Protestant Churches of Germany, and Paul Spiegel, chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany.

Ingrid H. Shafer
Pentecost 2004