What is clear is that Mr. Gibson defends his new film, The Passion, about Jesus's last 12 hours, and Mr. Drabinsky defends his visual translation to video and DVD, The Gospel of John, in exactly the same way: I was faithful to the text.
And they are reasonably faithful, apparently. Mr. Drabinsky's literalist version of the Gospel of John, financed by the far-right, evangelical Visual Bible International Corporation, is in serviceable Americanese and follows to the letter the Good News Bible, a decent, if far from perfect translation.
Mr. Gibson's as-yet-unreleased film has dialogue entirely in Aramaic, Latin (Koine Greek would have been better), and a bit of Hebrew with, it is promised, no subtitles. This, for most audiences, should be about as helpful as if it had been dubbed in Xhosa, for they will effectively be watching a silent movie with peculiar on-stage sound effects. But faithful.
That is just the problem. The Fourth Gospel is part of a nasty exchange of polemics between two sects of Judaism (something the prologue of Mr. Drabinsky's production recognizes fleetingly). This obscure argument would have mere curiosity value except for two huge magnifiers.
(Anthony Jenkins/ The Globe and Mail)
First, these two sects were the only viable survivors from among the two or three dozen Jewish sects that had flourished in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple era. Then, in 70 AD, Rome destroyed the Temple and nearly levelled Jerusalem. Of all the forms of Judaism, only the descendants of the Pharisees adapted sufficiently to survive: The main group became the founders of modern Judaism, and a second bunch, a slightly off-brand set, the followers of Yeshua of Nazareth, became the forebears of Christianity.
Even so, the rivalry of these two groups would have been merely a cat fight in a Middle Eastern sandbox had not the Roman Empire turned Christian in the fourth century, a win for the Yeshua crowd. Suddenly, arcane polemics of the first century AD were broadcast empire-wide and eventually worked their influence on governmental policies in dozens of Western countries for several centuries.
And, second, the impact of the fight between the two tattered forms of late first-century Judaism was greatly magnified because each group was not just monotheistic, but fanatically exclusivist. Considered as an entire system of belief, there is no such thing as a nice monotheism. How could there be? Monotheism associates the One True God with one set of people, its tribe or its converts, and the god of any other people is traif (non-kosher). It either has to be destroyed (by destroying its adherents) or, at a minimum, marked down as misled, mistaken, or non-existent. So, when projected upon the big screen of world history, tiny fights between monotheistic sects of the late first century become huge, life-threatening harangues.
Christianity and Judaism have managed their uneasy mutual survival because the pastoral leaders of these religions have mostly been realistic. In day-to-day teaching, they have quietly rewritten each of their sets of sacred texts to highlight the generous and to downplay the more vicious aspects of their exclusivisms.
Thus, for example, Christian pastors spend a lot of time on the noble and generous Beatitudes and rarely mention that Jesus of Nazareth not only never intentionally preached to Gentiles (non-Jews), but actually compared them to dogs (see Mark 7:24-28.) And in study groups, modern rabbis spend their time on the benign teachings of Hillel and Akiba, but rarely parse the Eighteen Benedictions (the 18 curses against heretics, especially Christians) that originated in the late first century and continued to be said in some Sephardic rites well into the 20th century.
Of course, in none of these cases do the religious leaders admit what they are actually doing: gentling the sacred texts by being unfaithful to them. In seminars, sermons, homilies, they buff the hard and hateful parts off their sacred writings under the guise of reinterpreting them. We all tolerate each other a bit more as a result.
Of the Four Gospels, the Gospel of John is the closest to being hate literature. Granted, it contains some lovely writing, but its basic narrative -- and a very strong narrative it is -- shows the mainline Pharisees and "the Jews" (or, as Mr. Drabinsky often has it, the "Jewish authorities") as being responsible for the death of Jesus. The Romans get off lightly and the Jews take almost all the blame.
Historically, this led to the lunatic charge of deicide (god-killing) against the Jews and their descendants: lunatic because the Christian scheme of things requires that Jesus's blood be shed to complete God's plan for the salvation of true believers, and slagging a rival religious group for its implementation of God's will is simply schizophrenic discourse.
Nevertheless, the charge of deicide against the Jews, when magnified by the power of the Roman Empire and later by various Christian national states, cost the lives of tens of thousands -- probably hundreds of thousands -- of Jews. Killing the Christ-killers is one of the products of the Gospel of John.
Why would anyone want to be faithful to such a text? It can be redeemed by informed, discriminating and gentle scholarship. But, to film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Garth, Mel, you're missing the point. To claim faithfulness to the text of the fourth Gospel is not a defence of your films.
Donald Harman Akenson, recipient of the Molson laureateship for contribution to Canadian culture, is the author of Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, and of Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus.
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