Passions of the Christ: Do Jews and Christians See the Same Film?
Shortly after the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, I served as the moderator for a panel discussion at Mount Holyoke College, the liberal arts college where I teach philosophy and film studies. The panel organizer consulted with me about whom to have on the panel because I am Jewish and play a central role in the College’s Film Studies Program. The diverse panel we assembled was composed of a New Testament historian, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, the College’s Protestant Minister, the Catholic Chaplain to the College, and a film historian. The panel went as anyone who has seen the film might expect.
First, the historian criticized the film because of its historical inaccuracies. He argued that such criticism was very important because the film presents itself, and will be taken by many viewers, as the truth about Jesus’s life. But, he argued, the Gospels themselves reflect the specific concern to make Christianity appealing to the large numbers of Romans who were joining the faith in the century after Jesus’s death. Because the leader of this growing religion was both Jewish and killed by the Romans, Pilate’s role in the crucifixion was whitewashed in all of the Gospels. That Gibson went even farther than the Gospels themselves by portraying Pilate as a tormented soul while having the Jewish leaders appear petty and spiteful was, for the New Testament historian, truly appalling, especially when viewed in light of the current global climate of religious warfare.
Next came the scholar of Jewish mysticism, who wanted to explain the anxieties and concerns that the film had raised for Jews. Although Gibson has said that he intended to show that all of us are sinners and therefore guilty of Jesus’s death, that is not the message our scholar got from the film. A group of Jewish rabbis and members of the Jewish community are the ones who demand Jesus’s death by crucifixion from a Roman proconsul who is portrayed as deeply troubled by it and who only very reluctantly bows to the Jews’ pressure. Stressing the importance of the world climate today, in which anti-Semitism is on the rise in many quarters, the scholar argued that the film is likely to inflame those fires just at a time when we should be doing our best to augment the Jewish-Christian dialogues that have stemmed the spread of anti-Semitism.
The Protestant minister agreed that the film is anti-Semitic, but that was not her central worry. To her, it represented a real distortion of the message of a man who had deeply affected her life. She told the audience that Jesus’s message was that we had to embrace those on the margins, whom no one cared about or wanted to love. This message is the real gift of Jesus to the world, she said, and it is completely missing from Gibson’s film, which focuses exclusively on his torment. Although the crucifixion is important, it has to be seen in the broader context of Jesus’s teachings, virtually none of which is given prominence in the film.
The Catholic College Chaplain emphasized the Church’s complicity in the murder and torture of Jews over the centuries through its propagation of the questionable moral idea of collective guilt, an idea that the Church has been combating since at least 1962. In her eyes, the film does a disservice to the Catholic Church and harms the dialogue between Catholics and Jews. She pointed out that U.S. Catholic Bishops had issued a statement emphasizing the importance of maintaining the dialogue between Catholics and Jews, rather than taking any step backwards, let alone a giant one, as this film is.
The last speaker on the panel was the College’s film scholar who approached the film very differently. She saw the film in light of previous attempts to bring Jesus to the screen. Her claim was that Jesus’s body had always presented filmmakers with a problem, because it inevitably registered contemporary bodily styles at the same time that it was supposed to be historical. From her point of view, Gibson had succeeded in doing what he attempted to do: tell Jesus’s story on the screen in a way that is not inherently a parody. He did it by making that body virtually unrecognizable as contemporary by having it beaten thoroughly from virtually the beginning of the film.
After these presentations, I made a few comments and the discussion was turned over to the audience, composed mostly of students. I found remarkable the number of students who quite openly said with great conviction that The Passion had tremendous religious significance for them. One of them said that she had seen the film three times with three different groups of friends and all of them had their faith not merely renewed, but actually ignited for the first time. All of the students said that they didn’t perceive the film as anti-Semitic because it isn’t a movie about Jews at all but about Jesus and his suffering. They also admitted that the film made them realize that they were responsible for Jesus’s death, as was each of us.
I left that discussion puzzled that the same work could produce such widely divergent responses. It seemed as if the people I had been listening to had watched very different films. Some saw it as historically inaccurate and a real threat to Jewish-Christian relations; others considered it an abasement of the true message of Jesus’s life and death; and still for others it was a remarkable document of faith that captures the essence of their religious belief. And, of course, there may be many other ways in which audiences reacted to the film that did not get expressed that afternoon.
