Introductory comment by Ingrid Shafer: I received the following essay by email on Sat, 28 Feb 2004. It was a response to the reflections by myself and Leonard Swidler on the Web. 

I decided to actually see Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, rather than taking half a dozen different opinions and trying to meld them. All religious stories interest me, whether I believe them or not--hence my major in comparative religion--so I was interested in seeing it, controversy or no.

There are two different ways I want to approach this review. The first is to review the movie as a movie and adaptation of a text, the second is to deal with the question of antisemitism raised in several quarters. As someone who spent half her life Christian and the other half Jewish, I'd like to speak to both sides of the debate about what goes through the mind of the other when seeing this movie.

(I am a Jew and do not believe in the divinity of Jesus. I will therefore not be capitalizing the personal pronouns. I don't mean this as offense.)

The Passion as a movie
No, I'm not going to review the Gospels as literature. Suffice it to say that I think stories that have captured as many as these have speak for themselves in terms of power. I'm just going to deal with Mr. Gibson's adaptation, and I will do so as I would review any other adaptation, beginning with faithfulness to the source material.

Fewer liberties are taken than is usual with this sort of endeavor. There are no glaring anachronisms or outside observations, as might be found in The Ten Commandments or the various made-for-TNT Bible epics. A few later interpretations have been added in, including the presence of Satan from the beginning to the end, a haunting performance by an androgynous looking woman (I thought she was an effeminate man until I noticed that her name was Rosalinda) who stands in quite well for the evil in everyone. Two lovely scenes between Jesus and Mary, trying to bring her loss into focus, have been added, but they aren't enough to counter the movie's central failing as a story.

In each gospel, before the Passion is reached, the reader gets some chance to know Jesus as a person. Whether or not the reader believes that Jesus is dying to redeem humanity from sin, it's made quite clear that Jesus believes it. Whether it is or is not true theologically, it's a powerful story of a man who allows himself to be humiliated, tortured, and ultimately killed because he believed it would benefit others. Strangers. He had a life, too; you get glimpses of it it in the gospels, in the birth narrative, in the story of his precocious preaching in the Temple, in the rescue of the adultrous woman, in his expelling of the moneychangers. He was a brilliant man, with a great deal of potential, and he gave it up for what he believed to be good for mankind in general.

This sense of pathos, of sympathy that I have generally felt while reading, was largely missing in Gibson's film. Rather, it was taken for granted. The film begins in Gethsemane, as Jesus prays for the chalice to be taken from him, only minutes away from the beginning of the suffering. While it evokes the kind of identification and pity that normal human beings experience at seeing another human being in pain, it only rarely achieves the specific empathy for a particular and unique person that the written gospels evoke. In short, not be too technical and writer-y, but the movie fails because it doesn't bother with characterization, assuming that everyone coming in will already sympathize.

Gibson adds two brief scenes, as I mentioned, the first rather more effective than the second. The second, on the Way of the Cross, is a quick back and forth cut from Mary running to the beaten and dying Jesus to a younger Mary, running to her little son who has fallen in the yard--it's a bit too saccharine and predictable for me, though it works as Mary's point-of-view. The first is more interesting, and I think approaches brilliance in characterization of Jesus and Mary's relationship--Jesus sees a carpenter in the Temple, and flashes back to his days of making furniture. He has made a newfangled high table, to be used with chairs as we know them now, and he and Mary joke around about how the style of eating will never catch on. He takes pleasure both in the company of his mother and in the rendering of his craft, and when the cut returns to his trial in the Temple, there is actual pain involved--a specific man, a carpenter who once laughed with his mother at the idea of chairs, is being beaten badly and dragged to a painful death. This is storytelling. I might have preferred to see young Jesus preaching in the Temple or turning water into wine at a wedding--events from the Gospels--but this scene is not one that contradicts anything, and is something that you can look at and think, "Yes, that would have happened." Unfortunately, that was the only such moment in the movie. Most of the time, Jesus is quite distant, very much not a trait of the rabbi who walks through the pages of the Gospels.

It is, nevertheless, a powerful film about injustice and human cruelty, and the havoc it works on human society. For a Christian, it is also a reminder of the sacrifice made on his behalf, a sobering look at what it really meant to die in that horrible way.

On the question of antisemitism
But is it antisemitic?

That's a more complex question than either side would like to admit. It's certainly not something that's geared toward making people hate Jews, and it's not out there to instigate pogroms, and it's not deliberately nasty. On the other hand, it's very faithful to the gospel account, which includes a mob of Jews screaming for the blood of an innocent, while a Roman procurator gives them every opportunity to recant. It has him tried secretly by a Temple court and beaten before he even reaches Pilate, who asks, "Do you always punish criminals before they are tried?"

One scene that I've seen quoted as antisemitism which absolutely is not is one which I saw described as "Demonic Jewish children chase Judas into suicide." I was disturbed by this report--of course!--but it's not what it seems, and anyone who sees the film will recognize it for what it is. After Judas sees what he has done to his friend and mentor, he goes quite mad. He sees a hallucination of a demon, then goes into an alleyway in the city, where, bloodied and dazed, he lies until two concerned boys come up to him and ask him if something is wrong. He lashes out at them, then begins to hallucinate that they are turning into demons, calling him accursed, and accusing him of everything he feels he's done. On the off chance that this isn't clear from context, Gibson very pointedly has them disappear--completely--as soon as he reaches the dogwood tree from which he hangs himself. They aren't "demonic Jewish children." They are Judas's self-accusations.

