Anti-Semitism in 'The Passion': a rabbi reflects on Mel Gibson & the Gospels.

Mel Gibson has fashioned the most successful Passion play of all time. His film, The Passion of the Christ, is weak in its presentation of Jesus' teaching, but is a powerful retelling of the Gospel stories, complete with miracles, cosmic portents, and signs--though it is bloody and bordering on the sadomasochistic. The film is gripping and emotionally wrenching, but it focuses one-sidedly on the suffering and death of Jesus and hardly deals with the Resurrection.

The Passion will be seen by tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of people--that is, by far more viewers than all previous Passion plays combined. The audience will therefore include many more people than have participated in the laborious, painstaking task of rearticulating Christian theology to stop it from spreading hateful images of Jewry. The film is likely to reach many more clergy and active Christians than were reached by all the statements, books, films, and conferences held to end stereotypical, demeaning interpretations of Judaism--one of the main foci of Christian dialogue with Jews for more than a half century. Whether the film will roll back sixty years of effort to theologically reconstruct Christianity in order that it no longer serve as a source of hatred (or justification for hatred) against Jews remains to be seen. One hopes that the American spirit of democratic respect for fellow human beings and disdain for hatred will defeat the film in this regard. In America, hopefully, even those devout Christians who love the film's telling of the Passion will mentally distance themselves or block out the rage at the Jews that the film evokes.

Like the classic Passion plays, The Passion is primarily built on Gospel accounts, but combines differing elements from all four Gospels to heighten the hatefulness of the Jews. The Gospels refer to Jesus' flogging but do not portray it. In Matthew and Mark, Pilate has Jesus scourged and hands him over to be crucified. In Luke, Pilate offers to let Jesus off with a flogging but is shouted down by the crowd, which insists on crucifixion. (The text gives no indication that Jesus is actually flogged.) Only John separates the flogging from the Crucifixion, and portrays Pilate again offering to let off Jesus with that first punishment only--but Pilate is overruled by the shouting Jewish mob. Gibson follows John. However, Gibson first represents and expands the horrific beating and torture--to make all the more cruel the Jewish insistence that Jesus be further tormented to death by crucifixion.

The external source material in the film systematically heightens the culpability and the inhuman hardheartedness of the Jews and their leaders. Gibson inserts an androgynous Satan into the Jewish group urging Jesus' death, literally putting Jews in league with the devil. Only Matthew has Pilate's wife urge the Roman governor to "have nothing to do with an innocent man." (The other Gospels do not mention her at all.) Gibson turns this fleeting reference into a portrait of Claudia, a good Roman who pleads with her husband to save Jesus, anguishes over Jesus' suffering, and brings a white fabric to wipe up his blood--all to highlight the Romans' compassion for Jesus and their reluctance to kill him, as compared with the Jews, who are hard and unyielding. Only John--and Gibson--have Pilate declare to the Jews who wish to execute Jesus, "Take him away and try him by your own law." Only John and Gibson have Jesus console Pilate by stating, "It is he who has delivered me to you [that is, the Jews] who has the greater sin." Only Gibson (borrowing here and in other places from Anne Catherine Emmerich, a nineteenth-century teacher of contempt) outdoes John in graphically heaping up Jewish responsibility and absolving the Romans. Gibson alone has the Jews fling Jesus in chains off a cliff as another of the hideous torments inflicted before the Crucifixion.

The whole film is a flagrant violation of Vatican II's declaration Nostra aetate, which stated that "what happened in his Passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living ... nor upon the Jews of today." Furthermore, as Professor Michael Cook has pointed out, the film violates the U.S. bishops' conference 1988 Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatization of the Passion. That document states that the Jews should not be presented as bloodthirsty or as Jesus' implacable enemies; that Gospel elements with potentially negative impact for the image of the Jews should not be used; that modern scholarship should be employed; and that, above all, Jesus and the apostles should be clearly portrayed as Jews. With countless uses and abuses of iconographic techniques, Gibson's The Passion represents Jesus, his apostles, and his family as "Christians" (that is, better looking, kind and compassionate, sensitive to pain, trusting in God), whereas the Jewish leadership and the Jews are depicted as "Jews" (that is, long- or hook-nosed, diabolically cruel and unfeeling, driven by power, and oblivious of God). Despite the fact that the Roman soldiers do the dirty work, on balance, the Jews in the film are less human than the Romans.