In order to register this wide divergence of viewer response to Gibson’s film, I will talk of a number of different “films” that audiences “saw,” using the terms figuratively. Of all these films, I want to focus on just two. The first is the film that people like myself and some of the other panelists had seen. It is a film that is deeply anti-Semitic and portrays sadism to an almost unbearable extent, a film that is hard to reconcile with the message of Christianity as I understand it. The second is the film that many Catholics and some other Christians—among them many students in the audience at Mount Holyoke—saw, a film of unparalleled spiritual significance that taught them the real meaning of their faith in a way nothing previously had done.
I was genuinely puzzled about the enormous discrepancy between these two films and have thought about it a great deal. How can people have such radically different experiences of a single work of art? Aside from my concern about the film itself—what I saw as its anti-Semitism and the effect that this might have on Jewish people the world over, for example—it was a more abstract issue that kept gnawing at me: I couldn’t understand how viewers of the same film could have experiences that appeared so completely to contradict one another. Perplexed, I had to figure out how this could be.
Why Different Responses?
One reason why the divergent responses to the film troubled me is that I am not a postmodernist. Adherents of that ideology think that it is only natural for people with different backgrounds, assumptions, and commitments to interpret artworks differently. At its most extreme, a postmodernist affirms the multiplicity of meanings that a work—a “text” in their parlance—has for every viewer.
I have no doubt that there is some truth to postmodernism, but I had always thought that interpreting works of art required me to think that there is a single meaning of a work that I am uncovering when I interpret it. Although we may react to certain features of a work differently because of our own particular identity as viewers—our “subject positions”—I still adhere to the idea that we can get others to accept the validity of our reactions once we explain what it is that makes us react as we do.
However, what struck me the moment I left the theater on the night before the discussion—I had put off viewing the film until the last moment, dissuaded by the press coverage—was my inability to understand how anyone could consider this film to be spiritually uplifting in any sense. To me, the repeated scenes of Jesus’s suffering—especially during the very long procession to Golgotha—portray rather the enormous brutality and sadism of which human beings in general are capable or, at least, that of the Roman soldiers at the time. Even though I know that it would make a difference if I thought that the body being abused was God’s body, I was thoroughly perplexed about how seeing people taking pleasure in its destruction could yield a spiritual message. Indeed, to me this overly long sequence was its own parody, for each new abuse seemed laid on only to prolong the sequence and show that no stone could be left unthrown, no flesh left intact, no indignity unsuffered.
Slowly an idea dawned on me about these two, highly divergent responses to the film. The reason there were two films—on the one hand, an anti-Semitic tract made by the son of a Holocaust denier that Jews and others like me saw and, on the other, a deeply spiritual portrayal of the agony of the Christ that moved a certain segment of the Christian community—is that the film itself is divided and contains each of these other films in it.
To explain what I mean, I’ll say that The Passion of the Condemnation is the film up to the point where Jesus is condemned by Pilate and The Passion of the Crucifixion is the remainder of the film culminating in a very short sequence depicting Christ’s return to life. One audience of the film—let me call them “Jews,” without meaning to prejudice the case—focus on what is depicted in The Passion of the Condemnation while another audience of the film—let me call them “true believers”—respond most fully to The Passion of the Crucifixion.
Although the narrative of The Passion is an amalgam of the four Gospels and is thus familiar material, The Passion of the Condemnation focuses on the quasi-legal processes that led to Jesus being condemned to death. In Gibson’s version, the Jewish community as a whole is responsible for this. They apprehend him in the woods as a result of Judas’s betrayal and then, in the film’s version, subject his body to its first round of torture—events not mentioned in any of the Gospels—as they bring him into a Jewish court. After he is condemned by the court, Jesus is brought before Pilate and the head rabbis ask that he be crucified, a request that Pilate finds unjustified and excessive. In these scenes, the film depicts a humane and thoughtful, if troubled and pressured leader—Pilate—succumbing to the vengeful, sadistic crowd of Jews that demands Jesus’s crucifixion. Even then, Pilate accepts this outcome only after repeated failed attempts to find other solutions, including appealing to Herod and having Jesus cruelly beaten.
At this point, I think most viewers understand the film to be presenting the Jewish community as a whole, though its leaders especially, as responsible for Jesus’s death. The Roman soldiers are already depicted as sadistic goons whose delight in Jesus’s torture appalls us, but we are meant to be even more repelled by the Jews’ failure to be satisfied with the destruction of Jesus’s body by the Romans, by what we see as their adamant and irrational demand that he be killed by crucifixion.
