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First, stir the shit. Gibson did this by fanning the fires kindled by Jews (whose fears were well founded, judging from leaked copies of the script). He made outrageous comments on the order of, "Secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church." He allowed that he'd cut a scene in which the head Jewish priest cries, "His blood be on us and on our children," because, "Man, if I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house, they'd come kill me." Guess who they are?
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For this project, Newmarket tapped into the current passion for backstory revelations. Soon we were hearing about the miracle (involving a lightning strike) that had occurred on the set. It was taken as an auspicious sign that the actor playing Jesus, Jim Caviezel, had the same initials as the Savior. These tantalizing tidbits were gravied up with a human-interest angle that centered on Gibson's struggle against the classic demons of drink and drugs. By the time he appeared on Primetime last week, the narrative of the sinner redeemed was at the heart of Gibson's conversation with Diane Sawyer. Her questions were as soft and fleecy as the Lamb of God.
Is Gibson an anti-Semite, she asked. "It's a sin," he replied. "There's encyclicals on it." Never mind that Gibson's breakaway Catholic sect rejects the most recent of these pronouncements, along with every other Vatican declaration since the 1960s. Never mind that Gibson's father thinks the Holocaust is mostly fiction and that the millions of Jews who lived in Poland before Hitler's rise merely migrated to places like Brooklyn. Under Sawyer's sympathetic gaze, Mel presented himself as a loving son who wouldn't allow his enemies to "drive a wedge" between his dad and himself. Karl Rove couldn't have programmed him better.
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Every generation gets the Passion it deserves. Back in the '50s, anyone could take comfort in Gospel spectacles, with their Roman finery and celestial finales. It didn't matter whether you referred to Jesus as he or He. These old films enrage Gibson ostensibly because they were bland but actually because they crudely reflect the ethic of Christian humanism, tempered by firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust. That was then and this is now. Gibson lives in a world, and works in an industry, where Jews are not afraid to be powerful and profane. It is hard for him not to see these Jews as the linchpin of a culture that tempts him, rewards him, and alienates him from his father's convictions. So it has been for millions of Christians in the centuries since the rise of secular society—and millions of Jews have died as a result.
No wonder Gibson rails against scholars who try to place the Gospel in a historical context. That's the sort of thing his father would call a plot by Freemasons and Jews. When you do embed the New Testament in its time, you discover that the earliest books, composed about a generation after the Crucifixion, portray Jesus as beloved by the Jewish masses but reviled by their priests. It's only in the later Gospels, written by men who knew what the Romans had done to the Second Temple, and could do to them, that Pilate takes on an almost benign air and the Jews are affiliated with Satan. These late books are the primary source of Gibson's rendition, which reflects the traditional—and now repudiated—teaching of the Catholic Church.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has yet to weigh in on this film, but they certainly haven't allowed their parishes to be part of the hype. This is a fundamentalist megillah, and it's revealing that Gibson's rejectionist brand of Catholicism meshes so well with a reactionary Protestant agenda. Those who fear that this film will fuel anti-Semitism as it makes its way around the world are right to be alarmed. Despite his promises to the contrary, the curse upon the Jews that appears in Matthew is still in Gibson's Passion, cried out by the mob condemning Jesus but not translated in the subtitles. No one will understand these words as they are spoken in Aramaic, but what will happen when the film reaches other countries and new subtitles are made? And what about the relentless depiction of bloodthirsty Jewish priests and mobs manipulating a weak-willed Pilate? It is naive at best to deny that these images will resonate with what many Muslims think about Jews and what many Christians still feel deep in their hearts. A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 25 percent of respondents think the Jews killed Jesus.
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http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/goldstein.php
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