Mel Gibson’s Passion Play

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“His blood be on us and our children.” This single, chilling line from the Gospel of Matthew (27:25) has caused more bloodshed than any other verse in the Bible. Matthew’s invidious portrayal of “the Jews” clamoring for Jesus’ blood provided the impetus for centuries of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

As Stephen J. Patterson shows in the preceding article, the Gospels’ portrayal of “the Jews” as bloodthirsty has more to do with making Pilate and the Romans look good than it does with historical accuracy. It was the Romans, not “the Jews,” who had both the power and the desire to see Jesus publicly executed, as an example to other potential rebels. It was the Romans who employed crucifixion as a means of execution, and it was thus the Romans, not the Jews, who killed Jesus.

For the Jews, it was an internal dispute, within Jewish society. Jesus was Jewish. His supporters were Jewish. So were his detractors. He lived in a Jewish society.

Tragically, the inference drawn from the gospel writers’ account of the Jews’ collective responsibility for Jesus’ death has had lasting consequences for relations between Christians and Jews, particularly as those historical errors have been kept alive by depictions of the gospel story on stage and screen.

Many Christians and Jews are already worried that a new film written and directed by Mel Gibson about Jesus’ last 12 hours, to be called The Passion of Christ (formerly just The Passion), could, when it is released next year, revive the same anti-Semitic stereotypes once purveyed in Passion plays, dramatic performances of Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion that were popular throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages.

Passion plays evolved out of earlier ritual reenactments of biblical events that were part of regular church liturgy during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter. They emerged as a popular dramatic form distinct from the Mass early in the 14th century, especially in France and Germany. Passion plays enlivened the gospel stories for believers, enabling them to participate directly in their drama—especially since, in contrast to the Mass, the plays were usually performed in the vernacular. As local affairs, performed and directed by members of the community, Passion plays were a matter of pride for the villages or hamlets staging them. They were soon treated as festivals; by the 16th century some German Passion plays had become so involved that they took as long as three days to perform.

Passion plays are still performed in communities large and small all over the world. The largest annual Passion play is performed every Good Friday in Iztapalapa, a large working-class borough of Mexico City. Thousands of people act in the play every Holy Week, and hundreds of thousands converge on Iztapalapa every year to witness it.

Since they are about Jesus’ Passion—literally, his “suffering” (from the Latin passio)—Passion plays naturally concentrate on Jesus’ trial and execution—although many medieval Passion plays often contained other (even Old Testament) scenes as well. And, since the trial and execution are the parts of the gospel stories with the most negative portrayals of Jesus’ “Jewish” enemies, Passion plays also traditionally featured exaggerated caricatures of Jews clamoring for Jesus’ blood.

As a result, Passion plays often had the effect of stirring up Jew-hatred and even sparking pogroms or massacres of Jews. Historically, Holy Week was the most dangerous time for Jews to be out in the streets. To forestall bloodshed, city leaders would close off ghettos and recommend that Jews stay indoors during Lent. In 1539, Pope Paul III banned the annual Passion plays in Rome because they regularly prompted violence and riots against the Jewish quarter of that city.

The longest-running and best-known Passion play has been performed in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau every ten years since 1634—fulfilling that town’s promise to God in exchange for being spared from the plague in that year. Like other medieval Passion plays, the Oberammergau play contained, at least until recently, vicious characterizations of Jews that went far beyond the gospel accounts; the blood curse in Matthew, for instance, was repeated several times in the performance. When Hitler saw the Oberammergau play on its 300th anniversary in 1934, he commended it as a “convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry” and a “precious tool” in the fight against Judaism.

As part of the Catholic Church’s modern effort to repair the fractured relationship between Christians and Jews, and in recognition of the harmful inaccuracies in the Gospels when it comes to portraying Jesus’ trial, in 1988 the National Conference of Catholic Bishops published a new set of guidelines for the portrayal of Jesus’ Passion. 039The “Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion” were based on the church’s landmark Papal Bull in 1965 titled Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”)—part of the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II—which officially rejected the notion that the Jews bore collective guilt for Jesus’ death. The guidelines explain: “The overall aim of any depiction of the passion should be the unambiguous presentation of the doctrinal understanding of the event in the light of faith: … ‘Christ in his boundless love freely underwent his passion and death because of the sins of all, so that all might attain salvation’ [quoting Nostra Aetate, notes IV, 30]. Therefore, any presentations that explicitly or implicitly seek to shift responsibility from human sin onto this or that historical group, such as the Jews, can only be said to obscure a core gospel truth.”

To achieve this goal, the guidelines recommend that Passion portrayals show the complexity of the Jewish world of Jesus’ time. Passion plays should refrain from picturing Jesus or his teachings in false opposition either to the Jews collectively or even to groups like the Pharisees. They should also avoid Jewish caricatures (like avariciousness) and should portray Pilate more in line with his known historical character and role—that is, as a tyrant, not a cowardly, but basically sympathetic, bureaucrat.

The script of the Oberammergau Passion play has in recent years incorporated many of these changes. The blood curse of Matthew 27:25 is no longer repeated, and at the Last Supper Jesus and his disciples wear prayer shawls to show more clearly their Jewish identity. The revised script also makes it clear that Pilate himself had appointed the Jewish high priest, as was normal practice in Jesus’ day, and thus would hardly be subject to pressure from Caiaphas, his appointee, to have Jesus executed.