One thing that bothers Jews is that Gibson’s version of events exonerates Pilate of any responsibility for Jesus’s death, by using the flashback, among other cinematic techniques. Pilate begins to wash his hands and this action leads to a perceptually similar scene in which Jesus is washing his hands before that Passover Seder which has become known as the Last Supper. (For those that may not know, this is one of the traditional acts of the celebration of Passover.) When we return to Pilate, he says that he has washed his hands of Jesus’s blood and the Jews respond that his death will now be on them alone.
It is notable that the last phrase from Matthew 27:25 (“The blood be on us, and on our children.”) is not translated onto the subtitles of the American version of the film because test audiences found it upsetting! Despite Gibson’s avowal that the film is an expression of his faith, financial considerations do play a role in what we see on the screen and, indeed, in the entire controversy about the film. However, at least in some versions of the film the phrase is translated.
The Jews’ supposed acknowledgment of their guilt for Jesus’s death has been an ongoing spur to anti-Semitism. Its acceptance by many centuries of Christians resulted in countless assaults on Jews and untold suffering by them. It’s no wonder, then, that at this point Jewish audiences have had enough of the film. In it they see a depiction of Jesus’s conviction and sentencing that emphasizes the most anti-Semitic aspects of the Christian tradition. For those who have this response, this is essential to the film: its pointed emphasis and expansion of the anti-Semitic aspects of the Gospel’s version of Jesus’s condemnation.
However, Gibson is not by any means done with us. We have yet to sit through The Passion of the Crucifixion, a film that is more gory and unrelenting in its depiction of gore than The Passion of the Condemnation. The entire journey to Golgotha, the nailing of Jesus to the cross, and the suffering throughout are extended scenes of a body being brutalized well beyond any possible point of tolerance. But Jesus, as Gibson presents him, has extraordinary powers of endurance and he—or his body—just takes more and more abuse until he finally dies upon the cross. The process takes more than two hours in the film.
Sitting through The Passion of the Crucifixion is an ordeal, even for a non-believer. But for those who think that they are witnessing, albeit in fictional form, their God being tortured, brutalized, and, finally, killed, I imagine this must be a truly agonizing and yet purifying experience. My proposal is that this film—The Passion of the Crucifixion—so overwhelms The Passion of the Condemnation for true believers that it and it alone constitutes the film for them. They focus on and think the film is about the horrendous suffering that Jesus chose to endure in order to save them and everyone else. How can they see any other film? The earlier scenes of the various trials and machinations of The Passion of the Condemnation are just so much stage setting for the real issue at hand: Jesus’s sacrifice.
The reason, then, for the discrepancies in people’s experiences of The Passion is that different audiences focus on different aspects of the film. Jews will naturally be sensitive to the film’s tendentious portrayal of the events leading up to Jesus being sentenced to death by crucifixion, while true believers will naturally focus on their God’s acceptance of all the suffering, humiliation, and pain that the film depicts with such intensity. These, then, are the two Passions of the Christ that form the center of our interest.
Fiction as History
If, as I have claimed, it is possible for audiences to see two different “films” while watching the same set of images and sounds, does this mean that I think both of these films—one a vicious anti-Semitic tract and the other a profoundly religious movie—are equally valid when treated as interpretations of The Passion as a whole? In fact, I do not. Although I understand why those whom I have called true believers might find The Passion to be a source of faith, I think that they have been manipulated by Mel Gibson, for they think that they have seen an accurate re-creation of Jesus’s apprehension, conviction, suffering, and death. In fact, what they have seen is a highly slanted version of those events, one that Biblical scholars regard as riddled with error. Why, then, can The Passion be so convincing to these viewers?
The film relies on an important property of films that has received extensive discussion among philosophers: its basis in photography. Beginning with the French film theorist and journalist, André Bazin, film scholars have been struck by the medium’s ability to capture reality accurately. For these thinkers, photography is distinguished from all other arts by its automaticity, its ability to present us with a world that is, in some sense, not mediated by the consciousness of a human being. Once a photographer presses the shutter, the world is imprinted on his film no matter what he happens to think or desire.
This is significant because it gives films a verisimilitude that all the other arts lack. When we look at a painting, we may be impressed by how much it looks like the object it depicts, but we remain aware that what we see depends upon the painter’s decisions about what to include and exclude. We would never dream of using a painting of someone as conclusive evidence in a trial because we realize that what is shown in a painting is crucially mediated by the beliefs and desires of its painter.
Things are different with photographs. We believe that they give us good evidence about what happened at, say, a crime scene—so long as they have not been doctored. And, even then, we believe that the negative tells the truth. Indeed, many of our legal procedures are based upon just this belief.
