NT Blog

Thanks to Gail Dawson for passing along this sad news from the Washington Post:

Biblical Scholar Lucetta Mowry Dies
By Patricia Sullivan

M. Lucetta Mowry, 91, a biblical scholar, archaeologist and former dean at Wellesley College, died of pneumonia Feb. 23 at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown, Md. She lived in Sykesville, Md.

Dr. Mowry was a professor and academic dean at Wellesley for 36 years, retiring in 1981. She was a well-known New Testament scholar and author and taught on Hebrew scripture, Islam, Hinduism, modern Japanese religious sects and Gandhi's theory and practice of nonviolence.

She was part of the interdenominational committee set up by the National Council of Churches to update the Revised Standard Version of the Bible into contemporary but accurate language, a painstaking project that began in 1975 and lasted until the new version was published in 1989. Dr. Mowry's responsibility was translation of the Gospel according to John and the Johannine Epistles, and she was one of two committee members who were chosen to edit the completed translations . . . .

. . . . . As an archaeologist, she took part in two excavations in Jordan and one in Libya, where she dived into a harbor and found a 2nd-century Roman sea wall.

Her publications deal with subjects ranging from music in the Bible and poetry in the New Testament to the worship of the Hindu god Siva, called Saivism, in southern India and analysis of excavations at Herodian Jericho. Best known is her "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church," which the London Times Literary Supplement acclaimed as one of the 13 best books in the field of religion written by American authors in the 1960s.

She held Wellesley's Andrew W. Mellon emeritus professorship in the humanities . . . . .

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In RogueClassicism, David Meadows draws attention to this interesting piece in the Orlando Sentinel on rumours surrounding Mel Gibson's next film:

Gibson's next movie: A look at heroic Jews?
By Mark I. Pinsky

It's all rumour and hearsay and here is the bit of substance:

Alan Nierob, a spokesman for Gibson and his Icon Films, confirmed that the filmmaker has spoken in several interviews, including one with Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, about looking to the Old Testament for stories, but said Gibson has not been specific about which stories.

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On Mystical Politics, Rebecca Lesses offers her thoughts on The Passion of the Christ (linked by Jim Davila on Paleojudaica). Rebecca Lesses found it "a powerful film -- but in a very disturbed and violent way". She writes:

The camera lingered lovingly on every injury that Jesus suffered. I think that this film would have a seriously negative impact upon children who viewed it -- personally, I think it should have gotten an NC-17 rating for violence.

On the second point, as I have commented before, this is not a film that children ought to see. I don't entirely understand the American rating system, but in the UK The Passion of the Christ is an 18 so no one under the age of 18 will be allowed in. On the previous point, I disagree. I did not think that the camera dwelt lovingly on Jesus' injuries and this is one of the reasons I find the pornography charge made by Lesses as well as other reviewers to be misplaced. The camera frequently turns away with the Marys, with the viewer, and does not allow us to see the worst. Like the Marys, we are constantly looking yet not wanting to look. Sometimes we catch the full horror and flinch; sometimes we do not. I think what I would like to hear from those who are using the term pornography in this context is how they are defining it because I find it singularly inappropriate.

Rebecca Lesses also writes:

The priests are dressed up in ridiculous regalia that to my eye did not resemble what Exodus describes as priestly garb (it is described in this week's Torah portion, Tezaveh). The camera lingers on their bearded faces, many with the stereotypical Jewish hooked nose.

I disagree with this too. Because of the pre-publicity about the alleged anti-Semitism, I was conscious of the potential problem of the representation of Jews in the film and one of the things I looked for were choice of actors and what their appearances might be intended to evoke. But I did not see anything that led me to believe that certain actors had been chosen to evoke classic racial stereotypes. And if one really must descend to the business of talking about shapes of noses, Peter -- for example -- does not look different from the priests.

The difficulty about any such discussion is that it can be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps I am missing things that others are noticing. I think one of the only ways around this problem is to ask the question whether Jewish actors are used to play the Jewish priests and non-Jewish actors to play those sympathetic to Jesus. This, in my opinion, is one of the scandals about Jesus Christ Superstar -- it is clear that many of the priests are played by Jewish actors whereas few if any other parts in the film are played by Jewish actors. Now, in The Passion of the Christ the only actor I know to be Jewish is Maia Morgenstern who plays Mary the mother of Jesus (see blog entry on), the most sympathetic character in the entire film. Likewise, as I have previously pointed out, one of the other most sympathetic characters in the film is Simon of Cyrene, the only person in the entire film characterised with the single word "Jew".

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On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila draws attention to this piece in Archaeology Magazine:

LETTER FROM JERUSALEM: HOLLYWOOD HOLY LAND
Can anyone know the facts about the death of Jesus?
BY SANDRA SCHAM

[Archaeology, Volume 57 Number 2, March/April 2004]

The article features quotations from William Fulco, Paula Fredriksen, Adam Porter, Mark Chancey and others.

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Read AKMA's reflections on The Passion of the Christ on AKMA's Random Thoughts. And thanks to AKMA for pointing out in Comments that "Caiphas" is the Latin version of the name; so it's not a spelling error.

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I went to see The Passion of the Christ yesterday. I had my own trauma trying to find a place to park in Birmingham City Centre, eventually driving past the cinema and getting lost in a one way system, abandoning the car at the nearest available car park, wishing I had got the bus, and running like fury down Broad Street to make it in time. The viewing was essentially for Church leaders so I felt a little like Abe Foxman in Florida who sneaked in to a preview screening there; but I was honest about who I was and where I came from and they were happy to wave me in and give me a copy of the "promotional DVD" which I have yet to watch. I sat between two Anglican clergymen, both of whom I knew, and one a former colleague in the department here Birmingham so I did not feel too out of place.

I was absolutely dreading seeing the film. That may sound a little odd if you have followed my blog with its multiple postings on this film over recent weeks and months; you might almost think that I had an obsessive interest in the film. My worry was essentially focused on one thing: the violence. I am one of those people who just hates seeing violence anywhere in life. When the kids at school called "scrap", I was the one child who chose not to run to watch. I detest violence, find it very upsetting, and am not one of those people who finds is palatable as soon as it is represented on screen. And I know I am not alone in this. One colleague has told me that he has no intention to view the film at all. "I don't do violence", he said. Another friend emailed me and suggested I took a stand and did not go. But my problem is that I have followed Jesus films since I was a child. I have always been fascinated by the attempts to depict Jesus' life. I remember gathering round with the family to watch Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth on Sunday nights in 1977, something of a major national event. I always loved seeing King of Kings when it was shown every Easter and learnt to think of Jesus as looking like Jeffrey Hunter. Later, as a teenager, I loved Jesus Christ Superstar, the film, the soundtrack, the stageshow; I could not get enough of it. I still love it now. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I also loved Life of Brian when it came out in 1979. I had grown up on Monty Python and Jesus films, and here were the two combined!

When I began lecturing in Birmingham, I found that using clips of Jesus films were a marvellous way of sparking off discussion, of getting students interested in the subject. At this stage I discovered Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, the lecturer's dream, so full of interesting scenes to spark discussion, whether historical, theological or filmic. When I began lecturing on Jesus films, I often used to say that it was unlikely that we would get a major Jesus film in the old Hollywood epic tradition. How wrong I was. First The Miracle Maker and the CBS Jesus in 1999-2000, and now The Passion of the Christ. I simply had to see this new film, albeit allegedly one of the most violent films ever made.

I am not going to try to write a review on The Passion of the Christ. There are reviews galore in this film, and I have repeatedly drawn attention to them here. And, as I have frequently commented, these film critics really know how to write; academics could learn a few things from them. Many of my thoughts have thus already been expressed more coherently by other critics. The review that came to my mind most frequently when watching the film was Mark Kermode's. He is quite right that the film is "shocking . . . but utterly compelling". I thought several times about his comment on Newsnight Review last week that one had a kind of "ominous dread" of what was to come next.

