INTRINSICITY:

Friend Jim Siegel wrote the following:

The Consequences of Mel Gibson’s Fifth Gospel (Jim Siegel, March 2004)

1966 was the first time I read the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I was a high school freshman in a Boston suburb at St. John’s Prep taking the required Catholic religion course. As a fourteen year old Jewish kid, I asked our teacher Brother Linus, “Why are there four versions of the story?”

Because the film medium has so much power, today Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” is a fifth version. He thinks his Gospel is the right one and that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.

From what Gibson has said in recent interviews, he does not appear to be interested in having a conversation about this with anyone who has a different point of view.

Yet one good thing about the film is that it has sparked a lot of constructive conversations among Christians and among Christians and Jews. This is a consequence that I doubt Gibson intended. We’re learning more about each other. We’re learning more about ourselves. A couple of years ago Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in- chief of the interreligious journal “First Things” said, Salvation Is from the Jews (First Things, November 2001) :

The percentage of Christians involved in any form of Jewish-Christian dialogue is minuscule. Not much larger, it may be noted, is the percentage of Jews involved. …Only in America are there enough Jews and Christians in a relationship of mutual security to make possible a dialogue that is unprecedented in two thousand years of history…. Providential purpose in history is a troubled subject, and the idea of America’s providential purpose is even more troubled, but I suggest that we would not be wrong to believe that this dialogue, so closely linked to the American experience, is an essential part of the unfolding of the story of the world.

So far I’ve had conversations with eight friends I would describe as religious Christians who have seen the movie. Most say that its portrayal of how much Jesus suffered for them has strengthened their faith.

For them, that is good.

My friends who mentioned the portrayal of the Jews in the movie describe it as not positive. But they do not blame the Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus. Instead they say God in His love for humanity sacrificed His only son to redeem the sins of all mankind.

From what they said, I think they do believe that. I don’t think they were pulling punches for the Jewish guy.

In his unprecedented visit to the Synagogue in Rome eight years ago, Pope John Paul II denounced anti-semitism and the blaming of Jews for "what happened in Christ's passion" and proclaimed the bond between Christianity and Judaism:

Through myself, the Church, in the words of the (of the Second Vatican Council’s) well-known Declaration Nostra Aetate (Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions), "deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone;" I repeat: "by anyone."

The Jewish religion is not "extrinsic" to us, but in a certain way is "intrinsic" to our own religion. With Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.

No ancestral or collective blame can be imputed to the Jews as a people for "what happened in Christ's passion". Not indiscriminately to the Jews of that time, nor to those who came afterwards, nor to those of today. So any alleged theological justification for discriminatory measures or, worse still, for acts of persecution is unfounded. The Lord will judge each one "according to his own works," Jews and Christians alike (cf. Rom 2:6)

It is not lawful to say that the Jews are "repudiated or cursed," as if this were taught or could be deduced from the Sacred Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament. …(Refer to) Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans (11:28-29), that the Jews are beloved of God, who has called them with an irrevocable calling.

Nonetheless Jews today fear that Gibson’s film will fuel overt anti-semitism. This is not paranoia. Reactions in the past to passion plays have led to dreadful acts. There is a horrible history of Jews tortured, murdered and persecuted -- from the Crusades to forced conversion or burning at the stake in Spain and Portugal to the pogroms of Eastern Europe to the Six Million exterminated in the Holocaust.

Not What Jesus Would Do.

Jesus would condemn as well the covert, “polite” American anti-semitism that caused grandparents and parents of the Baby Boom Generation to anglicize their last names in order to deflect bigotry and get jobs.

A Jewish friend of mine recalls:

I grew up in a virulently anti-Semitic neighborhood in the Midwest. The police had to surround our house every Halloween to protect us from loving Christian children. Going to school every day was pure and violent hell. To this day I recall a kid sitting on my chest in kindergarten his fingers around my throat screaming, “You f-ing Jews killed Jesus." At the time I had never heard about Jesus and really hadn't thought much about what I was or wasn't.

There will always be a tiny percentage of Americans who dislike or hate people simply because they are Jewish. But I'm not worried about the United States. This is the best and most free country in the world to be a Jew or a Christian, or a Moslem or to choose another religion or none at all. For a Jew the United States is better than Israel in terms of economic opportunity, physical safety (while Israel can be a dangerous place the media highlight not the peace but the terrorist attacks) and the freedom to practice Judaism that is not Orthodox of the strictest kind. Religious freedom lies at the heart of our country’s founding, and the Constitution protects it. Religious freedom is enmeshed in American values.

However, Europe and the Arab world are another story. I greatly fear the film's effect where anti-Semitism is more prevalent and more public.

In recent interviews Mel Gibson supports his father, someone who has denied Hitler’s Holocaust. Gibson is not accountable for what his father says or does. Yet Gibson does not seem to recognize that the movie will encourage people who hate the Jews. This is not a Christian act. This is irresponsible. God teaches us that we must take responsibility for our actions.

I am dismayed that Gibson presents Pilate in the movie as a sympathetic man, when all other accounts describe him as cruel and ruthless.

I am troubled that many scenes are based not on the Gospels but on the graphic, bloody and imagined visions of an early19th Century nun Anne Catherine Emmerich. One of my friends noted the scene in the movie where an earthquake cracks the Temple structure when Jesus dies. He asked, “Was it factual or made up?” Emmerich made it up. So too the movie’s prominent role of Satan.

Why should the Gospels carry more weight than Emmerich’s visions? Two thousand years’ acceptance by hundreds of millions far outweigh a 200 year old tract that only a small number of traditionalist Catholics have embraced.

