Appraisal of Mel Gibson's film on the Passion of Christ

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ: Has it relevance for religious education?

There have been mixed responses to Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. People have reported that the extensive and gratuitous violence was repugnant. Others said the film was a moving experience; they felt that it “rings true” and showed the “enormity of Jesus suffering and sacrifice”; from here, it is a short step to feeling guilty, as if we were partly responsible – “Jesus needed to suffer for me.” These feelings can be associated with the view that it was the intensity of Jesus’ suffering for the sins of the world that brought salvation. This is a distorted view of the core Gospel message of Christianity.

However people perceive a film initially, and whatever the thoughts and emotions it prompts, and whatever the intentions of the film-maker and any artistic qualities in the work, a film about Jesus (like a Gospel narrative) inevitably implies a theology. An implied view of the meaning of Jesus is embedded, and this in turn implies a view of salvation through Christ. It is at this level that I have significant problems with Gibson’s film. The film “rings true” to Gibson’s interpretation of the history and theology of Jesus, but it is his interpretation that is questionable.

Christian theology, and especially Scripture scholarship and historical studies, provide a different interpretation of the meaning of Jesus that is more faithful to the early Christian tradition. The Gospels, the principal source of information about the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, were written some 40-100 years after his death by authors who were not eyewitnesses to his life. Drawing on the oral and written traditions in the early Christian communities, the Gospels were primarily documents of faith – about the meaning of the resurrected Jesus for believers in the early Church. They were not primarily documentary/historical accounts – an expectation that is part of 20^th century scientific-historical thinking that was unknown to the Gospel authors and their intended audience. While basing their narratives on historical events, the Gospel writers took creative literary liberties to promote the faith of their communities.

The Gospels do not focus very much on Jesus’ suffering as such. They were principally concerned with his message and ministry, with the fidelity in his commitment to the ‘little ones’ even to death, and the vindication of his commitment shown in his resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit into the Christian community. For example, the Gospel of John has a stylised account of the passion where the intentional impression is given of Jesus leading a ‘triumphal procession’ to Calvary.

Following the Gospel tradition, early Christianity developed the Cross as a joyous symbol of Christ’s salvation. It was not until about the 6^th century that the crucifix was introduced with the body of Christ on the cross, and it was only in the 10^th century and later that there was a new devotional interest in the suffering of Christ. While this devotion is still evident in the piety of some cultural groups in Catholicism, and while it was given some prominence in Australian Catholic piety and school religious education in the 1950s, the idea that it was the extent and intensity of Jesus’ suffering that saved the world was never the core Christian understanding of the Gospel message. Mel Gibson’s film really owes more to this mediaeval piety than to New Testament history or theology.

So, while not denying the intense suffering of Jesus and others who died the death of Roman crucifixion, I find Gibson’s film problematic because it has the potential to reinforce a distorted view of Jesus’ life and death, as well as promote a misunderstanding of the Christian notion of salvation through Christ; it can also subtly prompt a view of Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death. In addition, from a cinematic perspective, I found the excessive violence and prolonged brutalisation repulsive; I was concerned about the manipulative effects this could have on those who do not have enough historical and theological information to judge that the film is not historically accurate; it exaggerated the torture of Jesus way beyond what could be realistically expected from the Gospel accounts.

That so many people have gone to see this film makes me realise that there still remains much work to be done to give Christians better access to Theology and Scripture studies. What can be learned about the historical Jesus and the Christ of Christian faith from such studies can not only give a more realistic, arresting and challenging view of Jesus, but an understanding that can inspire personal spirituality and committed action. By comparison, Gibson’s film has little to offer. This is not to dismiss the educational importance of Jesus films, because this genre has been prominent and influential since the 1890s and is a fascinating area of study – but beyond our scope here.

The following collection of materials reflect the views of some who have critiqued the film under 6 headings, together with some information on the background to the production.

The film portrays violence and gore in a sadistic and crude way, almost making them ‘lyrical’, and intentionally manipulating responses to them. Some comments:-

Geza Vermes (retired Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford University): “I am still in a state of shock having sat through two hours of almost uninterrupted gratuitous brutality… I hope I will never be obliged to see something as dreadful again.”

Leon Wieselter (New Republic Online): “The Passion of the Christ is the work of a religious sensibility of remarkable coarseness. It is by turns grossly physical, and grossly magical, childishly literalist, gladly credulous, comically masculine. Gibson’s faith is finally pre-theological, the kind of conviction that abhors thought, superstitiously fascinated by Satan and “the other realm”, a manic variety of Christian folk religion. It is pious pornography.¹”

Franco Zeffirelli (Corriere della Sera): “Gibson is sinisterly attracted to the most unrestrained violence. What conclusion will children in particular be able to draw from the film other than that the Jews were to blame for all that bloodshed? In this way we set ourselves back centuries.”

