The Passion, actor and Catholic traditionalist Mel Gibson's film about the arrest and execution of Jesus, has set off a firestorm of debate dividing liberal and conservative Christians. A group of leading U.S. Roman Catholic and Jewish scriptural scholars have labelled it an intolerable historical and theological travesty that is at risk of promoting anti-Semitism. The scholars made their criticisms in a confidential 18-page report sent to Mr. Gibson and obtained by The Globe and Mail.
Lawyers for Mr. Gibson's production company, Icon, in turn accused them of being in possession of a stolen copy of the script and demanded it back. (The script had found its way to one scholar in a plain brown envelope.)
Mr. Gibson's film is one of two major movies on their way to cinemas this year. Both lay claim to absolute biblical authenticity. The other, produced by an impresario Jew -- Canadian Garth Drabinsky's The Gospel of John -- relied on an advisory board of biblical scholars to tiptoe carefully through the polemics of the Christian New Testament Gospels.
The fundamental difference between the two films is that Mr. Drabinsky's John, which had its premiere on Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells viewers they are not watching an account of the historical Jesus but rather a late-first-century narrative -- the Gospel as read by actor Christopher Plummer -- of a new religion trying to fend off theological challenges and state repression. Mr. Gibson's The Passion, scheduled for release next Easter, implies that viewers are watching historical verity.
In other words, the issue is scriptural interpretation: Are the Gospels history or not? The mainstream academic view is that they're not. Or not in any conventional sense.
Boston University's Paula Fredriksen, one of the world's leading experts on the historical Jesus and a participant in the scholars' group that analyzed The Passion, characterized the film as the blood and gore of Mr. Gibson's Braveheart and Lethal Weapon set in Roman Jerusalem, with cardboard Jewish bad guys.
Which, interestingly enough, is pretty much exactly how the Christian Gospel-writers portrayed the death of Jesus -- more than half a century after the fact and without much concern for historical accuracy.
The four Gospel accounts of Jesus's arrest, trial and execution (his "passion," from the Latin passio, meaning suffering) finger the Jewish religious hierarchy as the instigators, the Jerusalem Jewish crowds as the mob baying for his death and the Roman governor of Palestine who ordered the crucifixion, Pontius Pilate, as a reluctant dupe of the Jewish high priest Caiaphus.
As Jesus is led off to be killed, Matthew's Gospel infamously has the Jewish mob chant in unison: "May his blood be upon us, then, and upon our children." (Mr. Gibson put the line in Caiaphus's mouth and later, reluctantly, removed it from his script.)
The accounts led to 1,900 years of teaching by the Christian church that the Jews collectively were responsible for deicide, the killing of Jesus, and thus cursed by God.
Christian violence against Jews is one of the plinths of European history. Passion plays of the Middle Ages focused on Jesus's pain and were used to incite hatred of Jews and trigger pogroms. Prof. Fredriksen, in an interview, referred to the Holocaust as one of the "great Christian ecumenical movements."
In 1965, the Roman Catholic Church's reform council, Vatican II, made a Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) that officially nixed the deicide charge: "The Jews must not be presented as rejected by God or accursed as if this followed from Sacred Scripture."
Both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops subsequently issued detailed guidelines on dramatizations of the Passion. The Pope, when he visited the Middle East in 2000, prayed at the Western Wall of the Jerusalem Temple for God's forgiveness of Christians for their crimes against Jews.
The leading U.S. Catholic and Jewish biblical scholars who read the purported Passion script, Prof. Fredrickson included, unanimously concluded that it contained multiple guidelines violations. (See sidebar for excerpts from their 18-page report.)
They say Mr. Gibson has borrowed from the diary of a stigmatic, 19th-century German nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, who recorded visions of Jesus's cross being made in Caiaphus's court, of the high priests bribing the Jerusalem crowds to demand Jesus's death and of soldiers putting a bag over Jesus's head to drag him through the streets -- none of which is found in the Gospels.
Select groups of conservative Protestant and Catholic Christians who have been invited by Mr. Gibson to see drafts of the film -- and have praised it -- accuse the Catholic and Jewish scholars of condemning a movie they have not seen. The scholars, in turn, have suggested that Mr. Gibson and those who have seen his film don't understand the Gospels.
It may or may not be fair to report at this point that the traditionalist Catholic sect to which Mr. Gibson belongs opposes many of the teachings of the Vatican II and holds, among other things, that no legitimate pope has sat on the Throne of St. Peter since those reforms.
Mr. Gibson has vehemently denied his film is anti-Semitic. He says he is being sandbagged by anti-Christians. He also has accused "modern secular Judaism" of trying "to blame the Holocaust on the Roman Catholic Church" -- to which Abraham Foxman, executive director of the U.S. Jewish Anti-Defamation League, adds: "Whatever that means."