There are also points at which Gibson goes out of his way to point out the Jewishness of all of his major good characters. Mary and Mary Magdelen use Pesach imagery to talk to one another ("Why is this night different from all other nights?" "Because before we were slaves, and now we are free"). People in the crowd--including the High Priests who sent Jesus to Pilate--are shown looking disgusted with Roman punishments. And Simon of Cyrene, whose religion is a matter of some debate (I discovered looking him up tonight) is identified very strongly as a Jew--a Roman spits the word at him a few moments after he drops the cross (he has been pulled from the crowd to carry it because Jesus no longer can) and tells the Romans to stop beating Jesus immediately. They then link arms and are pushed through the streets together with the cross. (For the record, what I learned tonight is that Cyrene is a city in North Africa, in what is now Libya. So Simon was an outsider to Jerusalem. Some people think he was a Gentile. I'm inclined to agree with Gibson's interpretation, though--Simon is derived from a common Jewish name, and they were in the midst of a pilgrimmage festival. So chances are, we're dealing with a North African Jew, and as far as anyone knows, he remained so.)

But it's hard to balance that against the deliberate casting of the keepers of the Temple (not Pharisees, but Saducees; however, the Gospels and much Christian thought seem not to konw that) as practically demons, and the mad chanting of the crowd to "Crucify him! Crucify him!", and the demand to release the crude murderer Barrabas instead, when Pilate had offered a choice.

It's not simple.

It's on this issue that I think Jews and Christians tend to see two entirely different movies, and as someone who has spent her life in both worlds, I'd like to address this.

I'd like Christians to understand that the Jewish horror at this story is neither petty nor unfounded. For nearly two millennia, its accusations were the last thing thousands of Jews heard before the bayonets came down. Easter Sunday was a common day for pogroms, and people were arrested and executed on the charge of torturing communion wafers on the belief that Jews would take any opportunity to crucify Jesus again. (This is a strange belief, in that it rests on the notion that Jews in fact believe in the divinity of Jesus and are inimically opposed to him for that reason--since Jews don't in fact believe in the divinity of Jesus and never have, there's no logical reason to torture Communion wafers. What Christians of that era simply couldn't seem to comprehend was that Jesus did not play any important role in Jewish life... except that his name was on the lips of people killing them. Not a good association.) It's neither surprising nor inappropriate that Jews respond to this accusation with instinctive defense and anger. The story they are hearing is about their people being made into demons, and suffering for it. They aren't seeing a story about redemption and sacrifice, or G-d's intervention on Earth.

I'd like Jews to understand that Christians hearing this story today aren't the ones with the bayonets, and when they listen to the sufferings of Jesus on their behalf, the last thing in the world that they're thinking is, "Damn those Jews," any more than Jews listening to the Passover story are thinking, "Damn those Egyptians." The story they are hearing is about G-d coming to Earth and suffering to release them from the slavery to sin and from eventual damnation. For a Christian, the Easter story is both beautiful and terrifying, the holiest part of the year, the thing on which their entire religion rests. It is nothing less than the cleansing of every human soul. Being told, "Your gospel is a lie! Your gospel is hateful!" brings up the same kind of defensive reaction that we would have to Manetho's accusation that the Jewish slaves were expelled from Egypt because we were lepers, or that I'd imagine a Muslim would have to being informed that the Koran gets several Bible stories mixed up and wrong.

As it happens, I do think there are historical problems with the gospel account. I already mentioned the fact that they seem to have Pharisees in charge of the Temple, when it was really the Saduccean sect who held most of the power there. (For those who aren't familiar with this part of Jewish history, this is significant because the Saduccees more-or-less died with the Temple, and modern Jews are the intellectual descendants of the Pharisees.) And there is, shall we say, reason to doubt that a prisoner of any sort would have been released for a festival. On the other hand, I know perfectly well that some of the inter-sect fighting in that era was downright nasty, with each side blaming the others for the misfortunes of the people, and it's not inconceivable that a group of staid Temple priests would be outraged by a populist minister with Messianic claims, especially if they were accompanied by business about being the physical Son of G-d.

There's no easy way out of this. Everyone just has to accept that it's a complicated and horrible situation.

However, by the time Pope John XXIII begged forgiveness for Catholic antisemitism (saying that by denying that Jews are the brothers of Christians, Christians crucified Jesus again), already the rank-and-file Christians of most denominations had no more desire to continue this rivalry, and Jews were learning that we were able to live among our neighbors without losing ourselves. After a bloody family feud that lasted nearly two thousand years, the fact that we can have this discussion with any degree of civility is, to my mind, a miracle. The family is beginning to reunite, and while there will always be differences of opinion and very bitter and painful memories, I think we can learn to live with them, to accept that these things are there and are insoluable--Christians aren't going to renounce their gospels, Jews are not going to suddenly "come around" and decide that Jesus was the Messiah after all--but that they need not be a permanent barrier.

The Passion of the Christ is not going to cause a wave of pogroms. The ADL isn't going to start burning the Christian scriptures in protest. Maybe we should all just try to understand the story the other side is seeing..