This is a very powerful film. This film gets inside your head and makes you think about it. You wake up at night thinking about it. The images are so compelling, so moving that they demand a lot from you. I wonder whether those reviewers who have reacted with vitriol are actually trying to expel the images from their minds, to prevent the film from doing its work.

Having seen the film, I am surprised about just how over the top some of these reviews are. The repeated charge of "pornography" seems quite out of place to me. Yes, the film is horribly violent but it is not gratuitously violent. Pornography is all about titillating the viewer, drawing him/her to want more to satiate their appetite for flesh. Mel Gibson does not encourage the viewer to want to see more. All the time he is asking you to turn away, to think about what is happening, to be appalled at the Roman guards' brutality, to share both of the Marys' grief. This is not pornography. Indeed the scourging scene, so often commented upon in the reviews, is not twenty minutes of watching Jesus being scourged. The camera itself cannot bear to look on and repeatedly draws away, sometimes so far that you can only hear it in the distance. I am not saying that it is not traumatic. It is. Very traumatic, deeply disturbing, very upsetting. Of course it is possible that a particular kind of viewer might derive sadistic pleasure from looking upon this, but if so they do so against the grain of the film. Unlike pornography, it is not beckoning you to watch more, much less to revel in it. The real villains of the piece, the sadistic Roman guards, are the ones who are utterly depraved. They are able to look on, to laugh, to increase the torment. The viewer turns away, cries, demands them to stop.

Many of the reviews have said that the crucifixion almost comes as an anti-climax after the scourging. I disagree. Watching the soldiers crucify Jesus was easily the most traumatic part of the film. Really upsetting. The use of flashback here is particularly moving, the Last Supper, "Love one another . . .", the Good Shepherd, the Sermon on the Mount,"Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors . . ." Very powerful. The Greatest Story Ever Told attempted to do something similar by juxtaposing John the Baptist's beheading and Antipas's demand that Jesus be arrested with "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness's sake . . .", which is brought forward as the first beatitude. But the link is easily lost; Gibson really makes it work with the use of flashback.

Some have commented that the flashbacks are all too brief. I understand those comments. One longs to see more, especially as Jim Caviezel's Jesus is so warm and personable. The scene in Nazareth, when Jesus builds a tall table and shows it to Mary, is delightful. It is the kind of table that people may use in the future ("It could catch on"). Jesus and Mary both laugh. There is a trend here in recent Jesus films that bucks the trend of all the older films. In an article I wrote in 1997 about Jesus Christ Superstar, I commented on how rare it is to see Jesus smile anything other than a beatific smile in a Jesus film. Yet since then, we have had several portrayals of Jesus as a man with a sense of humour, from Bruce Marchiano's American applie-pie Jesus in the Visual Bible's Matthew (1996), to Jeremy Sisko's Jesus (1999), the first Jesus to dance, to the claymated Jesus voiced by Ralph Fiennes in The Miracle Maker (2000) who jokes with Mary and Martha and makes his parables amusing, to the most recent Jesus, Henry Ian Cusick in the Visual Bible's The Gospel of John (2003), who pulls off the remarkable feat of making the Johannine Jesus warm and friendly.

But having said that the flashbacks in The Passion of the Christ are terrific, I think the timing is about right. It just tantalises the viewer with reminders of Jesus' life. They provide the film's context, encouraging the viewers to fill in more from their own knowledge. It would be interesting to ask how the film would view to someone who had no knowledge at all of the Jesus story, like the Japanese viewers John Dominic Crossan was referring to in his most recent piece on beliefnet. My guess is that the flashbacks would appear so fascinating, so tantalising, that it would leave one wanting to find out more, perhaps even to read the Gospels! Perhaps Mel Gibson will think of cashing in by doing a film on Jesus' ministry. After all, prequels are all the rage these days. And, in my humble opinion, it is how the Gospels were themselves built up; the Passion Narrative came first, the extended introduction afterwards. (Go on, Mel, do us another Jesus film!)

Now some reviews have said that the film has no real feel of joy, of triumph, of redemption. That was not my experience of it. [Note: SPOILER COMING] It is true that it gives us the briefest of glimpses of the resurrection, but it leaves the viewer on that note -- Jesus has not even emerged from the tomb yet -- and you are left dwelling on what happens next. Again, it drives you back to the Gospels. In fact the ending reminded me a little of the ending of Mark's Gospel; it has that tantalising feel of "But I want to know what happened next". Given the historic difficulties faced by Jesus films in portraying the resurrection effectively, this could be seen as a brilliant decision. Gibson has resisted what would have been an obvious and perhaps clichéd final scene with Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden, so that the film could have been framed by those two gardens at each end of the story.

But also there was redemption in the cataclysmic events that happen at the death of Jesus, a tear from heaven, an earthquake, the devil cast to the pit of hell, a remarkable scene. I thought it was implied pretty strongly that the soldiers, the Temple authorities, Pilate, everyone realised that something world shattering had happened. Nothing was ever going to be the same again for any of these characters.

On the alleged anti-Semitism, in the film itself, this has been at best greatly overstated. Many of the elements that troubled the so-called ad hoc committee about the early script do not appear in the film. Perhaps, after all, their views were taken into account. With respect to the Matt. 27.25 line, "His blood be on us and on our children", it is not only that there is no subtitle but that it is lost in the crowd -- you can hardly even hear Caiaphas say it. Part of the problem now is that it is difficult to watch the film without scrutinising it at every turn for signs of anti-Semitism and one can end up seeing things that really are not there. Paula Fredriksen commented on Caiaphas's bad teeth, for example. Well, yes, he has bad teeth but so do many of the other characters on screen.

One of the ways of looking at this is to ask how the film's depiction of Jewish leaders compares with that of other Jesus films. I would say that Jesus Christ Superstar comes off far worse. In that film the Jewish authorities are on the whole played by Jewish actors whereas Jesus and his disciples are not. It carelessly writes in phrases like "permanent solution". The Passion of the Christ does not, on the other hand, enhance any of the admittedly troubling elements in the Gospels. Perhaps it could have done more to make some of the Jewish authorities less clearly out-and-out baddies; it could have done more to show Pilate's nasty, ruthless side. All these and similar elements might have been given some more attention had Gibson assembled an advisory committee consisting of Jews and Christians and others as did Garth Dabrinsky on The Gospel of John.

But that point having been conceded, I think those who have gone looking for anti-Semitism in the film have missed some pretty important elements that severely limit the plausibility of the charge. In particular, I am amazed that no one in any review I have seen (and I have read a lot!) comments on Simon of Cyrene. This is a wonderful character, beginning very reluctant to help this random criminal but in time realising that he is in the presence of someone special and encouraging Jesus. And he is directly castigated by one of the Roman guards as "Jew!" Now, I think I am correct in saying that this is the only character in the entire film who is specifically characterised as a Jew, and he is one of the most sympathetic characters in the film. I regard this point as significant and am annoyed that something so blatant has been universally missed by critics.

I would also want to echo those who say that the baddies in this film are without question the Roman guards, nasty, depraved, violent, selfish men who occupy a great deal of screen time.

One or two other random thoughts: Bob Schacht's review on Xtalk, focusing on the stations of the cross, provides a brilliant insight into the film and I was grateful to have read that before seeing it. It is quite right. It explains why the road to Golgotha is so long -- it occupies much of the film.

In reviews I have seen, no one has mentioned Veronica's appearance on the road to Golgotha. Perhaps people are not familiar with this legend, that Veronica gave Jesus a cloth and he wiped his face and his face was imprinted upon it for ever more. And one more thing -- in the subtitles Caiaphas was repeatedly spelt "Caiphas". An error?

