I signed up for a Beliefnet dialogue group on the Passion but have not yet posted because I feel somehow out of place among participants who have seen the film and consider it a powerful statement of faith, especially since I have not seen the film, and on principle don’t want to give any support to Gibson’s project, even by buying a single ticket.

One of the participants, a Catholic,  wrote that seeing this film gave her the visual images she had needed for a long time, that the pictures will stick in her mind. While she had read the gospel accounts of the Passion every year and regularly  participated in the Stations of the Cross during Lent, apparently something had been missing. Until now.

The pictures will stick in her mind!  That’s what worries me. Let me explain (I apologize for repeating some thoughts from my earlier articles in this site):

I was born in Austria a month before Hitler marched into Poland. Around 1949 I read a magazine article on Hitler's death camps, complete with graphic pictures of piles of corpses. This was the first time I learned of the concentration camps or the Shoah. I ran home and confronted my mother, asking her if she and my father had known. After first denying any knowledge, she finally yelled back at me that I'd understand once I had a child of my own; that Hitler and the Nazis were crazy, and that anyone who would have dared object would have been arrested and killed. Parents had to go along with official policies to save their children! Over the next few years, I became convinced that my life and that of my entire generation of Germans and Austrians had been literally purchased with the blood of those who had been slaughtered, and that our task would be to ensure that such horrors would not happen again–to any one. I also began to realize how deeply strands of antisemitism were woven into the very fabric of Catholic culture (at the time I knew little of Lutheran or Reformed traditions), reinforced by pious legends, paintings, selective scripture readings, and devotional practices, such as the Stations of the Cross or the Good Friday liturgy with that ghastly petition (now no longer part of the liturgy, thanks to the Second Vatican Council) asking God to convert and have mercy on the perfidious Jews. And yet I realized that Jesus was a Jew!  

I came to understand how 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 even 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.”  This is the reason I was so disturbed by the Pope’s reported endorsement (later denied by the Vatican) of Gibson’s film by saying  “It is as it was.”  No one can know how it was!  There are as many interpretations of the events as there are people reading or hearing the gospels, and is not possible to dramatize the gospel story without major extra-biblical additions.

Since times immemorial, artists have shaped the ways we visualize and understand our worlds – past and present. No one, for example, knows whether Jesus wore a beard. In ancient depictions he resembles a clean-shaven Apollo, because that’s the way Greek and Roman artists depicted their sun god. He started to grow a beard when Christians wanted to portray him as a philosopher, and philosophers were traditionally shown with beards.   As for the crucifixion, it was first understood primarily as opportunity for 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 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. I have written a brief piece on the questionable origins of The Dolorous Passion.  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. Internet hucksters are already selling new editions of the Brentano-Emmerick volume as "the book that inspired one of the most controversial movies ever made."

The following citations can be found on the Web in The Dolorous Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a translation of the Brentano-Emmerick volume:< http://www.emmerich1.com/THE_Passion.htm >. (It is interesting/disturbing that the Brentano-Emmerick book, complete with a dedication to Mel Gibson's film, is also available on "Liferesearchuniversal.com" a site, registered to BlackSun Inc., which features links to publications by Benjamin H. Freedman,  Alfred M. Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler [I am substituting a working link for the dead one in the Liferesearch site], and Elizabeth Dilling  < http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/passionmenu.html#christ >). The site is anonymously edited: "We have intentionally omitted to identify authors, other than the Bible itself, as the source of our material as we feel that since the original inspiration came from the Lord then that is Who you, the reader, should be concentrating on,. . .. Whoever did the physical writting is of no real importance anyway, insomuch that the content glorifies the name of the Lord. . . . The only thing truly original to this site is the "Newsletters" which are written here, but still carry no authorship for the reasons already laid out."

I’ll now cite a few examples of imaginative extra-biblical elaborations on the Passion narrative according to Brentano-Emmerick.  Scenes like the following appear to have been included in Gibson’s Passion. On the way from Gethsemane to the Jewish high priests Jesus is continuously assaulted by the arresting guards who go so far as throwing him off a bridge:

The archers behaved in the most cruel manner to Jesus as they led him along; this they did to curry favour with the six Pharisees, who they well knew perfectly hated and detested our Lord. They led him along the roughest road they could select, over the sharpest stones, and through the thickest mire; they pulled the cords as tightly as possible; they struck him with knotted cords, as a butcher would strike the beast he is about to slaughter; and they accompanied this cruel treatment with such ignoble and indecent insults that I cannot recount them. The feet of Jesus were bare; he wore, besides the ordinary dress, a seamless woollen garment, and a cloak which was thrown over all. I have forgotten to state that when Jesus was arrested, it was done without any order being presented or legal ceremony taking place; he was treated as a person without the pale of the law.

