Bad little boys: the children of 'The Passion'.

They are for children, these Gospels. They're for children, they're for old people, they're for everybody in between." So claimed Mel Gibson in rebuttal to a group of academics who challenged his movie, The Passion of the Christ, on historical and theological grounds (Peter Boyer, "The Jesus War," New Yorker, September 15, 2003). Despite Gibson's conviction that the Gospels are for children, his version of the Gospel story most certainly is not. Its R-rated violence and gore put it more in line with the conventions of the horror movie than the biblical epic.

One of the ways The Passion--following The Omen, Pet Sematary, and other classic supernatural fright films--intends to shock and horrify viewers is with its disturbing images of evil children. Of course, the exploration of the "unnatural" is what sells horror movies. In the case of The Passion, the depiction of demonic children is meant to convey theological meanings as well as to shock the audience.

From their first appearance in The Passion, children are cast in a number of demonic roles. Two small boys playing in the street encounter a guilt-stricken Judas; they taunt and bite him as their faces morph into demonic forms. ("Away from me, you little Satans!" is Judas's cry.) Later, a pack of ten boys chases Judas up the hill to the site of his suicide, screaming, hitting, spitting, and throwing stones at him while shadowed by an androgynous Devil figure. And in a scene that presents the Devil as a kind of unholy Madonna, Satan moves within the crowd at Jesus' scourging while clutching an "infant" to its bosom. The child, held in a breast-feeding position and tenderly stroking Satan's cheek with a pudgy arm, suddenly turns to the viewer (and to the gaze of the badly beaten Christ) to reveal a sneering demonic face.

Masculine, rebellious, demonic: these children mirror the evil adults in the film. Like the hated Jewish authorities and the sadistic Roman torturers, these urchins run in packs and inflict physical pain. Their eyes are sadistically attracted to horror ("He's bleeding!" they scream. "Look! Blood!"); they delight in gore.

A few "good" children also appear in the film. After encountering the demon baby, we see in flashback Mary's memory of Jesus as a cherubic curly-haired toddler, playing, falling to the ground, crying, and being scooped up into his mother's arms. Next viewers are shown Veronica's small daughter weeping on her mother's shoulder in anticipation of Jesus passing their home on his way to Golgotha. This girl hands her mother the cup of water Veronica will offer Jesus, and hides her face behind a pillar to avoid glimpsing the bleeding man. And when Simon of Cyrene is enlisted to carry Jesus' cross, he too is accompanied by a young girl. "Abba, Abba!" cries Simon's daughter, echoing Jesus' cry to his father, while burying her head in her father's robes. Simon commands, "Stay here; wait for me," and she obediently turns back.

Feminine, submissive, helpful: these children mimic the adults who have authority over them. Like her mother, Veronica's daughter weeps for Jesus and offers water to the dying man. Like Simon, his daughter regards the bloody Christ with a mixture of puzzlement and revulsion. Both daughters hide their eyes from the same horrors that fascinate the demon-boys.

Traditionally, Christian theology has expressed a complex attitude toward children. Christian salvation, of course, came through the birth of a child. The theological tradition has presented children as a blessing, a comfort, and sacrament of God's grace, as well as the inheritors of original sin. With the exception of Jesus, the tradition does not present children either as simply holy or simply evil. Hollywood, though, is fond of images of demon-children.

In this sense, The Passion of the Christ presents a highly Manichaean view of children: they are either taunting, sneering demons or submissive imitators of virtuous adult behavior. These behaviors are grounded in gender difference: all of the demon-children are boys, while the "good" children are girls (with the exception of the boy Jesus, whose behavior is markedly different from that of the other male children). The film's portrayal of children is a microcosm of its portrayal of the adult world, a dichotomized realm of good and evil without moral ambiguity, and in that world it is the evil children that come most vividly to life.

The Passion is suffused with a sense of the inherited sinfulness surging through the small bodies of children. Screen-writers Mel Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald combine the doctrine of original sin as an ontological stain on the soul with a belief in rebellious disobedience as the particular manifestation of sin. The burden of original sin takes on a demonic character in the rebellious child; accordingly, the unruly boys who taunt Judas are physically transformed into devils by the magic of special effects.

The movie's emphasis on Christ's redemptive suffering has a long history and its proper place in Christian thought. But the idea of atonement has always been balanced by another mystery: that salvation has also come to us in the form of a crying, dependent, suckling newborn. You will not find that balance in Gibson's film: the scenes of "good" children are fewer, and have less dramatic power. As a result, The Passion seems to replace the innocence of children, once secured by Christ's sacrifice, with disturbing images of the demonic. Satan's suckling of the demonic child is not juxtaposed with a Madonna scene; there is no depiction of a divine baby who is God incarnate, sent to save humanity from its sins. Redemption comes from the passion of Christ, not the incarnation of Christ.

Gibson and Fitzgerald might have presented a very different vision of children, for there are alternative views of children in the film's main textual sources, the Gospels and Anne Catherine Emmerich's The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Although children do not figure in the Passion narratives themselves, throughout the rest of the Gospels they appear in the sayings of Jesus: "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven" (Mk 10:14, Mt 19:14, Lk 18:16); "unless you change and become like children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 18:3); and "whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me" (Mt 18:5). Although children play a few minor roles in Emmerich's narrative, there is nothing like Gibson's demonic children. Rather, a child--Joseph as a boy, it turns out--appears to Emmerich throughout her visions of Jesus' Passion. In Emmerich, the child brings comfort, assuaging and redeeming her pain.

For a director who has been so outspoken about his film's historical and scriptural authenticity, Gibson's vision of children is profoundly unbiblical. The children of The Passion do not resemble those spoken of by Jesus. They aren't predominantly something to "become like," nor are they something to welcome. When it comes to children, it's not the Gospel Gibson has taken his cues from, but Hollywood.

Elizabeth A. Musselman is an adjunct professor of theology at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School.