In conclusion, a powerful film. Shocking, violent, utterly compelling; an amazing cinematic experience. On the Guardian's film site, I rated it at 8/10.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this link from The Tablet from the principal of Heythrop College in London (where, once upon a time, I was a tutorial assistant):

A remarkable Passion
John McDade
Mel Gibson has made a stunning and justifiably violent account of a Christ who bears the weight of the world's sin. But, says our critic, his film is not anti-Semitic

An excerpt:

When Christ rises from his prayer in the Garden, he crushes under his heel the snake which has crept from the devil's bosom - in iconography it is Mary who crushes the head of the serpent, and this sends us back to the conflict between the serpent and Eve's offspring in Genesis 3:15. When Christ dies, there is a remarkable shot (a God's-eye perspective?) in which Golgotha, seen from above, is like a globe of the world from which the figures of Satan and his brood are summarily eliminated. The devil (and certainly not the Jewish people) is the real antagonist of Christ; one of the film's structural features is the polarity between Satan and Mary, eyeing each other on the road to Golgotha. "See, mother," Christ tells her as he falls a second time, "I make all things new" - a remarkable line from Revelation 21:5. Satan mimics Mary's motherhood by cradling a devil-child in her bosom (a child who drives Judas to kill himself for his suicide on the tree is the devil's counterpoint to Christ's tree of life), while at the end of the film, Mary holds her dead Son in her lap in a Caravaggio-style pietà, looking outwards towards the viewer - the one point in the film which explicitly engages the viewer in the drama.

In one of the most moving sequences, drawn from the writings of Sr Catherine Emmerich, an eighteenth-century German visionary, the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene are given towels by Pilate's wife which they then use to soak up the blood from the scourging at the pillar. Gibson uses this action to give a flashback to Magdalene's rescue by Jesus from the Pharisees' stones: she is identified as the woman caught in adultery. The sequence of the scourging - lasting for 20 minutes or so - is dramatically the high point of the film. After the first series of beatings, Christ, already brutally scarred, raises himself up from the stones and prepares to take more: this is the Son of God carrying through his divine work. When, finally, the Cross is about to be lifted up and set in the hole prepared for it, we are shown in flashback Christ raising the bread at the Last Supper - "This is my body for the life of the world" - and then the Cross is dropped into place. The Eucharistic Body, the Sin-bearing Body and - right at the end, in a brief, silent, enigmatic sequence - the Risen Body, are the single locus of salvation. Gibson gives us profound themes from orthodox Christian faith in a popular medium; that, in itself, is remarkable . . . . .

. . . . . Gibson has not given us a film that manipulates its audience, and certainly not one which provokes Christians to anti-Jewish sentiments. He does not incite the viewer to view Jews negatively, nor - although violence is pervasive - does he elicit any vicarious thrill at what takes place. Nor does he encourage hatred of any person or group in the film. This film is not in the tradition of Passion Plays. Christ's forgiveness of all, spoken from the Cross, is dramatically serious and guides the viewer about how to think and feel. Contrast this with real cinematic manipulation of hatred and violence . . . . .

I disagree about Emmerich's vision of the mopping up of the blood as "one of the most moving sequences"; I wasn't quite sure what the purpose was of them cleaning up after Jesus. But otherwise, an interesting review.

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It seems that this week's Church Times makes The Passion of the Christ its cover story, but no on-line versions of the articles unfortunately.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this item from BBC News:

Italy 'triples Passion screens'
The Passion was filmed in Italy last year. The Italian release of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is to be tripled from 150 prints to more than 500, it has been reported.

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I have blogged several times about William J. Fulco, S. J., who was "Theological Consultant and Translator of Latin / Aramaic" (if I remember the credit correctly) on The Passion of the Christ. On RogueClassicism, David Meadows points out this interesting little article about Fulco and his work on the Aramaic and the Latin in the film. This appears on Metromix.com but originates from the Chicago Tribune:

AT RANDOM ON LANGUAGE
The Jesuit scholar who translated `The Passion'
By Nathan Bierma

On the subtitles:

"He was real hard-set against them," said Alan Nierob, Gibson's publicist. "He initially thought they would be a distraction. . . . It's a very visual movie."

Gibson also wanted to avoid the phony air of British English that has plagued so many film renditions of the life of Jesus Christ, Nierob said.

Well it doesn't sound phony if you are British! And for those who can cope with "the phony air of British English", I would strongly commend Henry Ian Cusick's recent performance as Jesus in the Gospel of John. Having said that, I loved the use of Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ. The article goes on with some nonsense about Greek and Latin, but herewith Fulco's interesting comments:

"I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps," Fulco said. "Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn't subtitle those words."

Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.

"Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There's one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, `You take care of it.' He's actually saying, `Take care of my laundry.'"

Other linguistic tricks of Fulco's serve a function in the script.

For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups' inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.

Later, "there's an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It's kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game," Fulco said. "One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, `My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.' That's [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive."

It is the strangest experience reading these articles after having seen the film. I have read so many articles on this film, as anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, but until now I had no point of reference.

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The Passion of the Christ is gradually making its way around the country in preview screenings for church leaders and the like. Today it arrived in Birmingham and I went along. I'll offer some reflections later -- still a bit shell-shocked at the moment -- but this review is from Matthew Page who saw the film yesterday. Thanks to Matthew for sending this over; several of his comments resonate with my own thoughts on the film.

The Passion of the Christ
A review by Matthew Page

If you believe everything you’ve been told about this film then you’re probably expecting the most realistic, anti-Semitic film to ever usher in a major revival. So it’s probably best to lay aside those brain cells assigned to the task of remembering all the pre-release discussion and concentrate on the film itself.

And it is an unusual one. A smash hit filmed in two almost dead languages. The resurrection of a genre in a generation far more cynical than that which killed it. A violent film about love. Victory through death. This web of apparent contradictions seems appropriate for a film about the ultimate paradox -–Jesus – God in human form.

That this was a labour of love for Mel Gibson is well known. Most people seem greatly impressed that he spent his own money to finance it. However, what I personally find a far greater testimony to his devotion to the project is the way that he spent that money. 40 years ago George Stevens also spent $25 million making The Greatest Story Ever Told. This was an astronomical amount in those days, but it doesn’t look even half as good as The Passion (although it was twice as long!). It’s the care that Gibson has taken that speaks loudest; lavish sets painstakingly detailed make-up, detailed costumes. Jerusalem just feels real, in a way that the campy sixties biblical epics just don’t touch. Furthermore, hardly a camera shot goes by which doesn’t seem to have undergone an awful lot of consideration, and reconsideration, until it is just right.

Sadly, most of these highs seem to have been missed by many of the reviews. Instead praise in the Christian press has focused on two areas – its power to move people and its realism and historical accuracy. Personally I wasn’t greatly moved. Partly I guess that whereas many people have hardly ever seen a film about Jesus, I have seen 20-30 and have undergone many times what a lot of people are experiencing for the first time - being moved by a Jesus film. Perhaps more significantly I never really accepted that this was Jesus. There is so little time to get acquainted with Caviezel’s Jesus and thus connect with him before he begins his ordeal. Additionally, whilst the use of Aramaic was academically interesting I found it emotionally distancing (despite having watched many foreign films).