The procession proceeded at a good pace; when they left the road which runs between the Garden of Olives and that of Gethsemani, they turned to the right, and soon reached a bridge which was thrown over the Torrent of Cedron. When Jesus went to the Garden of Olives with the Apostles, he did not cross this bridge, but went by a private path which ran through the Valley of Josaphat, and led to another bridge more to the south. The bridge over which the soldiers led Jesus was long, being thrown over not only the torrent, which was very large in this part, but likewise over the valley, which extends a considerable distance to the right and to the left, and is much lower than the bed of the river. I saw our Lord fall twice before he reached the bridge, and these falls were caused entirely by the barbarous manner in which the soldiers dragged him; but when they were half over the bridge they gave full vent to their brutal inclinations, and struck Jesus with such violence that they threw him off the bridge into the water, and scornfully recommended him to quench his thirst there.

The brief reference in John 18:12-13, 19-24 to Jesus’ interrogation by Annas turns into an entire chapter, 1,366 words of detailed description of the high priest and his goons verbally and physically assaulting Jesus:

At this answer of Jesus the countenance of Annas flushed with fury and indignation. A base menial who was standing near perceived this, and he immediately struck our Lord on the face with his iron gauntlet, exclaiming at the same moment, " Answerest thou the High Priest so " ? Jesus was so nearly prostrated by the violence of the blow, that when the guards likewise reviled and struck him, he fell quite down, and blood trickled from his face on to the floor. Laughter, insults, and bitter words resounded through the hall. The archers dragged him roughly up again, and he mildly answered, " If I have spoken evil give testimony of the evil; but if well, why strikest thou me?"

According to Brentano-Emmerick, demons possess Caiphas, the high priests, and others in the same general area.  This imagery continues the  medieval assumption of “Jewish Evil,” of Jews as satanic torturers of Christ, and the identification of Jews in general with Judas (note the similarity of the German words Jude [Jew] and Judas).

At the same moment I perceived the yawning abyss of hell like a fiery meteor at the feet of Caiphas; it was filled with horrible devils; a slight gauze alone appeared to separate him from its dark flames. I could see the demoniacal fury with which his heart was overflowing, and the whole house looked to me like hell. At the moment that our Lord pronounced the solemn words, " I am the Christ, the Son of the living God," hell appeared to be shaken from one extremity to the other, and then, as it were, to burst forth and inundate every person in the house of Caiphas with feelings of redoubled hatred towards our Lord. These things are always shown to me under the appearance of some material object, which renders them less difficult of comprehension, and impresses them in a more clear and forcible manner on the mind, because we ourselves being material beings, facts are more easily illustrated in our regard if manifested through the medium of the senses. The despair and fury which these words produced in hell were shown to me under the appearance of a thousand terrific figures in different places. I remember seeing, among other frightful things, a number of little black objects, like dogs with claws, which walked on their hind legs; I knew at the time what kind of wickedness was indicated by this apparition, but I cannot remember now. I saw these horrible phantoms enter into the bodies of the greatest part of the bystanders, or else place themselves on their head or shoulders. I likewise at this moment saw frightful spectres come out of the sepulchres on the other side of Sion; I believe they were evil spirits. I saw in the neighbourhood of the Temple many other apparitions, which resembled prisoners loaded with chains: I do not know whether they were demons, or souls condemned to remain in some particular part of the earth, and who were then going to Limbo, which our Lord's condemnation to death had opened to them.        

Along with scores of  miracle-seeking pilgrims, Brentano accepted Emmerick’s visions as inspired and popularized them in his  books, and now, whether revelations or hallucinations, those visions have been given yet another opportunity to affect a new and far larger audience.  With the preconscious language of image, film has immense power to influence the way millions of viewers interpret, remember, and represent events. Hence, this spectacular production may determine the way viewers read, interpret, and tell the Passion story for years to come.