David Denby (New Yorker): “Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’, not ‘let the little children watch me suffer’. How will parents deal with the pain, terror, and anger that children will doubtless feel as they watch a man flayed and pierced until dead? The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson’s timing couldn’t be more unfortunate: another dose of death-dealing religious fanaticism is the last thing we need”.

Geoff Pevere (Toronto Star): “Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. Gibson’s film career has been anchored in glorification of violence (the Mad Max movies) and in preposterous overstatement of the actual occurrence of violence (the Lethal Weapon movies). Gibson knows the sad Hollywood lesson – for which audiences are ultimately to blame – that glorifying or exaggerating violence is a path to ticket sales. The one thing that differentiates this movie from the many previous films about Jesus is the exaggerated glorification of violence”.

It is insensitive, to say the least, to the question of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus, and leaves itself open if not actually intends to the view that Jews are Christ-Killers: it perpetuates the ‘blood libel’.

United States National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1988): “If one cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the particular gospel element selected or paraphrased will not be offensive or have the potential for negative influence on the audience for whom the presentation is intended, that element cannot, in good conscience, be used”

Adele Steinhartz (New Republic): “Do such films intend to stir up hostile feelings towards Jews, that under certain circumstances might lead to physical violence? No. Do they help to perpetuate certain beliefs and stereotypes that have been implicated in anti-Semitism: Yes. This film has added to the visual library of images in which the Jews are portrayed as conniving, bloodthirsty Christ-killers. The Passion of the Christ is morally careless…”

Dominic Crossan (Beliefnet): “The soft questions are whether Gibson, his film, or even its possible effects are anti-Semitic. He could truthfully say no. The hard question is: what has he, as a conscientious Christian who knows very well that the passion story has repeatedly grounded lethal anti-Jewish prejudice, done to cauterize that potential venom in making this film? The answer: nothing. He has shown careless irresponsibility, culpable negligence, and even depraved indifference….If you juggle with dynamite you are accountable for collateral damage.”

It is historically inaccurate on many counts, partly due to a mix of sources, including the visions of Mary of Agreda (1602-1665) and Anna Catherina Emmerich (1774-1824)². It is imagination rather than history.

Dominic Crossan (Reuters): “Jesus talking to Pontius Pilate in Latin!… I mean, in your dreams. It would have been Greek.” Latin was reserved for official decrees or used by the elite. Most Roman centurions in the Holy Land spoke Greek rather than Latin. The Latin was so badly pronounced in the film that it was almost incomprehensible…”

Geza Vermes: (The Guardian): “ ..the use of Latin and Aramaic in the film. Not only are Pilate and Jesus (!) fluent Latin speakers, but even the soldiers of the Jerusalem garrison, who were most probably Aramaic- and Greek-speaking recruits from Syria, converse happily in a clumsy Latin with Italian Church pronunciation. The Aramaic is mixed with unnecessary Hebraism.”

Lawrence Schiffman (New York University): “Jewish texts ridiculed long hair as something Roman or Greek. A frieze on Rome’s Arch of Titus, erected after Jerusalem was captured in a.d.70 to celebrate the victory, shows Jewish men with short hair taken into captivity.”

Joe Zias (Archeologist, Jerusalem): “Jesus didn’t have long hair. Jewish men in antiquity didn’t have long hair”.

Ben Witherington III (beliefnet/ntgateway): “There are historical oddities. Why is Simon of Cyrenaica not black, which is historically accurate? Did Jesus really know Latin and speak Latin to Pilate? What was Mrs.Pilate doing giving clean linens to Mary and Mary Magdalene to mop up Jesus’ blood? Why was there no proclamation of the centurion ‘surely this is the Son of God’? Why portray Mary Magdalene as the woman caught in adultery, which is unhistorical?”

Joe Zias: “Nobody was physically able to carry the entire cross. It weighed about 350 lb (159 kg). He carried the cross-beam, maximum. Vertical beams were kept permanently in place. They humiliated the crucified victim. They were naked. There was no loin-cloth. He would have been tied or nailed through the wrists, not the hands as shown in the film. There is nothing in the hands but skin and muscle. It will tear.”

Joe Zias: “The Romans did not flog a condemned man to the point of death. They wanted him to stay alive as long as possible after crucifixion, as a deterrent to passersby.”

See The Passion: What’s not in the Bible? (Beliefnet Staff) [This is a detailed analysis: much of the non-scriptural material comes from visionaries like Emmerich.]