I also found the violence and uneven historicity took me out of the film. Some of this was to enable the film look more like Caravaggio’s paintings, but this left the much trumpeted realism resting almost solely on the amount of violence and blood. Whilst I admire the leap away from the sanitised crucifixions of Jesus of Nazareth and King of Kings (where actor Jeffrey Hunter had to shave his armpits!), Gibson seems to have leaped so far that he flies over the end of the sand pit altogether and crashes into an advertising hoarding. Its one thing to dwell on the violence, but another to import additional acts of violence so more dwelling can be achieved. Scenes such as those where Jesus is thrown over a bridge, or a crow pecks out the bad thief’s eyes can be defended as artistic license. However, artistic license is essentially the outworking of the director’s mind, how he views the person / story concerned. Here, nearly all of the insertions are extra violence, extra torture, extra blood – Mel clearly has issues. In places this compromises the plausibility of the story itself. The Romans were brutal, but they were also disciplined. They wouldn’t have needed to be told a third time to calm down. A Pilate as weak as this one would never have lasted in ruthless Roman society. Perhaps most telling is that the film spends longer on the road to Golgotha than on the time spent on the cross itself. The actual crucifixion was far longer in reality, but passes quickly here. It’s almost as if once Jesus is on the cross Gibson can’t do anything more to him, and so moves on.

Such quibbles should not detract too greatly from the overall quality of the film. The performances are uniformly excellent. The most poignant moments for me came from looking at Mary’s reacrions, not Jesus. The colours and textures in the film are beautiful, but restrained, and there is some great camera work. Gibson pulls all the tricks out of the bag in this respect. There are shots from high above, and shots from the ground, points of view and upside down angles. Long ponderous takes are mixed with fast disorientating sequences. There are a few too many slow motion shots; perhaps the teardrop seemed a bit too sentimental and the earthquake too DeMille, but mostly these devices work well. It took me a while to decide that I liked the horror-esque techniques in a seemingly straight historical drama, but on reflection they capture the strangeness of that unique day when the “hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered”.

There is much to applaud Gibson for. The Passion of the Christ is a Jesus film which manages to give Jesus Gravitas without detracting from his humanity. In fact of all of the films that I’ve seen this one best captures Jesus’ dual nature – divinity & humanity. This is a Jesus that I could follow, and after decades of Robert Powell’s blue eyes, Jeffrey Hunter’s monotone, Willem Dafoe’s instability and Bruce Marchiano’s cheesy grin that is a major achievement.

Will it fan the flames of another round of anti-Semitic pogroms? Probably not. Will it be the key to opening the floodgates of a major revival? Fairly unlikely I imagine. Will it give a generation a Jesus they can relate to and some understanding of what he did for them? Possibly. And for a film about Christ, that is probably the highest single piece of praise you can give.

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Thanks to Jim West in his blog and on Xtalk for this link with the sad news of the death of Jürgen Roloff and a brief obituary:

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Roloff verstorben
Am 21. Februar 2004 ist Prof. Dr. Jürgen Roloff, emeritierter ordentlicher Professor für Neues Testament an der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, im Alter von 73 Jahren verstorben.

Labels: obituaries

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Thanks to Kevin Bush, author of the Tom Wright Page, for this news. This study week has been advertised:

Reading Paul in the Third Millennium
A Study Week in Rome with Bishop N.T. Wright
Sunday 16 May — Friday 21 May, 2004

And the previously mentioned programme on the resurrection will be showing (in the UK) on Channel 4 at 7 pm GMT on Easter Monday. He is also doing four programmes on Radio 3 on the four Sundays running up to Easter called "Spring Journey." I'll keep a look out for the latter and post links here if they are archived.

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Thanks to Dalen Jackson for drawing my attention to some material from Michael J. Cook of Hebrew Union in Cincinnati, USA. He was one of those who was on the famous "ad hoc committee" that reported on the script of The Passion of the Christ last year (along with Paula Fredriksen, Mary Boys, Amy-Jill Levine, Gene Fisher and Eugene Korn. Any others?). This is his public statement on the Reform Judaism web site:

Commission On Interreligious Affairs of Reform Judaism:
Some Jewish Reactions to Mel Gibson's, "The Passion of the Christ"
by Michael J. Cook, Ph.D

There is then a more recent update which is pretty cynical about the whole Icon spin-machine. It is undated but is clearly issued before Cook has seen the film:

Commission On Interreligious Affairs of Reform Judaism
Update on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"
by Michael J. Cook, Ph.D

On the same site, Cook has made available a long PDF document made up of excerpts from correspondence he has had with colleagues about how to tackle the reactions to the film. The document was prepared before he had seen the film and there is a long checklist at the end to see how far the final version differed from the script that was so criticised by the ad hoc committee:

Excerpts from Postings Concerning:
“OUR GIBSON STRATEGY” ©
including a “Checklist” of 48 critical motifs to look for in the Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ
by Michael J. Cook, Ph.D.

If you've followed the controversy surrounding the film, it makes interesting reading.

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Thanks to David Mackinder for pointing out to me that the next round (4) of the Crossan and Witherington correspondence on The Passion of the Christ has begun at beliefnet (so far just Crossan's fourth email). Incidentally, why on earth is it called "Scholarly Smackdown"? What is that supposed to mean?

Scholarly Smackdown: Round 4 (Crossan)

In this instalment, Crossan focuses again on the question of anti-Semitism, relating his own experience of visiting an Oberammergau Passion Play in 1960 and going on to give his own reading of the identity of the crowd in Mark (cf. his previous contributions to this exchange) and asking questions about how the film will play in places like Japan, where many will not know the story, or to Muslim audiences. "What will Muslims see when 'the Jews' act so viciously to Jesus, a prophet from their Holy Quran?" Not many of the Muslims I know would be likely to go to see this film, I think, so the question may not arise. But I'd also guess that those who do would be more concerned about Jesus dying on the cross, which the Qu'ran does not affirm, than about alleged depictions of Jews, not least in that the term "the Jews" is not one that the film (apparently) uses. But I may be wrong.

Update (22.05): Dwight Peterson and David Mackinder help me out with my ignorance over "smackdown", apparently a term from professional wrestling. The image is presumably of two scholars, one "liberal" and one "conservative" battling it out as would two sweaty wrestlers. Not a happy image!

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Thanks to Jeff Peterson for the link to this piece on NRO:

Portrait of Pilate
Critics miss the point in Gibson's portrayal of Pontius Pilate
John O'Sullivan

. . . . Pilate is portrayed as a sympathetic character, they argue, who wants to spare the innocent Christ but who yields to the demands of Caiaphas and the mob that He should be crucified. Caiaphas, however, harbors no such reluctance. He agitates clearly for Christ's death. And this is undoubtedly what Gibson's film shows — just as it is also undoubtedly the account in the Gospels.

But is it anti-Semitic? For what the critics miss is that this account makes Pilate a far worse villain than Caiaphas. After all, Caiaphas believed that Christ had committed the ultimate sin of blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God. As a leading representative of religious laws that condemned adulterers to death by stoning, he was almost bound to call for His execution. Caiaphas is making a terrible mistake. He may also have corrupt political motives for his actions. But he is plainly sincere in believing that, however conveniently, he has the law of God on his side.

Pilate is on much weaker ground. He condemns to death a man he believes to be innocent — and he does so, moreover, in a shifty manner that seeks to fix all guilt for the murder on Caiaphas and the mob and to exculpate himself.

From the standpoint of the New Testament, according to the traditional teaching of the Christian church, and in Mel Gibson's movie, Pilate is by far the greater villain. And if any charge of bigotry can be sustained against Gibson, it is that of anti-Romanism since in addition to Pilate's murderous cowardice, the Roman soldiers are shown gleefully enjoying their torture of Christ . . . . .

It's an interesting potential corrective to the claim that Pilate is exonerated either in the film or in the Gospels, though it does not engage with the key points made by many Biblical scholars, viz. the difference between the portrait of Pilate in the Gospels and his portrait in Philo and Josephus; the historical problems associated with Caiaphas apparently manipulting Pilate; and the specific issue of "innocence" and "guilt", the terms around which the issues is debated.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this one from BBC News:

Passion 'could earn Gibson £160m'
The film has had one of the biggest openings in US cinema history
Director Mel Gibson could personally earn more than $300m (£160m) from The Passion of the Christ, according to respected US financial experts Forbes.

