Like many others, I almost walked out of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." The unnecessary violence was bad enough, but the anti-Semitism and historical absurdities were intolerable.
Among other errors, the ubiquity of Latin in the film is just silly, because almost all of the occupying Romans, recruited from Syria and other west Asian provinces, would certainly have been speaking Greek or Aramaic. Even worse, the Roman troops were not even speaking classical Latin - it was Church Latin!
The crucifixion, the focus of the film, was also riddled with nonsense. Everybody and their brother knows that the nails went into the wrists of the crucified, not the palms of their hands.
Additionally, in Gibson's film, Jesus' smooth, completely formed cross was taken out of pictures from a children's Bible storybook. Research done on crucifixion has shown that Jesus would not have carried the entire cross, just the beam. (The 1975 film "Jesus of Nazareth" does a much better job of portraying crucifixion historically.)
Gibson's recklessness and nonchalant attitude towards history and scholarship show that the film is not about portraying what Jesus truly experienced. Rather, it is just another gratuitously violent film involving Mel Gibson (for example, "Mad Max," "Payback," "Braveheart," "Lethal Weapon").
In many films featuring Gibson, the protagonist experiences torture that no ordinary human would have been able to survive. In "Lethal Weapon," Gibson's character is subjected to savage beatings and electric shock torture, yet in the end he finds the strength to kick the tar out of the enemy anyway.
This unrealistic depiction of violence finds its way into "The Passion." A person subjected to the beating and torture depicted in "The Passion" would have been at least unconscious and probably dead long before reaching Golgotha. But Gibson must keep Jesus alive and conscious to horrify the audience with his own bloodlust. Surely, portrayals of Jesus' crucifixion should be violent - even disturbing - in order to capture the brutality of Roman occupation. The violence in "The Passion," however, is so obnoxious that Jesus' suffering in the film cannot be taken seriously.
Gibson's contempt for history and scholarship can also be blamed for the film's obvious anti-Semitism, which defenders have had to go through somersaults to deny.
Film critic Roger Ebert, in his glowing review, suggested that the film is not anti-Semitic because it "reflects a range of behavior on the part of its Jewish characters, on balance favorably."
To be fair, some Jews are presented positively, and the Roman soldiers who torture Jesus are not shown favorably.
But random instances of virtue from very minor Jewish characters and the cruelty of some nameless Roman characters do little to take away from the overarching "Roman versus Jew" theme running throughout the film. On more than one occasion, Gibson seems to go out of his way to contrast Jewish sadism and barbarism with Roman reason and humaneness.
When Jesus is arrested and taken to the Sanhedrin, two Roman soldiers pass by the trial and ask about the commotion. One of the High Priest's guards lies to the Romans about the nature of the arrest because, obviously, if the rational, reasonable Romans were to find out about this Jewish kangaroo court they would have done something to stop it.
Gibson painstakingly shows Pontius Pilate's angst about what to do with Jesus. First, if this was really a film about Jesus' suffering, why spend an inordinate amount of time on Pilate's internal struggles anyway?
Second, Gibson even turns Pilate's wife, mentioned in one verse in one gospel, into a major character to reinforce the virtue and goodness of the Romans.
Conversely, Caiaphas, often surrounded by a screaming crowd of bloodthirsty Jews, is a crude comic-book villain who, even after Jesus is torn to shreds by Roman whips, coldly tells Pilate to "crucify him!" Numerous critics have pointed out that Gibson could have taken just as much time to show Caiaphas' political dilemmas as he did Pilate's without deviating from the gospel accounts (John 18:14).
As a Protestant, I am embarrassed that the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther, was a rabid anti-Semite who used the gospel accounts in his "On the Jews and their Lies," later quoted by the Nazis.
This is one example of the appalling anti-Semitism perpetuated by Christians, and anyone who makes a film about Jesus' death should bend over backwards to put the story in its historical context.
Gibson's refusal to do that arrogantly denies the real pain and suffering inflicted on Jews by Christians.
Brian Rainey '04 should have bought a ticket for "Eurotrip" and snuck in to see "The Passion" so he would not have given financial support to Gibson.