A film benefits from the verisimilitude of photography. Viewers have a tendency to trust that what they are seeing is real, even when they know it isn’t. Although analogue photography has become compromised by the advent of digital imaging, generally viewers still retain their faith in the realism of the medium.
Film makers have sometimes used the viewers’ trust in a film’s verisimilitude to present a work of fiction as historical truth. A prime example is D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. The nation referred to in the film’s title is the Ku Klux Klan and the film attempts to vindicate the Klan as necessary for defending whites against marauding blacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. To get audiences to accept his claim, Griffith made a film that was self-consciously styled to appear to be a work of authentic history.
For example, throughout Griffith’s masterful presentation of the Civil War, he stops the action and inserts a still tableau that he presents as a copy of a famous photograph of the War, even including information about where and when it was shot, and by whom. The effect is to make audiences believe that they are seeing a completely accurate recreation of the historical epoch of the Civil War and its aftermath.
In fact, however, The Birth’s narrative offers a highly skewed version of the historical period it portrays, relying on rumor and fabrication in the service of its ideological goal. It uses its apparent verisimilitude in re-presenting the events of the Civil War to subtly lead audiences into accepting the rest of its narrative—including its presentation of black men as sexual predators of white women—as if it were also gospel truth, so to speak.
At the time of its release, The Birth of a Nation was subject to protests by various black organizations that were offended by its racism. Although many white viewers had trouble understanding this charge then, it is hard to imagine a viewer now who would take the film to be historically accurate. One reason is that we are no longer susceptible to Griffith’s cinematic strategies for creating the illusion of verisimilitude.
I suggest that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ relies on a very similar cinematic strategy to that of Griffith’s racist masterpiece, and with similar results. Gibson goes to great lengths to make the film seem realistic. A central strategy is the explicit portrayal of violence, intending that the film not be seen as a romanticized portrait of Jesus’s martyrdom. This is why Gibson focuses so explicitly on many cruel events and why the film shows, in excruciating detail, the effects of violence on Jesus’s body as a repeated object of torture. Why else do we need to see Jesus’s skin literally ripped from his body and then stuck in the teeth of the torture instrument with which he was beaten?
I can understand how true believers might wind up thinking that what they are seeing is a virtual recreation of the events of Jesus’s passion. The realism that Gibson employs in showing Jesus’s tortured body can easily lead one to assume that what one is seeing in the film’s narrative is equally realistic. But just as viewers who accepted The Birth’s racist narrative about the Klu Klux Klan were duped by that film’s realism into accepting its version of the Reconstruction Era, so too, I suggest, are viewers of The Passion who come away thinking that they have learned the truth about what took place in Jerusalem one spring so long ago.
This is my proposal, then. It is not an interpretation of the film or an interrogation of its anti-Semitism or anything like that. My aim has been to understand how The Passion of the Christ can produce such different responses in different viewers, depending on their religious or ethnic affiliations. It is important that everyone who is interested in this film think about this question so that the film not result in an increasing polarization between people. Too often, when Jews feel they have been victimized, their very response to that victimization alienates others even more, bringing about increased anti-Semitism rather than a greater awareness of its perils. I have tried to explain not only why the film upsets Jews but also, and equally importantly, why some Christians find it spiritually compelling. In closing, I ask those who share that second response to consider why some of this film’s audiences might react so differently, rather than simply dismissing them or regarding them as having missed the film’s point. For, as I have argued, there are more Passions of the Christ than it might seem on a first viewing.
SOURCES
André Bazin. 1971. What Is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thomas Cripps. 1977. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomas E. Wartenberg. 1999. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder: Westview.
———. 2001a. Film and Representation. In Ananta C. Sukla, ed., Representation and the Arts (Westport: Praeger), pp. 210–220.
———. 2001b. Humanizing the Beast: King Kong and the Representation of Black Male Sexuality. In Daniel Bernardi, ed., Classic Whiteness: Race and the Studio System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 157–177.
1. Do you think The Passion of the Christ is anti-Semitic? Why or why not?
2. Does knowing that many people take a point of view opposed to yours affect your own view?
3. Do you think that there can be multiple interpretations of a film? What about the possibility that these different interpretations contradict one another?
4. Do films deserve a special status as works of art in virtue of their basis in photography?
5. Do you agree with the author’s contention that viewers who found the film spiritually compelling did so because of the film’s realistic portrayal of violence?