And to Jim West for this one on Biblical Studies Resources, also from BBC News:

Clergy's verdict on Passion film
Some church groups in the US have been given screenings of the film
Religious figures in Scotland have been giving their verdicts on Mel Gibson's controversial new film which portrays the death of Jesus.

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On b-greek, Carl Conrad recommends several blogs of interest, including this one, for which thanks. If, as a result of that message, there are any fresh visitors here, let me explain that the last couple of weeks has been a bit unusual in this blog's six month history in featuring about ninety per cent of its posts on the new film The Passion of the Christ. I know that my interest in Jesus films is not shared by all readers of the blog and I suspect that some are heartily sick of the whole thing. Some readers have joked with me about the sheer volume of posts on the topic. But even if you are not interested in the topic of Jesus films, you may be interested in some of the debates that have been spawned by it, and the Biblical scholars who have appeared in the press in connection with this (Paula Fredriksen, John Dominic Crossan, Amy-Jill Levine, Joe Zias, Krister Stendahl, Geza Vermes to name just a handful of the many). In due course, the blog will look a little more balanced again and will continue to cover all the areas of interest to users of the NT Gateway, including -- of course -- the Greek New Testament. Indeed that day may come sooner than expected. I am going to see a preview of the film tomorrow and if the reports of the violence are anything to go by, it's entirely possible that I will not manage to sit through it all!

Labels: b-greek

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Thanks to David Mackinder for this excellent piece from Easterblogg:

Mel Gibson versus Franco Zeffirelli

A couple of excerpts:

In Jesus of Nazareth the Sanhedrin conducts a lengthy, reasoned debate about the meaning of prophecy, religious liberty, and the dangers of an uprising against Rome. Zeffirelli's debate is a little stilted, but depicts the Sanhedrin as containing men of conscience who were deeply divided about how they should treat Christ. At one point one of Zeffirelli's elders exclaims, "We are a people who love ideas and argument, then reject our prophets." Zeffirelli's Caiaphas is a doddering old man who dreads rebellion and is obsessed with fear that if Jesus really is the Messiah, then he will replace Caiaphas as leader. In sum, Zeffirelli presents the elders as real human beings, not cartoon villains.

The most telling point of difference between the films is the utter lack of joy in Gibson's telling. The Passion of the Christ is all torture, screaming, bleeding, and weeping. There's no sense that anything about Christ or his ministry is hopeful. Even in flashback scenes that precede the torture close-ups Gibson is so keen about, all is sad and depressing. We see a one-minute flashback to the Sermon on the Mount: Jesus preaches expressionless as if reading from the Federal Register, while the crowd looks about as happy as if they'd been forced there at gunpoint. There's a one-minute flashback to the Last Supper: Jesus drones in monotone while the expressions of disciples suggest they're all facing execution. This is either a total misreading of the Christian story, or reflects Gibson's desire to make that story one about misery rather than love. The Sermon on the Mount proclaimed a new hope for the human prospect; the Last Supper was a night of warm intimacy among friends. You'd never know from Gibson . . . .

. . . . . Mel Gibson appears not to like the joyful, hopeful, universalist message of Christianity. Fundamentalism of all faiths and denominations tends to be angry at the world, and Gibson's is at bottom an angry telling of the Jesus story--an argument that Christ's followers should be full of fury about their enemies and their mistreatment. Perhaps Gibson, a wealthy celebrity, sits around telling himself that he is being mistreated by enemies. Or perhaps Gibson simply longed to earn millions by being the first filmmaker to manage the race-to-the-bottom feat of presenting a gratuitous, exploitive version of the crucifixion. Take your pick of these unattractive alternatives, then stick to Franco Zeffirelli. . . . . .

Two minor quibbles. Zeffirelli is called "the previous big-name-director attempt at the Jesus story". I'd say Martin Scorsese qualifies for that. And I am not sure about the comment that "The Gospels also never say Jesus was beaten by the Temple guards who arrest him". Mark 14.65?

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Thanks to Gail Dawson for this link to an article that quotes Krister Stendahl and Amy-Jill Levine extensively. It is from the Episcopal News Service and located on the Worldwide Faith News and it focuses on a "Forum for Inter-Religious Understanding" held at Rhode Island on 18 February:

Rhode Islanders consider The Passion
by Andrew Wetmore

Levine referred to her presence on what is usually called the "ad hoc committee" (though not here); it's worth quoting this line because of previous blog entries on it:

Levine said she had taken part in an ecumenical review committee that looked at the film script with Gibson's knowledge.

The comments quoted are all worth reading, including this:

Offering some advice for those who will see the Gibson movie, Levine said, "When you sit in the theatre and watch this story, picture my 13-year-old son on one side of you and my neighbor from down the street, who survived the Holocaust, on the other side. Try to see what they would see."

Concluding, Levine said, "This move is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that Jews and Christians do not really know each other. They need to."

And from Stendahl's comments:

It was not until after World War II and the Second Vatican Council, Stendahl said, that "Christians began to learn how the things we say sound in the ears of the Jews. We have a new situation which calls upon us to make new attempts to help one another against the undesirable side effects of our devotion. The historical record is shocking."

The cross, he said, is a symbol of faith and hope for Christians. "But the Cross reminds Arabs of the Crusades. The Cross reminds the Jews of the Crusades and the pogroms (massacres). Historically, most attacks on the Jews in Europe took place in Holy Week, after the people in church heard the Passion narrative."

Stendahl suggested that, to live together, we have to practice three principles of communal living:

1. "Let the Other define herself. 75% of what our tradition says of another tradition is bearing false witness."

2. "Compare equal to equal. We all have our extremists and nuts. Don't compare ideal Christianity with the actual or distorted form of the Other."

3. "We will never have good relations without an element of holy envy. Find something in the Other that is beautiful and meaningful and that tells you something about God. You are not called upon to absorb it or to pass judgment on it."

Like many others, including Crossan, Stendahl sees the violence in the film as "pornographic":

"Violence is pornographic. I've always thought the suffering of Christ and the shout 'why have you forsaken me?' is the pain of the martyr-the pain of wondering was it all in vain, had it all been wrong. That's where the deep suffering is, not in the physical abuse." The way in which the movie describes the Passion, he continued, "is a celebration of suffering and death instead of a celebration of life and of the triumphal resurrection."

As I have commented before, one of the enormous effects for good that this film is having is that it is providing an opportunity for Biblical scholars to communicate to a broader public than usual. People are interested in what they are saying. Some people, who have not previously been exposed to it, are asking to hear the kind of discussion that has been going on in the academy for the last generation.

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I apologise in advance to anyone who will be offended by my posting a link to an article from The Onion here, but some readers might join me in finding this very amusing and -- in its own satirical way -- pretty astute:

Jesus demands creative control over next movie

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On About Ancient/Classical History, N. S. Gill draws attention to a reproduction of a short dictionary article by Benjamin Jowett from 1875:

Crux
Article by Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford on pp. 370-371 of William Smith, D.C.L., LL.D.: A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, John Murray, London, 1875

One element is worth mentioning in relation to discussion over The Passion of the Christ:

The manner of it was as follows:— The criminal, after sentence pronounced, carried his cross to the place of execution; a custom mentioned by Plutarch (De Tard. Dei Vind. ἓκαστος τῶν κακούργων ἐκφέρει τὸν αὐτοῦ σταυρόν), and Artemidorus (Oneir. ii.61), as well as in the Gospels. From Livy (xxxiii.36) and Valerius Maximus (i.7), scourging appears to have formed a part of this, as of other capital punishments among the Romans. The scourging of our Saviour, however, is not to be regarded in this light, for, as Grotius and Hammond have observed, it was inflicted before sentence was pronounced (St. Luke, xxiii.16; St. John, xix.1.6).