It is contextually exclusive of the story of the ministry of Jesus, and of the accounts of his resurrection. Its concentration on the ‘last 12 hours’ is arbitrary and counter to the options taken by the gospel writers and to the agreed focus of contemporary theology.

Kenneth Woodward (NewsWeek): “Gibson leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story that contemporary Christianity now emphasises. His Jesus does not demand a ‘born again’ experience to gain salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons. He doesn’t promote social causes. He doesn’t crusade against discrimination. He doesn’t teach that we all have an inner divinity…Like Jeremiah, his Jesus is a Jewish prophet rejected by the leaders of his own people, and abandoned by his handpicked disciples. Besides taking an awful beating, he is cruelly tempted to despair by a Satan whom millions of church-going Christians no longer believe in, and dies in obedience to a heavenly Father who, by today’s standards, would stand convicted of child abuse.”

Andrew Sullivan (ntgateway): “Theologically, the point is not that Jesus suffered more than any human being ever has on a physical level. It is that his suffering was profound and voluntary and the culmination of a life and a teaching that Gibson essentially omits.”

Theologically it is an attempt to support the theory of ‘displaced retribution’ (or, ‘vicarious atonement’), with the nuance that sacrifice demands suffering, and the more the suffering the better the sacrifice. There is an innuendo (and more) that most human beings now need more suffering.

Dominic Crossan (NT Gateway): “At the time Jesus was born, there was one human being already accepted by millions of people as Divine, Son of God, God, and even God of God. He was also hailed as Lord, Redeemer, Liberator, and even Saviour of the world – the Roman emperor Octavian the Augustus. The core of Roman imperial theology was peace through victory – it has always been and still is the norm or even the cutting edge of civilisation.

Jesus proclaimed the different kingdom of a different God. It was not just imminent but already present. One could enter it by living here below in radical submission to the will of God. His mantra was not peace through victory, but peace through justice. The first century would see a clash between Octavian the Augustus and Jesus the Christ, between two incarnations of divinity, two alternatives for the future of the world, two possibilities for life under opposing visions of transcendence, and therefore, two fundamental options for faith and union with God: peace by violent victory, OR peace by non-violent justice.

We Christians have sought to avoid God’s challenge for two thousand years. The public, legal, official execution of God in Jesus was not particularly abnormal. It was imperially normal. God’s quarrel was and is with civilisation itself. That is why we need the radical vision of a New-Type-of-Kingdom from Jesus and a New-Type of Creation from Paul. We try to avoid saying that God is on a collision course with civilisation. We blame the Jews or at least their top-echelon priesthood. We blame the Romans or at least their lower-echelon governor. We even blame God and his plan of vicarious atonement.

Jesus died from our sins, or better, from our Sin, that is, from the normalcy of human civilisation which historically, has always been unjust, oppressive, and imperial. If Jesus were alive in any capital of any empire from Rome to Washington, he would be eliminated. He died as God’s warning about the normalcy of civilisation.” (For example: 250,000 other Jews were crucified by the Romans in the period of Jesus’ lifetime.)

Paula Fredriksen (New Republic Online): “The Christ that Gibson is selling is not the Christ of the first century scriptures.. Gibson missed the evangelists’ point. Unlike them, he explored, in lurid and lingering detail, how a human body would look if pulped, pummeled, and flayed. Gibson’s Christ is a theological figure whose origins lie in late medieval Europe, who saves not through dying so much as through endless, unspeakable, unbearable suffering.”

Psychologically it portrays almost all of the human race(and not just Jews) as ‘evil, nefarious and diabolical’.

The film is the work of Mel Gibson, and his company, Icon. Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton Gibson, now in mid eighties, belongs to a group that is part of ‘contemporary catholic sectarianism’. It has never accepted Vatican II. It is opposed to any softening of the older monarchical style of the papacy. It is against religious liberty. It refuses ecumenical dialogue. There is much internal division within this large movement. Its flagship is devotion to the Latin mass. One of the best known groups within the movement is the Society of St.Pius X, linked to Marcel Lebebvre (excommunicated). Some extreme units within the movement hold for ‘Sedevacantism’ – they think there has been no true pope since Pius XII, and the roman see is vacant. The overall aim of the movement is to undo Vatican II. Hutton Gibson is prominent in a strong unit of the movement called Alliance for Catholic Tradition which has its church above Malibu in Los Angeles. It is evangelistic for its own version of Catholicism. Mel Gibson is part of this larger mentality, but perhaps is not as extreme in his views as his father has been (though he does fund it substantially). These people are literalists in regard to the church (outside the Roman church, no salvation) and in regard to biblical interpretation (outside the literalist sense, authoritatively upheld by the church, no interpretation). This generally leads them to some kind of anti-Semitism, and to thinking of Jews as ‘perfidious’- there is no salvation for them, and indeed they are responsible for the crucifixion.