Based on Emmerich’s visions and Gibson’s concept, the film portrays the Romans’ torture of Jesus with far greater gore and violence than do the Gospels. Father Bob Robbins of the Church of the Holy Family in Manhattan spoke at a packed-house, interfaith gathering of neighborhood clergy and congregants at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on March 15. On this point, he said:

Traditionally, Christ fell three times on the way to the Cross. I stopped counting at seven! The whipping that Christ receives at first from the Romans is so severe that no human being could have lived through it. He has the Lord turned over for a second beating. He has the Romans use a cat o nines tail and there is a close-up of the flesh being torn from Jesus' body. There isn't as much blood in the human body as he has gush from every imaginable body part. The Romans are portrayed as whipping Jesus all the way on the road to Calvary – a sheer physical impossibility.

Gibson has said that he intentionally focused on the death of Jesus. So the film barely touches upon life -- how Jesus taught that we should act with compassion and virtue.

An essay on Jesus from the Jewish perspective would be incomplete without explaining the Jewish concept of the Messiah. Monsignor Tom Hartman and Rabbi Marc Gellman (“The God Squad”) explain it in their wonderfully clear way:

The Hebrew Bible doesn’t really include the idea of a personal Messiah who will end evil and usher in a time of peace. Instead, there is the idea of a ‘Day of God’ – a kind of messianic age that would bring peace to the earth. Later, in the chaos that followed the Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (around the year 70 Common Era), when rabbinic Judaism gradually arose to replace the priestly sacrificial offerings, the idea of a personal Messiah developed. This idea became a part of both rabbinic Judaism and, obviously, Christianity…The rabbinic idea was that there would be two Messiahs:

* A Messiah, the son of Joseph, who would die in the great battle of the end of days, fighting the forces of evil.

*A Messiah, the son of David, who would come and defeat evil, gather the scattered exiles of the Jewish people into the land of Israel, bring world peace, resurrect the dead to eternal life, and usher in the end of suffering, death and strife.”
(Source: Rabbi Marc Gellman & Monsignor Thomas Hartman, Religion for Dummies®, 2002)

I respect Christians who believe that Jesus is the Messiah and who pursue their lives with the tenets of ethical monotheism -- that there is one God, and that His primary demand is that we treat each other decently. What matters is how we choose to act, and that we recognize that each person is created equal in the eyes of God.

Judaism does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Nor do Jews believe that the Messiah would be an incarnated god whose death would erase original sin and save mankind. The idea of original sin and its punishment are not at the core of Judaism. For my sins against other people, only they can forgive me. For my sins against God, only He can forgive me.

A fundamental principle of Judaism is that each of us is born with an inclination to do good and an inclination to do evil. Our struggle in life is to choose to act as God wants – to be His partner on earth in unfinished and ever-unfolding creation and to make the world a better place one act at a time.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Linking our purpose in life with Gibson’s “Passion” in particular, Central Synagogue Senior Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein said in a recent sermon:

All of us need to take responsibility for our actions and that is what we can learn from the events that surround the release of this movie. All of us would do well to think about the effects, intended or not, of what we do and what we engender. We all would do much better expanding the scope of our responsibility rather than claiming that we are powerless over others or the events of their lives or what they think.

At the start I said that the dialogue that Gibson’s movie has generated is a good thing. This is no small matter, as Father Neuhaus says:

We can and must say that there are great goods to be sought in dialogue apart from conversion; we can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other; we can and must say that Jews and Christians need one another in many public tasks imposed upon us by a culture that is, in large part, in manifest rebellion against the God of Israel; we can and must say that there are theological, philosophical, and moral questions to be explored together, despite our differences regarding Messianic promise; we can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel; we can and must say that the historical forms we call Judaism and Christianity will be transcended, but not superseded, by the fulfillment of eschatological* promise. But along the way to that final fulfillment we are locked in argument. It is an argument by which—for both Jew and Christian—conscience is formed, witness is honed, and friendship is deepened. This is our destiny, and this is our duty, as members of the one people of God—a people of God for which there is no plural.

Let’s keep the conversations going.

And if Mel Gibson wants to chat, all he has to do is give me a call.

(* -- Eschatology is the branch of theology dealing with death, resurrection, judgment, immortality. I had to look that one up. )

(Endnote: For those who wish to explore this topic more deeply, Beliefnet.com has created a terrific, comprehensive e-book called The Passion Papers)

MORE (via Rod):
One Small Problem With 'The Passion' (Jeffrey K. Mann, March 9, 2004, AScribe)

Claims that the film is anti-Semitic are ludicrous, and we need to recognize them as such. Even the argument that it could inflame anti-Semitism is rather weak. And since when do we condemn a work of art because it may be misunderstood? Could one see the film and conclude that the Jews are Christ-killers? Of course. However, I suspect even more people will see the film and conclude that the savior of the world is a Jew.

We live in an age when our racial sensitivities are on such high alert that we condemn not only racism, but anything that could potentially lead to racism. The Anti-Defamation League condemns the "objectionable elements that would promote anti-Semitism" in the film. This movie, according to these folks, is problematic not because it is anti-Semitic, but because it might be misused to convey anti-Semitism.

Now, in a society that constantly rewards those who claim discrimination, we can hardly be surprised by such objections. We have moved from condemning actual racism to behavior that could conceivably evoke racism. To do so is absurd and can never be applied equitably. We would have to censure "Schindler's List" for potential anti-Germanism, "The Killing Fields" for its anti-Cambodianism, "Austin Powers" for its potential anti-dwarfism, and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" for its ... wait, we've already done that.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2004 11:36 PM