The scourging also appears, though, in Matt. 27.26 // Mark 15.15 just before crucifixion (καὶ παρέδωκεν τὸν Ἰησοῦν φραγελλώσας ἵνα σταυρωθῇ).

Update (4 April 2006): Benjamin Jowett's article, Crux has moved to a new location and I have adjusted the link above.

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I commented recently on the fact that The Passion of the Christ identifies Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery (John 8.1-11) and so, for all the recent publicity attempting to rehabilitate Mary Magdalene, this film perpetrates an age-old identification. I have checked up The Gospel of John on this one and it is, indeed, two separate actresses who play these roles, Inga Cadranel the woman taken in adultery and Lynsey Baxter Mary Magdalene.

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Ben Witherington III has a review of The Gospel of John on the Christianity Today web site:

The Gospel of John
review by Dr. Ben Witherington, III

Although in some sections he prefers Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, he liked the film very much indeed:

. . . . It all adds up to what I think is the best portrayal of Jesus ever offered in a feature length film . . . . .

. . . . . But these are niggling complaints. On the whole, the portrayal is telling and sometimes compelling—thanks especially to the fine acting by Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Jesus. With a beguiling simple grace and style, Cusick convincingly presents us with a Jesus who is both human, and so very clearly more than human—no small task. There is a warmth and passion to Cusick's winsome portrayal. He tells his first followers "Come and see," and even as a viewer, you want to do so.

I agree with Witherington on this one. The Gospel of John is a tremendous achievement. Cusick's portrayal of Jesus has made me rethink the way I view the Johannine Christ.

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Lots of reviewers and others have drawn attention to one scene in The Passion of the Christ featuring Satan carrying an ugly baby with hair on its back. Christianity Today have taken the trouble to ask Mel Gibson about this:

What's Up With the Ugly Baby?
Everyone's asking about the Passion scene where Satan is carrying a hideous infant.
by Mark Moring

. . . . It's evil distorting what's good. What is more tender and beautiful than a mother and a child? So the Devil takes that and distorts it just a little bit. Instead of a normal mother and child you have an androgynous figure holding a 40-year-old 'baby' with hair on his back. It is weird, it is shocking, it's almost too much—just like turning Jesus over to continue scourging him on his chest is shocking and almost too much, which is the exact moment when this appearance of the Devil and the baby takes place."

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AKMA has posted his thoughts On the Passion, Before I See It. It's an excellent post and I agree with everything in it. Just one excerpt, but read it all:

. . . . . Now, the matter of context remains an interpretive choice — by opting out of a portrayal of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry, by ignoring the closely-reasoned controversies with his theological rivals, Gibson chooses to represent Jesus as unaccountably persecuted; he contrasts obscene suffering with utter innocence. But that’s neither the gospels’ narrative version of Jesus’ life and significance nor even the passion narrative that, even in Mark, constitutes a heightened, concentrated narrative exposition of how Jesus ends up on the cross. Gibson chooses to film only the grimmest moments from a narrative that ranges from shared joys to confusion and dismay to transcendent ecstasy to brutal, dehumanizing torture. He has the artistic freedom and theological rationale for so choosing — but that’s a choice, not a simple restaging of historical events.

I like the idea of posting thoughts before going to see it; I may try to do the same.

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Several years ago it was often reported that Paul Verhoeven, director of Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Robocop and Starship Troopers, was working on or planning a Jesus film. At one stage it was even hoped that he would be able to release it for the millennium. He was apparently a regular attender at meetings of the Jesus Seminar and appeared to be taking this project very seriously. I have heard very little about this recently, however. Has he given up the idea? Perhaps he could cash in on some of the hype surrounding The Passion of the Christ and at the same time make a very different film. He is apparently pretty interested in consulting Biblical scholars and clearly would want to focus much more on Jesus' life. The working title was Christ the Man. I thought it would be interesting to see if there is any more up to date news on the web concerning Verhoeven's project but googling only brings up older material. Perhaps the best round up of material on this is at PaulVerhoeven.net dating to October 1998:

Jesus and Verhoeven

But there is nothing more recent that I have heard. Anyone out there know anything?

Labels: Verhoeven Jesus Film

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On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila has a very sensible post on the topic of Mel Gibson as a holocaust denier and criticizes those who are perpetrating this for (at best) selective quotation and not checking their sources properly. I spotted yesterday another egregious example of this but did not get a moment to comment on it. Christopher Hitchens writes the following in his polemical article in Slate, Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably:

It's important to scan the Reader's Digest interview with Mel Gibson. He was questioned by Peggy Noonan, who was almost as simperingly lenient in print as Diane Sawyer was on the small screen. Noonan asked him a question that he must have known was coming, and which he must have prepared for, and she asked him in effect to "make nice" and agree that the Holocaust actually had occurred. His answer was, to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat "no." A lot of people, he agreed, had died in the last war. No doubt many Jews were among the casualties. It's one of the most frigid and shrugging things I have ever read. You would not know from this response that the war was begun by a fascist ruling party that believed in a Jewish world conspiracy, and thus that all of those killed were in part victims of anti-Semitism.

His answer in this interview was not "to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat 'no'"; he actually answered "Yes, of course" and attempted to add to this some personal context (viz. that he personally knew holocaust survivors). See my blog entry on this. It really comes to something when a reporter can manage to turn "Yes, of course" into "to all effects and purposes, a cold and flat 'no'". This is irresponsible. And it is as bad that Hitchens apparently knows of the Diane Sawyer interview too (note his reference to this interview in the paragraph quoted above) in which, as I have commented before, his affirmation that the holocaust happened is even clearer, if you can get clearer than "Yes, of course".

I have not yet seen The Passion of the Christ, which has not been released yet in the UK, and so I cannot yet comment on the charges of alleged anti-semitism. But it seems to me a shame that the proper discussion about how the film depicts the passion narrative should continue to get clouded by what is clearly an irresponsible charge of holocaust denial.

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On the Johannine Literature list, Jeffrey Staley suggests that subscribers draw attention to Passion of the Christ articles in which they (scholars) have been interviewed. Herewith two of Staley's, the first from the Seattle Times

'Passion': The Gospel according to Mel Gibson
By Janet I. Tu

. . . . . SU's Staley says while the Gospels provide "historical nuggets of truth and accuracy," it's important to remember they were written by believers.

"This would be like someone in George Bush's Cabinet writing for posterity the significance of George Bush. It doesn't mean everything in there is wrong. It just means if you're a historian, you're going to have to weigh it carefully." . . . .

The second is from Tribnet.com:

A challenging figure for moviemakers to depict Jesus
SOREN ANDERSEN; The News Tribune

"Most are too reverential," says Jeffrey L. Staley, a professor of theology at Seattle University who teaches a course on Jesus in movies. "The Jesuses portrayed on film appear more godlike than human. This makes it difficult for anyone other than a devout Christian to connect with the Jesus characters."

The worst screen Jesus, in Staley's opinion? Max von Sydow, star of "The Greatest Story Ever Told." The picture, Staley said via e-mail, "is so awful because its Jesus is too 'awe-ful.' The Swedish blue-eyed von Sydow's Jesus seems to float through the film without ever really touching the Earth."

I quite agree -- well said Jeffrey. The whole article is worth reading, with comments from Douglas Oakman and others. One more excerpt:

. . . . Staley sees "The Life of Brian," the Monty Python troupe's rowdy 1979 parable about a bumbling Christlike savior, as belonging to a group of films that depart significantly from the more traditional Jesus pictures yet are truer to the spirit and message of Christ. Also on this list are "Jesus Christ Superstar," "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Jesus of Montreal."

