According to Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, the Jews killed Jesus and “His blood be on [them], and [their] children.” Though the Vatican renounced the “blood libel” in Nostra Aetate (“His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today”—a sensible statement when one considers that every single one of the apostles and all of the Evangelists were Jewish and Christ Himself descended from Abraham and David) and expressly forbade the catechizing or preaching of anti-Semitism, the charge of deicide is repeated in The Passion, literally, in untranslated Aramaic, and figuratively, in the way that Gibson chooses and presents his Biblical and non-Biblical sources. Gibson does have a rationale for this apostasy—you see, Pope Paul VI’s ecumenical Declaration, and all the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, have been rejected by Gibson, who belongs to a tiny sect of traditionalist Catholics that views the Second Vatican Council as a conspiracy between Jews and Masons to take over the Church. As Mel put it in a line he himself apparently added to the lame thriller Conspiracy Theory, “Somebody has to lift the scab... the festering scab that is the Vatican.” And he’s just the guy to do it.
      To be fair to Gibson, the Gospels don’t simply record Christ’s life and preaching to the Jews of Judea. They also record his death—at the behest of Caiaphas and other Jewish leaders, fearful that Jesus’ Messianic message might lead to a rebellion against them, a Roman crackdown, and the destruction of the Temple (which is precisely what happened in 70 AD). And in so far as he sticks with the Gospel accounts of the events leading up to the Passion and the Passion itself, it is not fair to accuse Gibson of anti-Semitism without acknowledging that the Gospels themselves are inarguably anti-Semitic. Though Christ and his disciples reached out first to the Jews—and the first Christians were largely Jews, and first-century Christianity itself a kind of reformed Judaism—the Evangelists blamed the Jewish people (or their leaders) for rejecting God’s new covenant and engineering Christ’s murder.
      Gibson argues that his version of the Passion derives literally from the Gospels, so it can be no more anti-Semitic than the Evangelists themselves are. But is that true? As Pilate famously says, in John 18:38, “What is truth?” Interestingly, the question is answered in the film, in a passage not taken from scripture, by Pilate’s wife, who replies that truth is what you believe is true—truth is what touches your heart, what you have faith in, regardless of fact or circumstance.
      Gibson has used literalism (and all of the paraphernalia that goes with it—the fetishizing of the text, the rejection of contradictory evidence, the dismissal of historical context) as a sword and a shield, claiming that those who attack The Passion are attacking the word of God. But he has also used it to mask his highly selective handling of Biblical and non-Biblical texts—which amounts not to a literal recounting of the Passion, but to a brutal interpretation of its meaning.
      To begin with, one might consider what this literalist chose to use from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and what he left out. The “blood libel” appears only in Matthew 27:25 (“his blood be on us, and our children”), and though Gibson once claimed to have removed it from the film, it is in fact still there in untranslated Aramaic. At the same time that he has included the “blood libel” and greatly embroidered upon a second passage found only in Matthew 27:19, in which Pilate’s wife, Claudia, warns Pilate to have “nothing to do with that innocent man [Jesus],” he has entirely omitted another passage found in John 18:14, in which the political context of Jesus’ deliberate sacrifice by the Jewish leadership (“Caia-phas…had advised the Jews that it would be in their interest if one man died for the people”) is hinted at. In addition, he has in the barbarically dreadful scourging scene (in many ways the centerpiece of this Passion, eclipsing the Crucifixion itself) added a great deal of imagined and non-scriptural material—the entire episode in which Claudia gives folded linens to the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, who, after Jesus is taken away, begin mopping up His blood—derives from nothing in the Gospels. Rather it is taken from the writings of a nineteenth-century stigmatic and anti-Semite, Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, who, among other things, speculated that the Jews had bribed the Roman guards to be especially vicious in the scourging of Christ, as they certainly are here. Gibson has also added the figure of Satan, an oddly effeminate presence, who in the film is almost invariably associated with the Jews—wandering among them in the Temple guard and mob scenes and in the scourging sequence. This, too, has no literal parallel in any of the Gospels.
      What we have here in the abstract is the outline of Gibson’s Passion—a Passion in which the Romans (as represented by Pilate and Claudia) are capable of a mercy that the Satanic, hate-filled Jews (as represented by Caiaphas and the Pharisees) are devoid of. Though the Roman soldiers savagely execute the will of the Jewish leaders, it is the Jews who ordered up this sadistic punishment and whom we despise. Outside of Luke 23:34 (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”), which in Gibson’s Passion is delivered directly to Caiaphas and the Pharisees, Christ’s infinite compassion is scarcely dramatized. His parables and teachings are also scanted or omitted entirely, as are His wonderfully humane farewell discourses in John 13, which precede the Passion and help give it its tragic resonance. In other words, Gibson has left out virtually anything and everything that might smack of human frailty, including Christ’s own pity, which is here equated with frailty. Emphasized is anything and everything that reinforces the mindless brutality of His victimization and torture, and Christ’s own machismo. (When He rises from the tomb, He looks ready to rumble.)
      Not only does Gibson load the deck theologically but—far more damningly, really—he loads it iconographically. This is, quite deliberately, the most sadistic visual depiction of the Passion in the history of films. Gibson has expanded a single line (“Pilate had him scourged”) into fifteen minutes of brutality the likes of which we have rarely seen before in any movie. The ghastly moment, shot in close-up, where the sharpened bits of metal in the cat-’o-nines used to scourge Christ become embedded in his flesh and are jerked loose by a sadistic Roman guard made even the true believers in the audience with which I viewed this film gasp in horror and turn from the screen. If you can imagine the torture scene from Braveheart presented in far greater detail, with even greater relish, then you begin to understand the impact of this scourging—and the sadomasochistic imagination that concocted it. Indeed, if this weren’t a movie about Christ, I wonder how many would have sat through it.
      Gibson gives us virtually none of the context for Christ’s sacrifice—virtually nothing of Jesus’ gospel of love and redemption. This, the film supposes, we already understand (although that is a supposition that the film visually contradicts). Almost all we get is the extent of His brutalization by the Romans at the behest of the wicked Jews. Almost all we get is the torture, as if the scourging of the flesh were enough to signify the enormity of the sacrifice, and that which was willingly given up. And all we feel—all anyone could possibly feel given the way everything else that matters has deliberately been stripped away or changed or scanted or selectively omitted—isn’t pity for all that is lost and joy for all that is promised, but pain and horror over the brutalization of Christ and disgust and hatred for those few who did this. And the film makes clear that those who did it were the Jews.
      As Franco Zeffirelli, himself the director of a filmed life of Christ and of Gibson’s Hamlet, has said: “[Gibson is] sinisterly attracted to the most unrestrained violence...What conclusion will children in particular be able to draw from it other than that the Jews were to blame for all that bloodshed? This way we set ourselves back centuries.”
      Art, thank God, is long. In spite of Mel Gibson, Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Pather Panchali, Tokyo Story, Ikiru, Bicycle Thief, L’Avventura, 8 1/2, Smiles of a Summer Night, Schindler’s List will still be with us, after The Passion has been relegated to church basements and 700 Club replays. Gibson may be riding high at the moment, but I would remind him of another little saying of Jesus that he omitted from his films, “The first will be last, and the last will be first.” This doesn’t just apply to box-office receipts, Mel, but to entering the kingdom of Heaven. When, at the end of time, our self-righteousness is burned away, I suspect that Gibson will be shocked, shocked to find himself bringing up the rear amongst those who are saved.
      Aside from a bit of twitter and a few small motion artifacts, the transfer is exceptionally good, visually and sonically.