Passion about The Passion
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
Mel Gibson's epic The Passion of the Christ opened this week to extremely mixed reviews. Either you love the movie or you hate it.
Two chief criticisms have been made of The Passion of the Christ - first, that it is violent, and second, that it is anti-Semitic. We'll look at the violence first.
Well, Christ didn't spend his final hours, which are the subject of The Passion, performing community service. According to the New Testament, Christ spent them being spit on, beaten, blindfolded and beaten, flogged, and nailed to a cross with a crown of thorns on his head. When it comes to violence, I think Mr. Gibson is on safe Biblical ground.
As for anti-Semitism, let's see what the New Testament says. Hmm. In Matthew 27:25, after demanding that Christ be killed a crowd of Jews says "His blood be on us, and on our children." Just to be clear about this, Matthew says that all the people in the crowd said this. And in John 19:7 "the Jews" tell Pilate "We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God." Later on St. (sic) Paul informs the Thessalonians that "the Jews... killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost" (I Thessalonians 2:14-16).
I suppose no one reads the Bible any more. No one reads the papers, either, which is why they're surprised that a conservative Catholic, Mr. Gibson, who rejects the reforms of Vatican II might not be too concerned about the way people might take his literal rendering of the gospels. Or about how people might take his non-scriptural introduction to his screenplay of Satan as the Jews' (and Romans') sidekick.
The irony in all this is that the one person whose opinions are completely ignored in Mr. Gibson's movie about Christ is...Jesus Christ.
Christ (who, we might mention, did not write the accounts of his Passion) went around telling people to love God and to love one another – he called those the two great commandments. He told people that when someone punched them in the face, they should turn the other cheek. He told them to love their enemies.
Of course, following those rules doesn't build up much of a store of survival value, and it's scarcely surprising that Christ was swiftly done away with and that any of his followers who happened to believe as he did were kept out of the leadership of the church set up to "worship" him.
Most branches of the Christian church seem in fact to be a pretty good demonstration of Peterson F. Whalley's hypotheses about psychopathy in this week's other article. Those meek, God-loving, enemy-loving, cheek-turning people who naively believed that Christ meant what he said were quickly subjugated by generations of "Christian" leaders who saw nothing inconsistent in espousing the principles of the Prince of Peace while waging wars and crapping on Jews left, right, and centre. The Christ-like Christians were consigned by their leaders to monastic orders or similar organizations where they could perform acts of benevolence and philanthropy that the leaders could take credit for.
I doubt, with good reason, that Mr. Gibson is either a psychopath or an antisemite. But he does appear to be devout, and because he is devout he is not going to apologize for the gospels, or try to make them more appealing to the secular.
One would think, though, that as a devout conservative Christian he would think more about the unusual coincidence (and I stress that I'm not making this up) that his production was struck by lightning. Twice.
And be grateful that God's aim is so bad.
Posted February 26, 2004
Passion about The Passion © Coolth, 2004
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