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.

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