Under the circumstances, the failure of the U.S. bishops to condemn the film is disappointing. One understands that they may have been preoccupied with the church's current internal scandal, or fearful of Gibson suing, or reluctant to get in the way of a box-office juggernaut. And, to be sure, the French Roman Catholic bishops as well as important American Catholic scholars have spoken out against the film's portrayal of the Jews. That contrast makes the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' official review of the film truly troubling. By calling The Passion "a deeply personal work of devotional art ... unflinching in its brutality and penetrating in its iconography of God's supreme love for humanity," the conference sanitized the film. The review's statement that "concerning the issue of anti-Semitism ... Jewish people are at no time blamed collectively for Jesus' death" is wrong. Rhetorically, this statement may be true--no one condemns all the Jews verbally for doing the dastardly deed--but the dramatizations, highlighting, body language, and images communicate, in sum, the message of Jewish culpability.

Admittedly, Gibson caught a break from America's culture wars. Many devout Christians--even some Jewish Orthodox rabbis and conservative cultural spokesmen--defended the film. They read the public argument over The Passion as a struggle between film evangelism and secularists. They believe that antireligious filmmakers and cultural tastemakers hate The Passion because it is devout in attitude and powerful in its presentation of Scripture. Apparently some bishops themselves viewed the film through that lens. But the essence of pluralism and the moral challenge of the promise made in Nostra aetate is to preserve the powerful articulation of God's presence in the Christian narrative without letting it extend into teaching contempt or serving as a cover for hatred. The Passion willfully crossed that line in order to degrade Jews; sadly, the official Christian leaderships in the United States failed to defend that line.

Dramatization without degradation is the fine line that all Christians will have to draw in order to repent for past mistreatment of Jews. Remember, the only true repentance is one that prevents recurrence of past evil behavior. Perhaps this means that sometimes Christians must pass up a powerful tool for preaching Christianity if that tool might harm innocent bystanders or repeat past crimes against Jesus' family and people. Therefore, no simple republication of the general guidelines for teaching the Gospels (in which the bishops call for every attempt to avoid the type of treatment of the Passion that Gibson actually gives) can atone for the sin of silence in addressing the film itself.

This brings us to the three theological challenges posed by the film to all Christians who witness their faith in this postmodern world, as well as to Jews of good will who are striving to undo almost two millennia of hostility and hatred. The Passion is an assault on the half-century effort to prevent the gospel of love from serving as a sanctuary for hatred of Jews, in order to create a partnership of these two Abrahamic faiths going forward. The fact is that the film is substantially based on the Gospels. The Gospels themselves, literally understood, generate hatred (and worse) vis-a-vis Jews, living and dead. The consensus of modern scholarship holds that the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts but rather poetic/theological renderings. They are the outcome of historical revisions reflecting the painful separation of the two faiths, and an attempt to whitewash the Romans in order to make the new covenant faith more acceptable to gentiles. The scholarly consensus also discounts the extreme anger in the Gospels' language as reflecting an overheated, overstated inner-Jewish contentiousness (which is distorted out of context when exploited by gentile Christians to portray Jews in this cruel way).

The Holocaust dramatized how these vicious portraits can be used to set up the Jews for genocide and to justify mass murder; at the least, these degrading accounts encouraged Christian bystanding. After the Shoah, the leadership of the various mainstream Christian churches in the West determined to remove this cancer of hatred and began what is surely one of the great religious purifications of all time. Vatican II's Nostra aetate was the bellwether of that movement.

There were two choices before the assembled bishops. The council could have communicated the polemical aspects of the Gospels and the facts of modern Scripture research. But the council (and to this day, the authorities) was afraid to undermine the simple faith of the masses. Alternatively, the council could have directly challenged the Gospels' own adversos Judaeos tradition as an example of the texts of terror that every religious tradition carries from the past--and distanced them. The opposition of the traditionalists and the fear of disillusioning the faithful led to a third choice. The council declaration hinted that the Jews never forfeited their election, and combined this compliment with a call/promise to teach the Gospels in such a way as to present the Jews not as cursed or reprobates of God. This tack left the Gospels' authority untouched. However, it left open the door for people like Mel Gibson, Tridentines who reject Vatican II's reforms, to continue to use the Gospel story to portray Jews as the hateful, spiritually decadent, and blind people who killed God, albeit not fully knowing what they did.

