The gospel according to Mel: although not yet released, Mel Gibson's movie the Passion is already embroiled in a heated public controversy. Is it anti-Semitic and theologically flawed or simply the greatest movie ever made?

THIS YEAR THE MOVIE GRABBING THE MOST HEADLINES didn't have a major star in front of the camera, hadn't been picked up by a studio, and wasn't even expected to arrive in town until next Easter.

Still, by September everyone from Hollywood to Vatican City had weighed in on Mel Gibson's unfinished and (largely) unseen film about the last 12 hours of Jesus' life. The Passion has generated praise and protest from evangelicals, scholars, columnists, cardinals, and the op-ed pages of major journals and papers. As Gibson's marketing director noted, "You can't buy that kind of publicity."

The buzz began with a March Wall Street Journal article singing hosannas to Gibson's $25 million epic, which the director promised would be the most authentic and historically accurate film ever made of the Passion. To achieve this historical realism Gibson would immerse viewers in the graphic violence of Jesus' torture and execution, have his actors speak in the ancient languages of first-century Palestine, and rely on the gospels as the source for his script--embellished somewhat by the dramatic visions of two 17th-century nuns.

The following week a less complimentary piece in the New York Times Magazine reported that Gibson belonged to a traditionalist Catholic church that rejected Vatican II, the council that repudiated the long-standing libel that Jews are "Christ-killers" and guilty of deicide. The article also reported that Gibson's father was a Holocaust denier who believed that the council had been hijacked by a gang of Jews and Free Masons. (Gibson himself, it turns out, argues that secular Jews have long been trying to pin the blame for the Holocaust on the Catholic Church.) What did this mean, then, for the film Gibson was making about the Passion of Jesus?

As part of their struggle against such unholy critics Gibson and his production firm, Icon, showed a rough cut of the film to select audiences of political and theological conservatives. Columnists Cal Thomas and Peggy Noonan, movie critic Michael Medved, and talk show host Rush Limbaugh all loved it. Ted Haggard (president of the National Association of Evangelicals) got a peek and declared, "Gibson is the Michelangelo of this generation." Michael Novak wrote in the Weekly Standard, "It is the most powerful movie I have ever seen."

Still, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, had to wait until August for Icon to agree to show him the film. When he complained that even in its present form it "will fuel the hatred, bigotry, and antiSemitism that many responsible churches have worked hard to repudiate," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, slammed what he called Foxman's "politicized attack" on the film.

Meanwhile, Gibson, who thinks the papacy has been vacant since Pius XII, began showing clips of the film to select members of the Catholic hierarchy. Cardinals Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia and Francis George of Chicago both got a preview, as did Archbishop Joseph Chaput of Denver and the Vatican's Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos and Archbishop John Foley. George thought it was faithful to the gospels. Hoyos praised the film as a "triumph of art." Still, Cardinal Walter Kasper of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews stated that Hoyos' comments were "purely personal" and "carried no official status." The Vatican, like the U.S. bishops' office, would wait for the movie's release before offering its imprimatur or condemnation.

I AGREE WITH THE POLICY OF NOT REVIEWING A FILM I HAVEN'T seen and will reserve my final judgment until Gibson s movie (in whatever form) is released next Ash Wednesday. Still, public debates about the movie and its historicity, theology, and potential anti-Semitic impact raise pertinent issues.

First, there is the matter of Gibson's biblical naivete. Gibson has described The Passion as "the most authentic and biblically accurate film about Jesus' death," and it's clear he believes he can bring the historical events of the Passion onto the screen by translating the gospel accounts into a film. For Gibson the gospels are history, indeed the most realistic and authentic history possible.

Gibson believes the gospels are written by eyewitnesses and offer a realistic and consistent record of the events of Jesus' life and death. He believes he can compose an accurate, realistic, and authentic account of the historical events of Jesus' Passion by pulling together different elements of the four gospels as he sees fit--or in his case, as he believes the Holy Ghost has inspired him to do.

Since he began discussing his movie, Gibson has argued that it "is meant to tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible," he told Bill O'Reilly in January. But all along he has assumed that any child can read these gospel texts and know exactly what they mean. And he has assumed that he can tell that historical and biblical truth by patching together gospel accounts in whatever manner he chooses.

That hasn't been good Catholic theology since long before Vatican II. Gibson fails to acknowledge that the gospels were not composed as history, are not eyewitness accounts, and cannot be understood without the interpretive lens provided by the faith community we call church.

Second, there is the matter of Gibson's naivete about the anti-Semitic potential of Passion dramas, especially one so graphically violent as his. Gibson and his supporters argue that he is not a religious bigot and that he is simply telling the truth about Jesus' Crucifixion.

Whether Gibson, Haggard, Donohue and others are fight in saying the film is not even potentially anti-Semitic, the Oscar-winning director is wrong if he believes that just repeating the gospel accounts of the Passion cannot inflame and incite anti-Semitic passions.

