|
|
February 20, 2004
Passions over Passion
Editorial
Mel Gibson's massive epic of the death of Jesus opens in theatres
next week. The Passion of the Christ has received more pre-opening
buzz than any movie since Gigli because it is said to reflect
ancient, seemingly discarded notions of Jewish complicity in the
death of the Christian messiah.
Gibson and his family belong to a sect of breakaway Christians called
the Old Catholics. Though the sect broke from the Roman Catholic
church a century ago, the most notable divergence of theology occurs
in relation to the Second Vatican Council, a Catholic conclave in
the early 1960s, which massively reassessed the church's teachings
on a variety of issues, most notably, for the purposes of this editorial,
attitudes toward Jews.
The Old Catholics, apparently, reject the modernization of liturgy
and other changes made at that time, clinging to ancient interpretations
of events, including a sort of group guilt in the death of Jesus.
Though Gibson has reportedly made some changes to the original cut
of his film, the few who have seen it so far report that mobs of
chanting Jews calling for the death of Jesus leave a clear impression
of who was to blame. Similarly, reports suggest Pontius Pilate,
the Roman Empire's agent in the Holy Land, comes off in the film
as a sympathetic character whose execution of Jesus was a reluctant
accession to Jewish demands for Jesus's death.
Ancient religious texts may not translate easily into the literal
medium that is contemporary filmmaking, and there can be little
doubt that issues around this pivotal event in Christian theology
remain contested. As a cover story in Newsweek reports this
week, most of what is known of the crucifixion and resurrection
of Jesus comes from the first four books of the New Testament known
as the Gospels. They were written by disciples of Jesus in the decades
following the events in question. Not only does the frailty of individual
memory come into play, but the necessity of mythologizing the messianic
figure of Jesus, who, by the time of the Gospels' writing, was the
centre of an emergent new religion - meaning the narrators had particular
agendas. Moreover, political conditions at the time meant that the
Gospels were written by subjects of the Roman Empire and, as Newsweek
posited, little advantage could be gained by placing the blame for
deicide on the most powerful political force the world had known
and which remained the dominant force during the writers' lives.
Relations between Christians and Jews have always been difficult,
to say the least. In Catholic Europe, particularly in Poland, Easter
the holy day marking the resurrection of Jesus was
historically a time when priests enflamed anti-Jewish sentiments
through accusations of deicide, leading to those not-so-spontaneous
uprisings known as pogroms.
Officially, that all changed after the Second Vatican Council, which
adopted a rather more nuanced approach to the crucifixion story,
one which placed the blame on specific Jews, rather than
all Jews. Some of the few who have seen Gibson's film before
its release date suggest it negates this subtle difference in blame.
At Prof. Gadi Wolfsfeld's public lecture in Vancouver Sunday (In
February 2004 Archives, see Feb. 20/04, Cover), an audience member
asked if Vancouver's Jews should see the movie or boycott it. Wolfsfeld
noted that boycotts might give the film added cachet, and suggested
a film in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew with English subtitles might
have limited appeal in any case.
But the film comes at a time when anti-Semitism as a global phenomenon
is rising to alarming levels, even evidenced by seemingly arbitrary
scrawlings by graffiti artists in Steveston (In February 2004 Archives,
see Feb. 20/04, Anti-Semitism). Christian anti-Semitism, rooted
partly in the crucifixion story, has always been a bit of a mystery
to Jews, partly because it falls outside our own theological discussions.
We've never been entirely sure what to do with the Christ story
in general, let alone its climactic chapter of which we are accused
of playing a central part.
We may be tempted to boycott the film or ignore it, as we have done
with many similar aspersions. Burying our heads in sand, however,
never seems a particularly effective approach. Gibson's film promises
to be a lavish retelling of the oldest and most tenacious anti-Semitic
idea. Ignoring it hardly seems the prudent path. But neither should
we overestimate our ability to debunk 2,000 years of theological
assumptions.
Let The Passion of the Christ engage us in a debate with
our Christian friends, beginning with the role of some Jews in the
death of the Christian messiah, but let's take it further, and force
a debate over the manner in which Christians have interpreted those
events and used them to engage in theology-based anti-Semitism.
^TOP
|
|