A movie can reach and influence many more people than a stage production. Thus when news of Mel Gibson’s big-screen Passion play leaked out last winter—even while it was still being shot in the South Italian town of Matera^a—Jewish and Christian groups began to worry whether Gibson would be sensitive to the troubled history of Passion dramatizations and avoid the harmful caricatures and mistakes of the past. A March 9 New York Times Magazine article (“Is the Pope Catholic … Enough?”) by freelance writer Christopher Noxon added weight to these worries by revealing that Gibson adheres to a self-styled “traditionalist” brand of Catholicism, in which Mass is still given in Latin and which generally hearkens back to a pre-Vatican II (and, implicitly, pre-Nostra Aetate) world. Various groups, both Christian and Jewish, worried that Gibson’s film, coming from the theological position of “traditionalist” Catholicism, would stir anti-Semitism.

At that point, no one had seen the film and no one but the actors and production team had ever read the script. Father William Fulco, a biblical archaeologist and expert on Semitic languages who was hired by Gibson to translate the script into ancient Aramaic and Latin for purposes of historical verisimilitude,^b told BR when interviewed in April that charges that the film would be anti-Semitic were “outrageous.” He also contended that, in his view, the script conformed well with the Catholic Church’s guidelines for Passion plays. Fulco’s opinion was not, however, shared by an interfaith panel of scholars assembled by members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League, who were sent a copy of the film’s screenplay in April. Although they kept the specifics of their report confidential, by May various details had been leaked to the press, followed by accusations that the scholars had read and commented on a stolen copy of the script.

Four Catholic committee members quickly issued a joint public statement insisting that Gibson himself was aware all along that they had the script and had agreed to their evaluating it. They also expressed their concern over the film’s use of anti-Semitic sources outside the Gospels, particularly the visions of an early-19th-century German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, as recorded in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ—a book Gibson said he drew upon when writing his screenplay. Emmerich’s visions go well beyond the Gospels, both in their graphic violence as well as in their portrayal of Jewish high priests thirsting for Jesus’ blood, bribing other Jews to demand Jesus’ death and directly supervising the construction of the cross in the Temple courtyard. Emmerich goes to even greater lengths than Matthew, Luke and John in exonerating Pilate, by showing him being bullied and pressured by the high priest Caiaphas.

Two other members of the scholarly committee that read the screenplay, Paula Fredriksen of Boston College and Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University (both occasional contributors to BR), also expressed concern, in separate articles, over the script’s historical inaccuracies as well as over apparent efforts by Icon Productions and Gibson’s lawyers to silence and discredit the committee. Fredriksen (in the New Republic, July 28) and Levine (on the Web site Beliefnet) confirmed that the script contained worrisome additions from Emmerich such as Caiaphas bullying Pilate and Jewish priests supervising the manufacture of the cross. They worried about the possible effect—especially in countries where anti-Semitism is more virulent than in the United States—of a film that revives the harmful stereotypes that once whipped audiences into anti-Semitic furor when staged in European villages. Fredriksen, concludes: “I shudder to think how The Passion will play once its subtitles shift from English to Polish, or Spanish, or French, or Russian. When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.”

Gibson, for his part, defends his personal vision of Jesus’ Passion and his right to make a film (with his own money) that reflects his beliefs, however idiosyncratic. But he has also evidently listened to at least some of the criticisms: In a September 15 New Yorker article (“The Jesus War”), Peter J. Boyer, privy to both early and late edits of the film, revealed that the blood curse and Pilate’s handwashing scene from Matthew 27 had been cut from the film. Also, against his original stated intention, Gibson has opted to add subtitles in order to make it clearer to audiences that some of the (Aramaic-speaking) Jewish characters, even a Jewish priest, are among Jesus’ sympathizers and that Jesus himself is addressed as “rabbi.” At the time of this writing, however, Gibson has reportedly only screened the film for select audiences, predominantly Catholic and conservative, and has declined requests from potential critics to view it.

The controversy over The Passion of Christ continues to center as much on the public acrimony between Gibson’s defenders and his critics as on the film itself or what the film may or may not end up containing. The debate naturally touches on many tough-to-separate and, when it comes to the Bible, particularly hot-button issues—of faith, politics and freedom of speech. Trailers for The Passion of Christ that have been released on the Internet bear out Boyer’s observation that, like Gibson’s previous films, this one will be violent. Whether it will encourage further violence toward Jews is harder to say. In any case, the latest Passion play has already reopened some very old wounds.

“His blood be on us and our children.” This single, chilling line from the Gospel of Matthew (27:25) has caused more bloodshed than any other verse in the Bible. Matthew’s invidious portrayal of “the Jews” clamoring for Jesus’ blood provided the impetus for centuries of anti-Semitism, pogroms, and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. As Stephen J. Patterson shows in the preceding article, the Gospels’ portrayal of “the Jews” as bloodthirsty has more to do with making Pilate and the Romans look good than it does with historical accuracy. It was the Romans, not “the Jews,” […]