(Talk about The Passion on the IHS Discussion Board!) [Enter now]

[Editor's note: R. Joseph Hoffman is Professor of Religious Studies at Wells College, New York, and Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Books authored, edited, or translated by Hoffman include the following: Jesus in History and Myth, The Jesus Legend, Jesus Outside the Gospels, Biblical V. Secular Ethics: The Conflict, The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions (Oxford Critical Studies in Religion Series), Celsus, on the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, and Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains.]

I once failed an exam on the gospels in a religious studies class, circa 1971, by beginning an essay with the question, "What can you say about a 33-year-old Jew who died? That he loved Yahweh, and the poor, and Mary Magdalene -- and me?" The professor, then the only man in America who had not been exposed to Erich Segal's puling Love Story or the Hollywood redaction of it, was not amused, and would have been enraged if he'd been cinematically literate.

Now, finally, the answer to the ancient question, How much does God love you? Enough, oh foolish Man, to expose his only child to the unimaginable horrors of scourging, thorns pounded into his tender scalp, being spit at, and pinned while alive to a crossbeam, only to die slowly by asphyxiation in the presence of his enemies. What father wouldn't be proud? What people wouldn't be grateful for such a painful display of affection? Mel Gibson is very grateful, and he wants to share his joy.

Mel tells us -- no, shows us -- everything we want to know about the cruel death of a young Jew, living in Roman-occupied Palestine sometime in the first century -- usually thought to be the governorship of an especially noxious procurator, Pontius Pilate. We know Pilate is Roman because (though evidently fluent in Aramaic speaking to the rabble) he speaks in Latin to Jesus (and marvelously, Jesus in Latin to him). Of course, Pilate's words are "recorded" in Greek in the gospel, still commonly used by civil administrators in the eastern provinces -- one of many slips in the film's historical detail.

We don't learn from the film that he is noxious, because the gospel (thus Mel) paints him a light pink. Nor does it matter that the gospels give us a flattering picture of Pilate solely because the Christians had nothing to lose from Jew-hating after their expulsion from the synagogues dotting the imperial landscape-after all, the Romans hated the Jews passionately, and might have loved the Christians better (so the gospel writers thought) if they shared the Roman antipathy for Palestine. But they had a lot to lose from Rome-bashing in the early days. And this is why in the gospels Pilate's only character flaw is his indecision. So, the light pink.

But, never mind history. Critics who dislike the film for its shoddy and exploitative use of the gospel "record" need to know that the gospels aren't records anyway, so Mel must be forgiven for believing what most believing Christians believe about the gospels. He does for a generation of violence-benumbed viewers what would have been done in the age of jihad, sooner or later: he shows them that the gospel can be played as high drama -- bloody Jacobean theater, even. And that the laborious gospel story of the Passion that Mel was forced to stand stock-still for every Good Friday, while purple-vested priests and penitents "played" the roles of Jesus and Pilate and the Jewish mob antiphonally ("Crucify him! Crucify him!") might be taken out of St. Theresa's Church and put on a big screen where even Protestants (whose entire Easter aesthetic was shaped by looking at vacant crosses and Easter lilies) might see the whole saga in a different and thrilling light. The fact that the "Passion Play" has been a feature of European culture since the Middle Ages, an aperitif to get one in the mood for the Lenten discipline (the shtick now stretches from the Black Forest to the Black Hills of South Dakota), should not be taken to detract from Gibson's unique contribution to the genre. This is a Passion with a difference, where every scene is calculated to exact an emotional price, every excruciating close-up of the battered God-man a thorn in the viewer's heart.

"Pawrful stuff," said one member of a Baptist church group interviewed by CNN, exiting a special early morning showing of "PC" on Ash Wednesday. "Pawrful." His attending wife added, "It makes it so you don't want to sin no more." Perhaps the headline should be "Protestants Discover the Crucifixion," since it is abundantly clear that the phenomenon of Born-Againism has all but eclipsed the gruesome death of the gentle Jesus who grants them salvation with a firm handshake and a crooked smile.

That's part of the problem with this film: in the age of religious illiteracy it's more "powerful" than the text, thus more believable, thus the way it "must" have happened. It brings the ugliness of ancient torture to life in the way, some have said, that Saving Private Ryan revivified the diminished memory of D-Day horrors. The standard reaction to its self-indulgent focus on the grotesque is, "I had no idea." Of course not, and we still don't.

Contrary to the claim that the movie follows the gospel closely, it doesn't. The protracted scourging is pure maudlin stage business (when the centurion captain says "Satis," we want to answer "Enough already."); so is the flipping of the cross, the pecking out of the bad thief's eyes, the demon-children tormenting Judas, the occasional displays of Mother Evil (Satan as Sinead O'Connor, complete with dwarf anti-Christ child in her wicked arms), the incredible shrinking shroud inside the tomb after the burial, and the sopping up of the precious blood from the courtyard. Doubtless more than one Christian viewer paged through her red letter edition of the King James Bible to locate the passages for these curiosities. She won't find them; they are there to give the drama an edge of the supernatural.