This literalist reading of the passion narratives suggests that Caiaphas wished to see Jesus dead, and bullied a weak Roman governor, Pilate, into complying with his design. It was this understanding of events that, historically, was twisted into the doctrine of deicide. It also supported the theory of vicarious atonement. Contemporary Protestant Reform theologians often support this theory, but contemporary Catholic theologians are usually strongly opposed to it, on textual, theoretical, and pastoral grounds. This interpretation of a strong Caiaphas (and of a weak Pilate) is used as the plot of the film.

Support for Gibson and the film has come from well known media groups from the right end of the political continuum. It has come from Zenit (owned by the Legionaires of Christ), from EWTN (and Mother Angelica), from NewsMax (the Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party in the USA). Support has also come from Archbishop Chaput in the USA, from Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos (whose job in the Vatican is to reconcile dissident sectarian groups like the Lefebrvre people). There are allegations of some kind of minimal verbal support from the Pope himself, who has seemingly seen a version of the film. This has been officially denied by the Vatican. The allegation was that the Pope said “it is as it was”. The Vatican has been anxious to deny that this was approval.

Opposition to Gibson and the Passion has come from the publication (e.g. in New York Times) of articles revealing the religious background of the producer, and from a ‘Scholars’ Committee’.

A ‘Scholars’ Committee’ was asked by the person responsible for Christian-Jewish relations within the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) (Eugene Fisher) to look at the film. It included people like John Pawlikowski (University of Chicago), Mary Boys (Union Theological Seminary in New York), Paula Fredriksen (Boston), and Eugene Korn (from the Anti Defamation League). Their view was very critical and negative. ‘Somehow’ they obtained a script of the film. Their report was never sanctioned by any committee of bishops of the USCCB, and an apology for the fact that the script obtained was sent from USCCB to Icon. Too much attention has been given to this, and not enough to the content of the film, now publicly known.

The film develops a plot based on an interpretation of Caiaphas and Pilate that scholars do not accept as history.

Historically, we know a lot about Pilate. First century sources other than our gospels portray him as harsh, insensitive, cruel, guilty of bribery, responsible for numerous executions without trial. He was not a vacillating weakling with conscience troubles. The Roman authorities were masters of the Jewish high priests. They appointed and sacked them at will.

Caiaphas could not have bulldozed Pilate into executing Jesus. Caiaphas was not the villain of the piece. He had to try to keep law and order, especially in Jerusalem, especially at Passover. Any disturbance would have provoked violent Roman retribution. Jesus had caused a commotion in the merchants’ quarter of the temple. He was seen as a dubious charismatic prophet. He had a following. Most of them were Galileans. Jesus had to be dealt with to avoid disorder in which many might be slaughtered.

According to the Gospels, Caiaphas thought Jesus was a blasphemer because he called himself the Messiah. [This may well be later redaction, not history.] This is not blasphemy in any Jewish law. Even if Caiaphas thought it was, the penalty for it is death by stoning. Caiaphas’ court stopped in its tracks at that point. It changed the charge into a political one, and called Jesus a rebel. Sedition gets the Roman penalty of the cross. Thousands of Jewish revolutionaries died on a Roman cross. Was capital punishment the exclusive privilege of the Roman governor? Seemingly not. The Jews at the time thought they could do it, in cases of ‘leading the people astray’ or ‘being a false prophet’. (In these cases the manner of execution is stoning: these charges are religious.) Caiaphas was not unable to execute Jesus: he was simply unwilling to do so himself. He passed the buck to Pilate, on a charge that made sense to Romans, and with the implication that the cross would be the result. He was not a friend of Pilate. In the end, Caiaphas was responsible for delivering Jesus to the Romans. He was quite willing to do that. Both he and Pilate essentially wanted the same thing. They wanted no risk to law and order during Passover in Jerusalem. Both men, when Jesus was reported to be dead on the cross, thought it a job well done.

One of the most comprehensive critiques of the film, particularly from historical and theological perspectives, was written by Mahlon Smith (Rutgers University). It is available on

"http://religion.rutgers.edu/jseminar/passion.html">http://religion.rutgers.edu/jseminar/passion.htm

The Journal of Religion and Film, vol.8, n.1, February 2004. Special issue: Exploring Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ Symposium.

1. Andrew Sullivan explains: “Pornography is the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh…. About half the movie is simple wordless sadism. It is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino”.

2. Emmerich was a Westphalian farm girl who early in life had visions and received the stigmata. She became an Augustinian nun. After her death the romantic poet Clemens Brentano published her material in 1924

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Spiritual, Moral and Religious Education is a key area for Research in Australian Catholic University