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Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ

When Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out, there was quite a foo-fah over it. I wrote this article at the peak of the frenzy. Things have long since calmed down, but I believe the article is still worth reading.

In the weeks leading up to the release of the movie, a number of serious charges were raised by the press. Those charges had been flying around for at least a year before the movie came out. Here are some of them:

Many conservative Christians at the time found these charges to be offensive and incomprehensible. Many of them wondered why this was happening. I kept hearing from friends that it was all the fault of one or more of the usual suspects:

I wondered then, and I wonder now -- can't we all just get along? It sure would be nice if we could. One thing I've learned in life is that we can't get along until we figure out how to talk. And the truth is that Mel's critics and his defenders weren't really talking to each other very well. They were talking past each other. Sometimes they were not even talking, they were shrieking.

Things haven't changed much since the movie came out. The left and the right in this country are still way apart, and those in the middle sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about. Maybe I can help translate for all sides. When I lived in San Diego, I hung out for about fifteen years with a bunch of folks who are right in the middle of controversies like this -- Messianic Jews. These are Jews who also happen to be Christians. They tend to get shot at from both sides. I'm not Jewish myself, I'm a garden-variety sort of Christian who happens to find these people fascinating. I've written three novels with a Messianic Jewish main character. And I've learned a few things about anti-semitism and the long history of Jewish/Christian relations and all that. I'd like to share that with you now.

For starters, let's define a few terms. These are rough definitions, but they'll do for our purposes:

Anti-semitism is a hatred of Jewish people. Anti-semites typically believe that Jews are a sub-human race, that Jews bear a collective responsibility for killing Jesus, and/or that Jews have formed a conspiracy to take over the earth. Anti-semitism was not invented by the Nazis. It was rife throughout eastern Europe and Russia and it thrived in parts of western Europe for hundreds of years.

Anti-Judaism is an antagonism to the Jewish religion. Anti-Judaism typically asserts that Judaism is legalistic, absurd, or disgusting.

Anti-Judaism is often confused with anti-semitism, but they are not the same thing. Anti-semitism is about genes. Anti-Judaism is about religion. If a Jew converted to Christianity, the anti-semite would hate him precisely the same, whereas the anti-Judaic would welcome him with open arms.

Anti-semitism and anti-Judaism are still powerful forces throughout eastern Europe and Russia. Much of western Europe and much of Christianity was anti-semitic or anti-Judaic for hundreds of years. As we all know, anti-semitism reached a horrible peak in Nazi Germany, but it was alive and well there long before Hitler was born. France, Italy, and Spain all allowed anti-semitism to flourish for centuries. Since World War II, both Christian anti-semitism and Christian anti-Judaism have weakened substantially, at least in western Europe and America.

Many Christians feel very uncomfortable to hear about Christian anti-semitism. It's common for them to say, "Those weren't real Christians who murdered, raped, and robbed Jews in the Middle Ages." I wish I could believe that, but I can't.

For one thing, virtually all Europeans in ages past were either anti-semitic or anti-Judaic. If you claim that none of them were "real Christians," you will be left with hardly anybody. You will rule out a number of the early Church fathers, along with quite a few popes. You will rule out Martin Luther, who wrote an embarrassingly bombastic piece entitled "On the Jews and Their Lies" which makes pretty vile reading. And you will rule out most ordinary Catholics and Protestants from the Middle Ages up through the eighteenth century or so. Everybody is a child of their environment. Most of us unthinkingly take part in the prevailing evils of our own time. Most of those anti-semitic medieval Christians would consider us appallingly wicked for tolerating wide-spread abortion. If that observation strikes too close for comfort, I can think of some more politically correct examples of institutional evil. Consider the history of racism in twentieth-century America. Or slavery in the nineteenth-century South. People can be evil on a grand scale, and the evil can be thoroughly integrated into the culture. That doesn't excuse the evil. It's just an observation of what happens.