The bishops' failure to check this misuse puts the spotlight back on the Gospels. Read literally, they are primary sources of hatred and anti-Semitism. In order to atone for past sins and to prevent future evil acts based on Gospel writings, the bishops and the leaders of other churches must confront the New Testament (via modern scholarship or theological critique) or stand convicted of continuing the evils of the past.

The fact, as I believe, that most Americans will not act on the Gibson/Gospels portrayal of the Jews does not get Christianity off the hook. Thank God, there are hundreds of millions of democrats, secularists, etc., who resist the uncorrected, pejorative aspects of the narratives in the Gospels. Among such people, awareness of the Gospels/Gibson as the source of a recurrent virus of hatred will hurt Christianity's credibility. The equation is simple but devastating. The more devout you are, the more likely you are to ignore modern scholarship and condemn a whole people unjustly and generate hateful images of others.

The second question is that the film overwhelmingly concentrates the Christian message on the Crucifixion, that is, the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection is hardly dealt with and barely referenced--although clearly the triumph of life is the central message of Christianity (and Judaism). Were we in the polemic stages of relationships between Jews and Christians, I could argue that this film turns Christianity into a faith focused on death. The Evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic approbation of this movie derives from the film's glorification of Jesus' suffering for the sake of the forgiveness of human sins. But the psychology of a religious focus on the Crucifixion glorifies martyrdom as against religious living. Historically, the focus on suffering privileged religious asceticism and led to denial of this-worldliness, placing the emphasis on human sinfulness and the inability to repent. Is that where Christianity wants to go at a time when the chance to savor this world, to improve it, and to empower humans to serve God out of strength is at an all-time high? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, where are you when we need you?!

Do Christians really want to insist on the centrality of satisfaction theology, the teaching that God demands the tortured death of God's son as the price of forgiveness of human sin? What does this say about the God of love of the New Testament that such infinite suffering is the divinely required payment for forgiveness? Ah, you say, but God takes on this suffering voluntarily out of love for humans. But what kind of love tortures oneself and one's beloved son out of love for another? I must add that it is truly chutzpah to hold this model up while speaking disparagingly of the God of the Old Testament as a God of wrath--when according to Jewish understanding, this God accepts the individual's wholehearted repentance willingly and lovingly, without demanding sacrifice or the torture killing of animals, humans, or the son of God.

Finally, the film distorts the Christian faith in yet another way. Despite the extended cruel lashings and sadistic crucifixion, Jesus is portrayed as almost untouched. He not only says the words of forgiveness with equanimity as if he is not in pain; he says the words "My God, my God why have you forsaken me" as if he is stating a triumphant praise. The film comes close to reviving the old Monophysite heresy--as if Jesus is totally divine in nature. Neither his faith, capacity for suffering, nor his serenity is touched by the supposed agony he is undergoing. It is almost as if, as a divine being, he looks on this breaking human body as a foreign object.

Gibson has managed to obscure the deepest, most powerful teaching of the Gospels on the Crucifixion. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark (but not Luke or John) reveal the dark, bitter truth and the true lesson of the Crucifixion. The agony was so intense, the pain so unendurable, that Jesus broke under the strain. To religious Christians this means that even God on the cross cracked under the pain and cried out in utter despair that God had forsaken him and that faith is lost. Then the true lesson is not that God is above all this pain and that human suffering in imitation of God is to be glorified as heroic. On the contrary, the lesson is that all who love God and love the human being in the image of God must do everything to prevent any more people from being put on the cross. We must revolt to overcome evil and take people down from the cross, lest future suffering servants be so overwhelmed by torture as to lose the faith and hope in God for whose sake the servant underwent the ultimate agony in the first place.

Christians--and all believers--should reject the glorification of suffering and rise to protest. With God, they must labor to correct a world in which too many innocents are crucified by poverty, hunger, oppression, war, and sickness. On God's behalf, all believers must strive to take away the power of tyrants and nations to abuse the innocent.

True, suffering may sometimes ennoble. When there is no choice, the innocent may bear up under the strain and take refuge in the everlasting arms of God. But this response should always be a last resort. That Jesus returned love for hatred and blessing for torture should not be allowed to obscure his message. In life and in death, one should love, heal, rescue, and protect humans first--for as Jesus said, what you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg is president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, and the author of the forthcoming For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Jewish Publication Society).