Peter Richardson, recently retired as a University of Toronto theology professor, headed the scholars' committee that advised Mr. Drabinsky on this season's other Jesus film -- which is a narrative, and only a narrative, of the John Gospel, considered at once the most theologically complex and beautiful and the most "anti-Jewish" of the four scriptural accounts of Christ's life.
His committee, he said, "struggled with how to represent and explain the anti-Judaism of the fourth Gospel. We had a huge discussion about it. We each wrote three or four paragraphs, [which were] reduced to three-line, pithy statements."
Those six statements are shown at the film's beginning "as a kind of distillation of the scholarly concerns we have. It's an effort to deal responsibly with it."
The statements say Jesus and all his Disciples were Jewish, that the Gospel was written at a time of intra-Jewish debate, that crucifixion is not a Jewish form of punishment, and that the Gospel was written two generations after Jesus's death and has more to do with a polemical context of the new religion of Christianity being separated from a Jewish matrix than it does with a historical Jesus.
For the film's narrative, Prof. Richardson's committee selected the American Good News Bible because it was most easily dramatized. It also, fortuitously and unlike other Bibles, translates the 60-odd mentions of Jews in John as "Jewish authorities."
"I would have serious reservations [about using the Good New Bible] as a scholar, but for this purpose it works wonderfully well," Prof. Richardson said.
Mr. Gibson, conversely, has made it clear he believes that what the Gospels say about Jesus's passion is historically and theologically accurate. It's this claim, said Prof. Fredriksen, that bothers her most about the film.
Her irritation begins with the fact that Mr. Gibson's script has Pilate and all the Romans speaking Latin. The working language of the eastern Roman Empire was Greek, she said.
The script's portrayal of Caiaphus as the real power in Jerusalem able to manipulate a weak and waffling Pilate is historically inaccurate, she said. Caiaphus depended on Pilate for his job. Pilate, for his part, was known to be trigger-happy and was subsequently fired for too-brutal repression in neighbouring Samaria.
The scholars' report says the script gives no motive for either Pilate or Caiaphus wanting Jesus dead, but Prof. Fredriksen said in an interview that she believes Pilate had a clear motive: "The pilgrims."
Pilate, she said, would have known Jesus was harmless and his pacifistic movement no threat to Rome. But the thousands of Passover pilgrims who greeted him enthusiastically when he entered Jerusalem were another matter.
Palestine at that time was under direct Roman rule. Passover was a high holiday linked to Jewish freedom. Although nothing happened in the aftermath of Jesus's triumphal entry into the city, Pilate would have perceived the risk of a pilgrims' uprising with Jesus as the spark. Secretly arresting Jesus at night and quickly executing him was the way of dealing with it. Crucifixion was the Roman punishment for sedition.
Prof. Fredriksen said that if the Gibson script's account of Jesus's death didn't sadden her, she would find the controversy around the film fascinating. "But to have this kind of a movie coming out now, it just makes me, oh, so sad."
Judaism shown as 'locus of evil'
Excerpts from the Report of the Ad Hoc Scholars Group, which reviewed a script of Mel Gibson's unreleased film, The Passion:
Members of the Ad Hoc Scholars Group concluded unanimously that a film based on the present version of the script . . . would promote anti-Semitic sentiments.
[The Jewish] Temple -- and by extension Judaism -- is presented as a locus of evil: Jesus's unusually large cross is manufactured there and Jesus is physically abused there at night before a violent mob of Jews. This torment is said to occur adjacent to the Holy of Holies, a locale seemingly targeted by dramatic earth tremors when Jesus dies. Collectively, these elements uniformly project a negative view of Judaism and the Jewish people.
High priests are shown delighting in the physical abuse inflicted upon Jesus, while [the Roman governor] Pilate is shocked by it. [The high priest] Caiaphas's machinations will too easily be seen as epitomizing "Jewish" wickedness.
A Jewish mob is shown in ever-increasing size and ferocity. The mob is plainly identified as representing the Jewish people as a whole, portraying them as such as "bloodthirsty," "frenzied," and "predatory."
The Roman soldiers who flay Jesus are depicted as urged on by demonic forces, while Jews need no such supernatural stimulation for their wickedness. The few Jewish characters sympathetic to Jesus do not offset the disproportionately numerous hostile Jews.
Jewish figures are particularly associated with evil uses of money. The high priest, e.g., is careful to signal an underling to collect up the "blood money" that a distraught Judas [who betrays Jesus to the authorities] has flung at his "opulent robes." While it is true that the priestly elites were rich, the script also shows them using their wealth to corrupt a large number of ordinary Jews, something for which there is scant historical or biblical evidence.
[The script adds] scenes, without any historical or even biblical warrant, that increase the guilt of Jewish characters.
Viewers without extensive knowledge of Catholic teaching about interpreting the New Testament will surely leave the theatre with the overriding impression that the bloodthirsty, vengeful and money-loving Jews simply had an implacable hatred of Jesus.
Michael Valpy covers spiritual matters for The Globe and Mail.