Matter of fact, I've seen too many real Christians in the modern world who do bad things because it's part of the culture or because they just plain choose to do wrong. Most real Christians break the speed limit. Some real Christians cheat on their income taxes. A few real Christians drive drunk and end up killing people. A very few real Christians even steal, rape, and murder, as you can easily verify by visiting your local penitentiary. Real Christians sin because real Christians are still sinners, just like phony Christians, lapsed Christians, non-Christians, and everyone else. That's part of Christian theology, and we've all seen the bumper stickers that say, "I'm not perfect, just forgiven." It's true. We're all sinners and we're all capable of monstrous evil. Again, I excuse nobody. It's the opposite, in fact -- I accuse everybody. You and I are capable of monstrous evil.

Real Christians throughout history have done some horrible things. Anti-semitism and anti-Judaism were part of western culture for hundreds of years. An encyclopedic book on all this is James Carroll's huge book Constantine's Sword. It makes for heart-rending reading. I don't go along with Carroll's theology, but the naked facts he amasses speak for themselves. Christians killed Jews in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and in a thousand nameless villages all across Europe.

And now we come to the problem.

The motivation for all these horrible things centers on the passion narrative. For hundreds of years, Easter week was a time of fear in every Jewish home. Why? Because Jews everywhere knew that Christians were re-telling the passion story: How Jews tried Jesus and scourged him. How Jews begged Pilate to crucify Jesus. And most importantly, how Jews called down the blood curse on themselves, by shouting, "His blood be on us and on our children!"

This blood curse has played a critical role in anti-semitism through the centuries. Because of the blood curse, Jews for ages have been labeled as "Christ-killers." Jews have been assigned "collective guilt" for the death of Jesus. The Vatican finally repudiated the blood curse in Vatican II in 1965. Part of the reason Mel Gibson's movie has been criticised so heavily is that Mel's father belongs to a Catholic sect that renounces Vatican II.

It should go without saying that the blood curse is nonsense. It should, but some things need to be said, even when they're obvious. The blood curse is nonsense, and most western Christians know this. It's absurd to believe that God would honor a curse in perpetuity that was called down by evil people onto their own children. It's absurd to believe that all the Jews in Jerusalem participated in such a mob. Finally, it's a simple fact of history that the earliest Christians were all Jews. There were no Gentile Christians at all for the first ten years of Christian history. Jewish Christians outnumbered Gentile Christians for several decades. This would have been impossible if anyone in the early church truly believed the blood curse actually applied to Jews.

Modern Christianity turns the blood curse completely around. Most Christians today will tell you that, theologically, "I killed Jesus." In Mel Gibson's movie, it is Mel's hand that holds the nail that is hammered into the hand of Jesus. This is a simple and profound statement. Mel is saying here that his sins killed Jesus.

So what's the problem? Why was Mel getting pounded for making this movie? It's too easy to claim that Mel was just another victim of routine Christian-bashing. What was going on was a disconnect in how different people saw the movie.

Mel (and most Christians) saw this movie in an intensely personal way -- "Jesus did this for me, because of me, to save me." And they're right. That's what the movie is about. It's a theological, artsy movie dealing with the cosmological vanquishing of sin by the Sin-Bearer, Jesus, God Incarnate. That was Mel's message and his only message. If you are a Christian (as I am) you see this easily.

Whereas most Jews saw the movie very differently. Jews saw this as yet another medieval Passion Play, featuring evil Jews running a kangaroo trial for Jesus, evil Jews scourging Jesus, evil Jews turning Jesus over to Pilate, evil Jews screaming for the blood of Jesus, evil Jews calling down the blood curse on themselves, evil Jews building the cross. And they have a point. When I watched the movie for the first time, I saw immediately that they had a very serious point. Scene after scene shows a large crowd of Jews baying for blood. The vast majority of the movie's Jewish characters are in this crowd. Which gives a very distorted view of reality, because in fact, the proportion of Jews involved in the death of Jesus was probably very small. In the Jerusalem of that time, the vast majority of Jews would happily have elected Jesus their king in the hopes that he would crush the Romans and set up a theocracy, the Kingdom of God, here and now. Jesus would have refused that option, but the Romans and the Jewish aristocracy were terrified that he would accept it. All this is clearly spelled out in the only decent historical documents we have for this episode, the four Gospels in the New Testament.

