A historical, as well as theological, view of the Passion

Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion of the Christ,” will open nationwide tomorrow…. Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion of the Christ,” will open nationwide tomorrow. Writing on Feb. 17 in “Gibson’s ‘Passion’ depicts love, not hate,” Eric Miller points out that much of the controversy over the film centers on a verse in Matthew (27:25) in which the Jewish crowd declares, “Let his blood be on us and on our children.” Miller acknowledges that “this verse has been used as a justification for hate,” but quickly moves from a consideration of this historical reality to make a theological statement.

Miller concludes his theological argument as follows: “When considered holistically, the story of Christ’s crucifixion is loaded with meaning and defined by complex interactions between men and God. To whittle it down to anti-Semitism is to completely miss the point, and no one can soundly use it as a justification for hate.”

I think that Miller meant to be speaking prescriptively in the last sentence. As he acknowledges early on in his column, this statement does not work very well on the descriptive level — soundly or not, people have used Matthew as “justification for hate.” Indeed, the concerns of most Jewish and Christian leaders about the film have less to do with theology and more to do with history and sociology.

At the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine outlined a theological framework for the tolerance of Jews within a Christian society that strongly influenced the Catholic Church’s policies toward the Jews through the Middle Ages and well into the modern period: that Jews are not to be forcibly converted or killed, and that the Jews’ adherence to the Old Testament testifies to the truth of Christianity.

But the theological nuances of this position — his writing that Jews are rightly degraded, but not expelled or killed, and that Jews are rightly condemned for not accepting Christ’s message while acting as witnesses to the truth of that message — were often lost on the larger medieval population, not trained in theological dialectic.

Most people today, like most people in the Middle Ages, are not trained to think theologically. And the images and sounds of a well-made motion picture are as powerful (or moreso) than the images and sounds of a medieval passion play. Gibson said on “Primetime Live” that movies cannot be interrupted in the middle for the kind of theological disclaimer that Miller provides. Hence, Gibson has prudently removed the phrase from Matthew 27:25 from the subtitles. For the Aramaic speakers in the audience, it’s still there on the soundtrack.

Miller also writes that, “if Gibson bases everything in his movie on [the Gospels] alone, we will still have a story about a crowd of Jews calling for Jesus’ torture and death” (emphasis added). But this does not mean that the film offers an accurate history of the death of Jesus. The Gospels were all written long after the events they purport to record.

We should remember that Pontius Pilate was apparently a brutal colonial governor unlikely to allow himself to be swayed by a crowd of Jews, and that crucifixion was a punishment used by the Romans against hundreds of Jews for various forms of political sedition. As a historian, I read the account in Matthew not as “what really happened” at the time of Jesus’ death, but as a narrative being told a generation or two later by and for a community of early Christians in the process of separating itself from the Jewish community, and hence as evidence of the collective memory and religious identity of that later community.

I don’t fault anyone who takes the Gospels literally as an act of faith. And I don’t fault Gibson for offering us his version of the story — Gibson’s gospel, as it were. Nor do I think Gibson is an anti-Semite or that anyone emotionally or spiritually moved by this film is an anti-Semite.

But attending to the concerns of a people who have suffered immense persecution as a result of this story and the way it has been told does not seem unreasonable.

We are privileged to have Mary Boys and Peter Pettit — leading scholars and activists in the area of interfaith dialogue — speak at Pitt on March 29. They will be speaking in an academic forum that will be co-sponsored by the Honors College, Religious Studies and Jewish Studies.

Information about this event will be circulated soon, and I invite all students, faculty and staff to come for thoughtful discussion of the sensitive issues surrounding this film.

Adam Shear is an assistant professor of religious studies at Pitt.