Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 64-65
Christianity and the Middle East
A Plain and Simple Story
By Robert Younes, M.D.
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An undated handout photo released prior to the Ash Wednesday opening of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” shows Jesus on the day of his crucifixion. The film, which graphically depicts the last 12 hours of Christ’s life, is in Latin and Aramaic (AFP/Icon Productions).
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THE STORY is simple, really. Two millennia ago, a Jewish preacher living in the far eastern reaches of the Roman Empire spoke of God, his Father, and why He had sent His son to live among His chosen people and redeem them. Some Jewish listeners welcomed the preacher’s teaching, but the Pharisees and Sadducees of the Temple viewed him as a usurper of their authority (and possibly of their livelihood). In their fury they charged Jesus with blasphemy and demanded of Roman authorities that he be condemned. The preacher was arrested, beaten and flogged, then died a lingering death by crucifixion—the Roman authorities having reserved this prolonged agony and tortured death for its worst criminal offenders and to illustrate to its subjects the terrible punishment that awaited disturbers of civil order.
“The Passion of the Christ,” a film by Mel Gibson, portrays Jesus’ last 12 hours in graphic cinematic detail, with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin—an artistic device that heightens the viewers’ attention to the film’s unusually brutal visual content. Inevitably, a storm of controversy erupted about the film—even before it was completed—and it soon became a vehicle, an empty vessel, to be filled with forceful, stridently voiced opinion and comment that reflected where the speaker stood on a host of religious, social, and political issues. The film became the touchstone for a conflict that still crashes and roars in the exact same tiny dot of today’s Middle Eastern geography as it did 2,000 years ago. It generated an outpouring of reviews, opinions, polemics, outrages and congratulatory comments (I collected 61 opinion articles, and there are probably hundreds more) in every form of print, spoken, visual and electronic media.
For some Jewish commentators, the film was a lancet that pierced an abscess full of pent-up emotions, fears, resentments, and fury about their painful history living in a Christian and Muslim world for two thousand years. Their collective memories reverberated with pogroms, exile, persecutions, repudiations, humiliations and Holocaust. All of these fearful experiences and traumas were driven deeply into their collective psyches, making it almost impossible for them to view the world except through their own existential prism. They tried assimilation and concluded, ultimately, that it offered scant protection from persecution and marginalization. Their inspired solution was Zionism, and the midwife to the birth of the Jewish nation was the 19th and 20th century anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe.
Gibson’s film resurrected Christian allegations that the Jews committed the sin of killing Christ—a Christian charge that fostered unending torment for the Jews through the ages. Anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews was firmly repudiated in 1965 by the Second Vatican Council. Pope John Paul II has continued to lead the Catholic Church in its tremendous progress to rectify the long-standing anti-Semitism it fostered, going back to the first century, when some Jews repudiated the Jesus sect of Judaism and refused to convert to Christianity.
Leading the anti-Gibson charge were Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Institute. According to the ADL head, “Accusing Jews of deicide strikes a raw nerve among some because it has historically been the justification for persecution, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust.”
(ADL’s own surveys over 10 years ago, however, consistently concluded that religion was not a driver of anti-Semitism, and the organization does not include the charge of deicide as one of its indicators of bias against Jews.)
“I can tell you this is a terrible film,” Rabbi Hier said, “a terrible portrayal of Jews and will cause tremendous harm and be a delight to all the enemies of the Jewish people.”
Los Angeles Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe quoted Hier as not regretting his outspokenness, arguing that “The overriding issue for Jews in history is that too often we kept silent and we paid a great price, and I feel that we should not do that again.”
Watanabe also quoted J.J. Goldberg, editor of Forward, a Jewish newspaper published in New York, as commenting that, as a result of the backlash over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise of hate crimes against Jews in Europe, and efforts at a U.N. conference in South Africa to declare Zionism a form of racism, some Jews feel besieged. Even New York City’s Hate Crimes Unit got into the act, when cops were sent to see the film to determine if it inspired hatred.
James Carroll, a former priest and a reporter for the Boston Globe, said he thought “The Passion” was obscene and “the crucifixion...a triumph of sadomasochistic exploitation.” Mebah Uddin noted that the film induced a sense of “collective guilt” and might revive a new wave of anti-Semitism because of the gruesome depiction of the crucifixion. The National Secular Society newsletter noted that some critics called the movie “pornographic” and a “snuff movie for the devout.” According to Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, “Christians are in a state of hysteria about it.”
Writing in CounterPunch, Gary Leupp said he believes a more likely source of anti-Semitism lies not with Mel Gibson’s film about the Passion but with the moral outrage many Americans and others around the world felt was created by the systematic campaign of lies that led the United States into the war in Iraq. “Integral to the lie-spreading effort,” he pointed out, “were the ”˜neocons’ who, matter-of-factly noted in the Israeli liberal press, happen to be overwhelmingly Jewish and often dual nationals (U.S.-Israeli) who see the interests of the two nations as being inseparable.”
Not only was his film criticized, but Gibson and his father, Hutton Gibson, were attacked for their continued observation of pre-Vatican II Council Catholic liturgy and, by indirect inference, rejection of the Second Vatican Council’s repudiation of anti-Semitism. Commentators claimed that the younger Gibson, an Australian, had become too independent of Hollywood’s Jewish power circles and, as a result, his acting and directing career was finished. Curmudgeon Hutton Gibson was widely quoted as saying that the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust was exaggerated.
While many contemporary Jews see “The Passion of the Christ” as a glass that is much less than half full, devout Christians have been stimulated to renew their faith. Many film viewers are stunned into prolonged silence (and some into tears) by the brutal, visceral portrayal of the ordeal to which Jesus subjected himself in order to redeem his people.
Christian theology affirms that Jesus was specifically sent by God to live among the chosen people and become the human sacrifice to appease his Father in heaven to atone for His people’s sins. The Temple priests were merely the instruments for the sacrifice. For many reasons, this message evolved over the centuries to one of blaming all Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion—when in fact it was only a small number of Jews with vested interests who forced the hand of Roman authorities to condemn Jesus.
The initial converts to the Jesus sect of Judaism, after all, were Jews themselves. In their eagerness to spread the “good news” and convert more people to their sect, following the death of Jesus conflict arose in the first century between Peter and Paul. The conflict was resolved when it was decided that Peter would continue to convert Jews and Paul would proselytize and convert the gentiles.
In the final analysis, “The Passion” has starkly illuminated the gulf between Jews and Christians. As Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery recently said, “It is also a struggle to liberate the Israeli nation from the ghetto that is inside our heart.” So Christians, Muslims and Jews are enclosed in their own separate ghettos—and face the identical struggle.
Robert Younes, M.D., is secretary to the board of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation.