"Once the devout Christian gets past the jokes and scandalous scenes, these films are much more thought-provoking and challenging than the reverential ones, and in this way they reflect a key element of the Gospels' Jesus. Anyone who goes into the Jerusalem temple and overturns moneychangers' tables is anything but reverential," Staley said . . . . .

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The March edition of the SBL Forum is now available and the special theme is The Passion of the Christ with this blurb:

Mel Gibson's controversial film, The Passion of The Christ, stirs emotion, reflection, and debate. This month, SBL Forum focuses on biblical studies and film, and the cinematic representation of Jesus and biblical accounts.

There are several very interesting looking essays:

Biblical Allusions, Biblical Illusions: Hollywood Blockbuster and Scripture
by Nicola Denzey
"Despite the claim of the majority of Americans that religion (by which most mean Christianity) is important, despite their claims to attend church services regularly, knowledge of the Bible is often confined to sound-bytes or pseudo-scripture. In this environment, Gibson must see The Passion of the Christ as vitally corrective."

Filming Jesus: Between Authority and Heresy
by Paul V. M. Flesher
and Robert Torry
"Jesus films are about the meaning of Jesus, not about the reality of Jesus. While the depiction of Scripture, as well as the appeal to history, tradition, and theology, help authorize the scenes added into the film, it is the additions that impose their meaning upon Scripture and not vice-versa."

History, Hollywood, and the Bible: Some Thoughts on Gibson's Passion
by Paula Fredriksen

Judas the Film: Storytellers Then and Now
by John Dart
"Starkly different from Gibson's experiment with Aramaic and Latin dialogue, Judas has Jesus conversing in contemporary English."

The Problem of the Cinematic Jesus
by W. Barnes Tatum
"In academic circles and within the SBL itself, there has been a surge of interest in cinema generally and in the Jesus-genre specifically. Not only are commercially produced Jesus-films used in classroom settings but entire semester courses are dedicated to them."

Barnes Tatum's article features a link to the NT Gateway and a little blurb -- nice to see.

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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I post the following announcement for Dr Andrei Orlov of the Theology dept, Marquette University. It concerns a series of lectures by Professor Jarl Fossum that will take place this April on the campus of Marquette University.

The Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism

The Department of Theology of Marquette University

are pleased to invite you to a series of lectures by

JARL FOSSUM

Friday, April 23, 2004 3 pm, Olin Hall (EN 120)

MEDIATOR NOMEN DEI: Assumptionist and Pre-Existent Christology: The Exalted Servant of the Christ Hymn in Philippians 2 and the Eternal Son of the Logos Hymn in the Johannine Prologue


Saturday, April 24, 2004 10 am, Olin Hall (EN 120)

WOMAN IN THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS (LOGIA 22 AND 114)


Saturday, April 24, 2004 3 pm, Olin Hall (EN 120)

PAYING TAXES TO CAESAR (MARK 12:13-17) AND JEWISH MYSTICISM


Professor Fossum is a major representative of what is sometimes referred to as "the new History of Religions School." He is the author of a classic study on The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Mediation Concepts and the Origin of Gnosticism. Other contributions to the study of traditions that shaped Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity are collected in the volume The Image of the Invisible God: Essays on the Influence of Jewish Mysticism on Early Christology.

All sessions are open to the public and will take place on the campus of Marquette University. For the directions to the campus see: http://www.marquette.edu/pages/home/about/visit/directions.

For further information contact Dr. Andrei Orlov, Marquette University Theology Department, P.O. Box 1881 Milwaukee, WI USA 52201-1881, andrei.orlov@mu.edu.

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Thanks to David Mackinder for this link from Slate:

Schlock, Yes; Awe, No; Fascism, Probably
The flogging Mel Gibson demands.
By Christopher Hitchens

The article is pure polemic; Hitchens does not have a good thing to say about Gibson or the film. Also in Slate, this article compares Jim Caviezel's portrayal of Jesus with Ted Neely (Jesus Christ Superstar) and Willem Dafoe (Last Temptation of Christ), longing for their more human Jesuses, and suggesting that this film, like those, reflects the period of the film's production:

Ecce Homo?
The new celluloid Jesus doesn't seem real.
By Sian Gibby

. . . . Ted Neely's Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar is the angry rebel—the charismatic activist hippie. This Christ hit the screens during the Vietnam era, and thus his Jesus is preoccupied with fighting the powers-that-be, the government. He is quick to anger, bright, sharp, and in control. He answers with alacrity the questions the disciples put to him; he knows what he is doing; he's the empowered, self-aware dissident. Even in Gethsemane, he doesn't evince doubt. When he asks if the cup could pass him by, he already knows it can't and he is pissed off about it. And when he acquiesces to God's will, the anger is still there, just translated into intensity of purpose . . . . .

. . . . . This Jesus [Dafoe's] is befuddled and maybe only incidentally "right" about his mission. He is not sure of anything about himself, as Judas and Peter complain to him. "First it was love then it was the ax, and now you have to die!?" They worry privately to each other, "What if he changes his mind again?" Mary Magdalene sneers at his masculinity—mirroring the kinds of insecurity animating a time in which the men's movement in the '80s and early '90s was striving to reconnect with its manhood, after the "castrating" women's movement had done its work.

The '80s were also a hyper-realist decade, when spiritual identity was regrouping for the big booms of the '90s (the heyday of the New Age and the revival of Big Churches), and Nikos Kazantzakis' mentally-ill Jesus made sense. When this Jesus does miracles, they either don't smack of the supernatural (when Peter thinks they've run out of wine at the party and Jesus insists that there is still plenty, this could easily be Peter's boozy miscalculation); or else they seem to surprise even him. Ultimately, these miracle scenes don't mesh with the rest of the film, which largely consists of Jesus angsting. This Jesus doesn't seem divine. He is an uptight insecure mess, powerless, like the rest of us, in the crack-smoking, money-crazed "Me" era.

And now we find ourselves in a hyper-violent period, in which even little children are inured to celluloid viciousness. Enter Jim Caviezel's Jesus, who is absolutely conventional, conservative; the Jesus of a kiddie Bible, come to life. He says all the things we expect him to say (I was waiting for all the famous lines, mouthing them in the darkness like a Rocky Horror devotee: "My God, my God; why have you forsaken me?" "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do," etc.) and nothing else. We crave Neely's or Dafoe's humanness here, if only as a means of accessing, or at least understanding, this man . . . . .

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Here's another article quoting John Dominic Crossan's views on The Passion of the Christ:

Biblical scholar criticizes 'Passion'
Noted theologian to visit Lawrence for workshops
By Jim Baker, Journal-World

"There's not much more that I can say other than this is the most savage movie I have ever seen. I've never seen anything like this. It is two hours of unrelenting brutality," said Crossan, who saw "The Passion" Wednesday at a theater near the Orlando, Fla., suburb where he lives.

"That has actually raised for me the issue of whether it's actually pornographic to watch this for two hours."

That's several times now that the word pornographic has been used in reviews of this film. Crossan also comments on the film's theology:

As disturbing as he found the violence in "The Passion," Crossan said he was more shocked by the vivid display of director Gibson's personal theology and the Christian thought upon which it draws: displaced punishment, the idea Jesus had to accept divine judgment due all the world for its sin.

"Vicarious atonement, when it's laid out theologically, sounds rather nice. But actually what Gibson has done is made us face what it looks like. And I think he may have laid bare the savage heart of that theology," Crossan said.

"He forces us, I think, to look at that and ask: Do we believe in this God? And secondly, Should we? And what are the alternatives?" . . . .