For nearly two millennia Christians have dramatized the story of the Passion in ways that fueled anti-Semitic bigotry and violence. Time and again Christian have incorporated the gospel accounts into Passion plays that blame Jews for the crime of deicide and justify all sorts of persecution. It is because the gospel accounts can be put to such dangerous use that the U.S. bishops developed a set of criteria for Passion dramatizations.

FINALLY, THERE IS THE QUESTION OF the film's violence. Everyone who has seen clips of Gibson's movie agrees that it is an extraordinarily violent portrayal of Jesus' Passion.

But as Peter Boyer points out in a September New Yorker article, "violence is Gibson's natural film language," and he seeks to create an authentic experience of the Passion by having Jesus "unsparingly pummeled, flayed, kicked, and otherwise smitten from first to last." As the director reports, "I didn't want to see Jesus looking really pretty. I wanted to mess up one of his eyes, destroy it."

And here is my concern. In movie after movie--the Lethal Weapon series, Conspiracy Theory, Braveheart, Payback, and The Patriot--Gibson's protagonist suffers excruciating torture at the hands of his enemies, inevitably provoking mayhem that obliterates the forces of evil.

This theology of redemptive violence embedded in Gibson's most "realistic" films is a central tenet of American cinema. We see it in classics like Shane and the contemporary films of Eastwood and Schwarzenegger. It's "I'll be back" theology; the theology of the avenging angel.

And when someone whose movies are shot through with this theology makes a film about the Passion of Christ and believes that violence is the language of authenticity, there may be reason to pause. Boyer notes in the New Yorker that Gibson "perceives the Passion as a heroic action story," and that the director "had once said he wasn't interested in making a religious movie, and in The Passion he hadn't. He was making a war movie."

Indeed, when Boyer describes the Resurrection scene in Gibson's film (which he has seen), the reporter notes that "Gibson's resurrected Christ rises in the tomb with a steely glare, then strides purposefully into the light, to the insistent beat of martial drums." It's hard to imagine this Christ asking God to forgive us, for we knew not what we were doing.

It's not so hard to imagine him saying, "I told you I'd be back."

A GROUP OF SCHOLARS EXAMINES MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION

Concerned by media stories about The Passion, members of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs and the Anti-Defamation League assembled an ad hoc group of nine scholars (five Catholic and four Jewish) with impeccable theological and ecumenical credentials and attempted to set up a dialogue with Gibson's representatives.

Father William Fulco, SJ., who had translated Gibson's screenplay into Latin and Aramaic, assured the group that the script was completely in line with Catholic and Jewish teaching and not in any way anti-Semitic

But shortly before Easter someone sent Father John Pawlikowski (a member of the group) a copy of Gibson's screenplay, and when the scholars reviewed the text they discovered a number of historical and theological errors and concluded that the script violated official Catholic teachings about dramatizations of the Passion and worried that a film based on this version of the script would promote anti-Semitic sentiments.

Professor Mary Boys said, "All the way through [the script] the Jews are portrayed as bloodthirsty. We're really concerned that this could be one of the great crises of Christian-Jewish relations."

The group submitted their findings to Gibson's firm (Icon Productions) in a confidential 18-page report, replete with appendixes citing official church documents, and waited for a response.

The answer came in May when Icon threatened to sue the scholars and the U.S. bishops for extortion unless they returned the "stolen" copies of Gibson's script and kept silent about their report.

The scholars returned the copies and did not release their confidential document, which was never intended as a public critique of a film they had not seen. But (in spite of news reports to the contrary) they did not retreat from their position.

In June four of the Catholic scholars released a brief statement affirming these points, and in July Paula Fredriksen, one of the Jewish scholars, wrote an extended piece in the New Republic detailing the group's work and touching on some of the major historical, theological, and ecumenical concerns they had about the film.

Gibson got the languages wrong. (Roman soldiers and Pilate would have spoken Greek, not Latin.) He based his work in part on extra-biblical sources like the visions of 17th-century mystics (whose writings have been criticized as anti-Semitic). He violated basic principles of biblical interpretation and church teaching on anti-Semitism when culling material from different gospel accounts. He misread and sometimes contravened material found in the gospels. And (curious for someone so committed to historical accuracy) he seems not to have consulted any biblical scholars on this matter.

Throughout the summer Gibson and Icon continued to insist that neither he nor his film were anti-Semitic and blasted academic critics as "revisionists." Indeed, Gibson maintains that resistance to this movie is coming from demonic forces. "There have been a lot of obstacles thrown in the way of this picture," he told the Wall Street Journal. "And I understand it's the other realm warring." And to Bill O'Reilly, Gibson reported 'When you touch this subject, it does have a lot of enemies."

By Patrick McCormick, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.