A historical fact is that Passion Plays in medieval times were flash points for anti-semitism. The Passion Play was an intensely emotional experience, and it sometimes led rather directly to the murder of "Christ-killers." That is not likely to happen here and now, not in modern America. But before the movie came out, nobody could be sure that it wouldn't happen in eastern Europe, or Russia, or anywhere else in the world where anti-semitism still lives. Since Gibson's movie does not address the issue of anti-semitism, or even take any steps to counter it, anti-semites could easily have taken away a message of hate that Gibson never intended. That was a shame. Mel was warned, but he didn't listen. To be fair, his critics chose some poor tactics, but he chose to mostly ignore them.

Certain Jewish leaders and Christian scholars attacked the movie by saying that it's "not historical." This was not a very smart tactic. These folks made charges such as the following:

These critics blundered badly in their presentation of these charges. Few Christians are going to accept that the Gospels are unreliable. What sources would these critics recommend, if not the Gospels? There aren't any other sources for the story of Jesus. There is no compelling reason to disbelieve the essential story as told by the Gospels. It is true that there are some discrepancies among the four Gospel accounts, but that's true of all human accounts of anything. The discrepancies are problems, but they at least make it clear that the Gospel writers were not in collusion to produce a story. Which means that we have multiple witnesses to essentially the same story. We know that after Pilate's sponsor Sejanus was executed in Rome, Pilate was in a considerably weaker position and was susceptible to pressure. We know that certain Jewish Sadducean leaders had the motive and will-power to see Jesus destroyed, just as they did to his brother James a few decades later. It is impossible to disprove that the Jewish mob did not shout the blood curse.

However, let's bear in mind that the critics have a definite point about the blood curse. The thing has acquired a horrible connotation over the years -- that Jews everywhere at all times are guilty of murdering God. That is not what the blood curse meant when the Gospels were written. But that is what it has come to connote now because of a long and evil history. There was no decent reason I can imagine for including the blood curse in the movie. I am glad to say that Mel acquiesced and removed the subtitle for the blood curse from the final cut. It took him a long time to agree to do this, but he did it.

It never helped that Mel Gibson's father denies the Holocaust. It never helped that Mel didn't taken a stand to distance himself from his father's opinions. It never helped that a lot of Christians just didn't get why this should be a problem.

The reason it's a problem is that, in Jewish eyes, the Holocaust was a Christian-sponsored event. In Jewish eyes, the Holocaust follows directly from centuries of Christian anti-semitism and Christian anti-Judaism. In Jewish eyes, denying the Holocaust is putting salt into old wounds and grinding it in with jackboots.

Most Christians are surprised and stunned when they hear this. Most Christians are not anti-semitic. Furthermore, most Christians are not even anti-Judaic. They may well believe that Judaism is not the way to heaven, but they don't believe that it is a horrible, ugly religion. They simply believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven, and therefore Judaism, though it was a nice try, is an incorrect answer and there's no partial credit.

It was a big ugly mess when the movie came out. There was quite a bit of hand-wringing and wondering" "What should be done?" That's a very good question. It's never really been my job to tell anyone what to do. I have enough trouble figuring out what I should do. Then I have even more trouble actually doing it. Here are some recommendations that I made at the time the movie came out, and some of them are still useful, in principle. It was my hope that my suggestions might help cool the temperatures down a bit. For what it's worth, I've worked through all the points on the list for Christians and not one of those points has killed me.

For Christians, I recommended:

For Jews, I recommended:

For Mel, I recommended:

For Mel's Critics, I recommended:

A Lightning Review of the Movie: I saw the movie on the day it came out. As a work of art, it is a masterpiece -- gripping and chilling and relentlessly brutal. The movie is intended as a cosmological and theological statement of the central tenet of Christian belief -- that Jesus, God Incarnate, died for my sins and yours. On this level, the movie succeeds extraordinarily well.

About Randy Ingermanson

Randy Ingermanson

Randy earned a Ph.D. in physics at U.C. Berkeley and is the award-winning author of six novels and one non-fiction book. He writes about "The Intersection of Faith Avenue and Science Boulevard."

Randy publishes the world’s largest electronic magazine on the craft of writing fiction, the FREE monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. His ultimate goal is to become Supreme Dictator for Life and First Tiger and to achieve Total World Domination.

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