Immediately upon its opening in the United States, Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of Christ," which depicts the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus, stirred up a flood of reactions throughout the media and stormy public debates. The film premiered at about 2,000 cinemas on Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the events leading to Easter, when Jesus was handed over to the Romans and crucified.
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I saw the film twice, and it is a particularly violent film, which depicts the Jews - nearly all of them - in an ugly and repulsive way that does an injustice to Christ and to Christianity. Jesus is beaten, whipped and battered, bloodied and moaning; his face gradually becomes a doughy mass of torn and bleeding flesh. Everything is shot in close-up, at length and in great detail, from the moment Jesus is captured by the Roman soldiers to his death on the Cross.
After the detailed filming of the huge metal nails that are hammered into Christ's hands and feet, the exhausted viewer hopes to be able to stop holding his breath. But then along comes a blackbird which, with indifferent malevolence, pecks at the eyes and the dangling head of the thief who hangs on the cross next to Christ's. The pecking does not end until the blackbird itself is covered in blood.
The question of why such a superfluity of violence is necessary keeps coming up for discussion in the media. The answers to it range from personal problems that Mel Gibson has - or doesn't have - through the argument that violence is a current style that appeals to young people to the explanation that it is a way of achieving a profound and unique religious identification, about which fascinated Christian viewers report emotionally.
Most of the Jews in the film - not all of them - are ugly, cruel, seditious and easily incited. The High Priest, with his hooked nose and his malevolent expression, rules the public and it is actually he who forces the Roman governor to crucify Jesus. Indirectly the message here is that the Jews can bend even a representative of a world empire to their will. And perhaps there is a heavy allusion here to our own times, and to what has been said about the Jews' control of the American administration and its moves.
The Jews' desire to crucify Jesus is not entirely understood, because the film does not provide viewers with historical and theological background, not even in a few sentences, that might have made it clear who Jesus was, what his message was, what danger the Jewish leadership saw in his messianic declarations and what was happening in the province of Judea under Rome.
In Gibson's film things have been reversed. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate is a charming character and not a cruel suppressor of rebellions who crucified thousands of people as a routine punishment. The High Priest defends only his position and his power, and not the principles and practices of religion. The Roman governor gives the Jews an opportunity to choose between Christ's life and the life of Barabbas, another Jew who was imprisoned for his crimes. The Jews immediately choose the criminal. The choice is mentioned in the Gospels, but here it is presented in a visual way that testifies like 100 witnesses that the Jews are identified with the criminal and that they are the opposite of Christ, the fount of love and mercy.
The film does an injustice to Christ and to Christianity because actor Jim Caviezel, speaking halting Aramaic, does not succeed in coming across as a personality who is bringing a new message for mankind. Jesus remains a tortured body, from whose sufferings a cult of his flesh and blood begins. The spiritual dimension of the origin of Christianity - even if it was established decades after Jesus - does not exist here. The only element that reflects this dimension is that Jesus accepts his sufferings, and in fact welcomes them, with firmness and in the recognition that he has indeed been intended to atone for the sins of mankind.
The questions that are coming up repeatedly in the United States are: Is Gibson himself a confirmed hater of Jews - or a cunning merchant? How has he been influenced by his father, a Holocaust denier? Is the film faithful to the Gospels, as Gibson keeps declaring? To what extent does the film reflect Gibson's opposition to the decisions of the Vatican at the Second Ecumenical Council in 1965, whereby only a small minority of the Jews who lived at that time were responsible for the death of Christ, and all the rest are absolved of guilt?
But the main question is whether this violent and damaging film, which brings the blaming of the Jews for the murder of Christ back to the center of the world stage, will prompt a wave of anti-Semitism and violence. In the United States this has not happened. There are those who credit this to the work that the Vatican has done since 1965. The fear is of the reaction to the film in Europe and in the Arab world.
Professor Porat is the head of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University
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