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Go to source of 'Passion'

BY H.A. (ANDY) KELLY

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” purports to be a faithful rendering of the Passion accounts of the Gospels. To my mind, it’s close enough, and I am sure that many of those who see the film will agree.

What to me is a disgrace is that on a university campus, too few scholars have ever taken the time to read the Gospel accounts — many don’t even own a copy of the Bible — and so are ill-equipped to make such a comparison for themselves.

The Bible — both the New and Old Testaments — is probably the most influential book ever written. It is a work that every college-age person (not to mention university professor) should read and study, rather than relying on hearsay or the memory of lessons from Sunday school.

The Passion narratives consist of only four pages or so in each of the four Gospels. One of the key issues with Gibson’s film has been the question of whether its portrayal of the Jews at the time of Christ is anti-Semitic. Raymond Brown, in his 1,600-page “Death of the Messiah,” which is part of the Anchor Bible series, has an excellent section on the question of how anti-Jewish each of the Gospel accounts is.

Mark, the earliest Gospel, is highly critical of the chief priests and the scribes. The same is true of Matthew, who spreads the blame to “all the people.” Luke, in contrast, gives a more favorable picture of some of the local Jews. John’s account is the shortest of all, but he consistently calls the enemies of Jesus “the Jews,” and has the chief priests deny the messianic hopes of their people in order to convict Jesus.

The cry of the people in Matthew, “His blood be upon us and our children,” has caused many Christians to look upon all Jews as cursed. It doesn’t mean that, of course. Curses don’t work: You can’t implicate your countrymen or your descendants in your own actions. There’s a Christian principle that you are punished or rewarded only for your own bad or good deeds.
Gibson gives these words not to the mob as a whole but to the high priest alone. But as a concession to critics, he has left them untranslated from the Aramaic in the film.

Now that “The Passion” has been released, the most controversial aspect of the film is the graphic depiction of the physical abuse that Jesus suffers. There are good religious reasons for depicting it realistically: Christians have traditionally been urged to suffer Jesus’ torments with him. My own objection to the portrayal in the movie, however, is that the abuse is not realistic.

This is especially true in the scourging scene. No human being could survive such a brutal beating, let alone be able to carry a heavy cross. My advice to Gibson would be to cut the scene from the current nine minutes — it seemed like 20 — to three minutes.

Kelly, a professor of English and a former Jesuit, is on sabbatical while writing a book, “Satan: A Biography.”