As to the charge of anti-Semitism (and Mel says he prays daily for the Jews), with the impeccable logic of the forgiven, a Rochester man was quoted saying, "It was heartbreaking to know that I had put him there, it wasn't the Jews and it wasn't the Romans, it was me and what I did ... It was all of us and that is why he had to die; for us." If there is any meaning here, it is the frightening aspect that there are lots of people in the twenty-first century who think their misbehavior drove the nails into the Savior's wrists (hands, here), that their sins punctured his side, just as surely as when they were fifteen their coke habit meant stealing twenties from their long-suffering father's wallet and finally caused his coronary. And these people can vote.

Modern Jewish viewers would do well to remember that not every unflattering portrayal of their remote and unknown ancestors is anti-Semitic. Indeed, at the risk of joining common cause with Gibson's right to artistic expression, I frankly think the view of the "Jews" is far more nuanced than most critics have made it out to be. Caiphas is a rotter for sure; but he was a rotter, and most of the Jewish literature from the Maccabean period and after makes it pretty clear that the priests were scoundrels and the latter Hasmoneans (read: Herod) sycophants and fools. Mel does much better in giving them a degree of depth and complexity than he manages with his Hero. On the nastiness index, the Romans come off far worse -- sadists with whips and chains -- while in the gospels hardly a word is uttered against them.

The closest approximation among Jesus reels to what Gibson has done (including the cloying Middle Easternish music) is the low-budget 1988 Canadian film, The Jesus of Montreal, where a destitute actor, playing Christ affixed to a fake cross for a passion play, meets his end in a mob scene that topples the gibbet and cracks his skull. Only this time, we're the mob and the violence is directed against us: almost everyone who has seen the film, myself among them, feels brutalized and thirsty after watching the agony unfold in brilliant images of the bloodied Christ. It is meant to convey the theological premise (without resort to theology) that this death is a sacrifice (something else Mel wants to get across to the Protestant bystanders), not an enthronement, and sacrifice was a bloody business in the Roman world. The Herodian temple was not a Quaker meeting house, but a sacrifice factory with gutters running in blood. Blood, it was thought, washed away sin; but like dirt, sin kept coming back, so more blood was required. Gibson is simply making available in pictures what the early Christians believed about the saving power of blood: "By his blood," Paul exclaims to a wavering audience at Rome, "we are now put right with God; and marvelously saved by him from God's anger." God drives a simple bargain: he will eat your sins if you give him blood, and this film is swimming in forgiveness.

The success of the film, to be fair, will depend on whether it is judged to do what it sets out to do. (Roger Ebert is on record as saying that this is the only criterion by which to judge a film like this -- whether it "succeeds" in its artistic purpose.) But it is not clear what "a film like this" is, or what the filmmaker's purpose really was. At one level, the film is grossly and deliberately under-theologized, as though we are being fed accurate data and asked to bring our own religious conviction to its interpretation. On that ground, the film fails because the passion story in the gospels is not historical data: it is a composition built up of Old Testament prophecies and psalms that were applied to the life of Jesus, or more accurately, used to explain his untimely and unexpected death, late in the first century. Everything from the cross to the thirst to the piercing of the hands and feet to the mocking of bystanders can be found in Ps. 22, with bits from Zech. 12:10, Isa. 53:7. Ex. 12:1ff, and the rest in a little-read book known as the Book of Wisdom thrown in for good measure.

Almost every detail of the passion of the Christ -- even the words of Jesus on the cross -- are lifted from Psalm 22.15ff.: "My throat is dry as dust; my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth ... My enemies look at me and stare. They gamble for my clothes, and divide them among themselves." While the early Christians explained this striking similarity as the fulfillment of prophecy -- and thus saw it as corroboration of Jesus' messiahship -- our more cynical age can see it for what it really was: a script for the gospel writers to fill in the enormous gaps in their knowledge of the life of Jesus. So completely wanting for historical data are we concerning the death of this inconspicuous Jewish preacher that it has often been doubted that he was crucified at all: early Jewish and Muslim sources (for different reasons, of course)denied it, and pagan sources for the crucifixion are non-existent or forged. An oft-quoted passage alluding to the death of Jesus from the Jewish writer Josephus is so transparently a piece of Christian editing that it hardly repays effort to attack it.

Thus all the ink (and film) spent on describing the sheer viciousness of Roman torture and execution is invested (wasted?) in historicizing a piece of the gospel that is the least historical, the most liturgical, the most completely rationalized portion of Jesus' nebulous existence. Those who feel that the movie has awakened them to the reality of salvation, reminded them of its "cost," or transported them to a higher spiritual plane with its realistic depiction of historical events have been film-flammed.

What kind of film is it? The Passion of the Christ is the residue of too many Good Fridays, too many Irish priests, excessive meditations on The Sacred Wounds, zealous devotion to the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus, and a hateful conviction that Protestants need to see Christ on the cross, not just an empty tomb, and the Jews made to accept their responsibility. The most sickening scene is the last moment on Golgotha: Jesus' side has been pierced with a lance (John 19), blood and water flood from his side, and in a shot so suffused with Catholic piety it would bring tears to a nun's eyes, the soldier kneels to be bathed in the precious blood.

Calling upon Christians not to cast stones, Catholic bishops are repeating Cardinal Egan's call to Vatican II theological correctness, "He gave his life on the cross; no one took it from him. This is what the church has always taught." That is a nicety, but the fact is, the church wrote the gospel and Gibson is truer to its embarrassing first century religious context than the church can afford to acknowledge.

At the end of the day, what can you say about a 33-year-old Jew who died? Not very much, as it turns out.