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Thanks to David Mackinder for the link to this interesting article from Beliefnet:

Mel Gibson's 'Passion'
What makes this film different?
Jack Miles

The author dwells on some now familiar themes, e.g. the spectre of Bible-belt evangelicals enthusiastically endorsing a film that is "flamboyantly, counter-Reformationally Roman". Like Kermode he sees it as something of a horror movie. His main focus, though, is on the subtitles, both in general and in relation to one specific line:

As a cinematic matter, the boldest innovation in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ," is its use of language and subtitles to create, in a religious film, the illusion of documentary. Dialogue in a number of recent English-language feature films has fostered this kind of illusion by shifting into a second language plus subtitles for a few minutes at a time. “Dances With Wolves,” for example, shifted at several points into the Amerindian language Lakota. But no film that I know of unfolds in its entirety in subtitles beneath a language other than that of its primary audience.

Aramaic and Latin, the two languages in which the dialogue of “The Passion” is spoken, are not just foreign but dead. Aramaic survives only in a few remote corners of the Middle East. Latin is no longer spoken anywhere. The documentary illusion created by subtitles under ancient languages thus simulates a voyage not so much to a distant land as to a distant era. To the extent that any work of art derived from a classic must make it new by making it strange, this is a brilliant stroke. Yet the brilliance has a deeply regrettable secondary effect . . . .

. . . . . Rejecting the offer, a priest shouts a phrase in Aramaic that might or might not be intelligible in Tel Aviv. But then the Jewish crowd takes up the same cry in a slightly different grammatical form. They scream in unison a single, terrible word that happens to be identical in Israeli Hebrew and in Aramaic, and they scream it again and again as if it were a football cheer: Yitstalev! Yitstalev! Yitstalev! “Let him be crucified!” . . . .

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On Paula Fredriksen's criticism of Gibson's emphasis on suffering as
anachronistic, Jeff Peterson writes the following:

It seems to me this is qualified by the use of πασχεῖν in the NT (Mark 8:31, 9:12, et parr.; Acts 3:18 and 17:3; Heb 13:12 et al.; and several times in 1 Peter). Some of these might be taken as synonymous with ἀποθανεῖν, but not all: especially in 1 Pet 2:23, Jesus suffers and refrains from reviling but entrusts his case to God; it's not coincidental that the clearest NT allusion to Gibson's epigraph (Isa 53:5) comes in 1 Pet 2:24. There's doubtless a complex evolution from Mark and 1 Peter et al. to Catholic devotion to Gibson's interpretation, and I'm not denying some troubling elements in that development, but it's against the evidence to say that no early Christians found salvific value in Jesus' suffering; presumably this was strongest among those groups with some experience or prospect of martyrdom, as I would argue is already true of Mark's audience in the few years following Nero's action, when for the first time organized general hostility seemed like a possible future for adherents to Jesus (cf. Mark 4:17; 13:13).

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On Saturday I mentioned Newsnight Review on The Passion of the Christ, which featured film critic Mark Kermode. Yesterday's Observer features his review:

Drenched in the blood of Christ
Mel Gibson's Passion is the ultimate horror movie, steeped in guts and gore. Our reviewer, a regular churchgoer, found it shocking... but utterly compelling
Mark Kermode

The article reveals that Kermode is working on a Channel 4 documentary on Gibson. A couple of excerpts from this very interesting take on the film, one of the most positive I have seen, and in its own way quite funny:

. . . . . Ultimately, for all the theological bluster and intense inter-faith arguments which it has provoked, The Passion seems to me a quintessential horror film, a visceral cinematic assault which is no more or less 'Christian' than Ken Russell's The Devils or Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. All are examples of extreme movie-making from flamboyant film-makers who are passionately obsessed with the mysteries of Catholicism. But all are also rooted in the saleable aesthetic of the carnival sideshow; promising the audience an eye-opening spectacle of grotesque proportions.

Fainthearted viewers of The Passion who have so far avoided the fleshy shocks of gore cinema may find themselves mentally reciting that old monster movie mantra: 'It's only a movie, it's only a movie...' If there is a lesson I would wish such viewers to take away from Gibson's bloody epic it is that, contrary to the hollerings of the Daily Mail, the pleasures of horror cinema are not primarily sadistic but masochistic. One woman in Wichita has already reportedly expired during a screening of The Passion, inspiring breathless Exorcist-style press stories of the life-threatening powers of the film. All of which will doubtless add to its crowd-pulling clout . . . . .

Like me and about seven other people in the UK, Kermode is a credit-watcher. (Note to everyone else: you often miss interesting little post-credit sequences in your rush to the car park). He is the first person to have spotted this:

Elsewhere in the credits we find make-up effects stalwarts Keith VanderLaan and Greg Cannom, horror graduates who honed their skills on shockers such as the vampiric epic Bram Stoker's Dracula and the grisly modern-gothic chiller Hannibal.

And one more excerpt from the conclusion to the review:

To someone who believes in the invigorating power of extreme cinema, it seems entirely fitting that Gibson has leaned so heavily upon the horror genre to express his clearly tortured Christian faith. When the evangelist Billy Graham (who famously condemned The Exorcist as 'evil') likens The Passion of the Christ to 'a lifetime of sermons', I hear a man experiencing a Damascene (if probably temporary) conversion to the transcendent power of shocking cinema. As an unrepentant gore-geek, I have no problem with the unremitting physicality of The Passion, and admire the dexterity with which it ruthlessly terrorises its audience. Yet any sense that Christianity has less to do with enduring sublime suffering than with helping the poor and needy seems lost in the anguished howl of the film. Personally I have found more of religious substance in the 'secular' prison drama of The Shawshank Redemption, or the strangely comedic ramblings of the cult psychological thriller The Ninth Configuration.

In the end, Gibson has created an exploitation movie par excellence, fittingly shot in Italy whose national cinema has produced both Pasolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, those twin visions of heaven and hell between which The Passion of the Christ ultimately falls.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this one from BBC News:

Gibson's Passion tops box office
The Passion of the Christ has gone straight to the top of the North American box office chart.

It took an estimated $76.2m (£40.7m) from Friday to Sunday and these takings are the seventh highest in US cinema history.

On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila draws attention to a nice piece from today's Guardian:

What's popcorn in Aramaic?
Its alleged anti-semitism isn't the only problem with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. There's also the small matter of it being in Aramaic. To help enrich your enjoyment, here is a handy glossary of useful terms
Tim Dowling

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After the mammoth week for postings last week, the NTGateway weblog felt it needed a sabbath rest yesterday, but now it's back. In the Philo of Alexandria blog, Torrey Seland notes that his Resource Pages for Biblical Studies have been updated -- now the March edition. It's mainly Philo links; full list here. (Note: one of the new links is to an article by Gregory Sterling in Harvard Theological Review at Find Articles and this seems now to be a dead link. Alas, it looks like all the links to the 2001 edition of Harvard Theological Review are dead now on Find Articles. The list of contents is still available, but none of the links are active. This follows on from all the other 1998-2003 issues of HTR disappearing from Find Articles.)

And if you haven't looked at it yet, the latest Explorator was posted by David Meadows yesterday and as always, there is plenty of interest:

Explorator 6.44

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this:

Jesus opera actor Anderson dies
Actor and singer Carl Anderson, best known for playing Judas in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, has died from leukaemia, aged 58.

An excerpt from the short article:

Anderson featured in both the original Broadway production of the show, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and the film version in 1973.

He stepped into the stage version after actor Ben Vereen, who was originally playing Judas, fell ill.

Anderson also performed in revivals of the show in 1992 and 2002.

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Paula Fredriksen has been involved with the controversy over this film from the beginning -- I have mentioned her article Mad Mel here before. Now, after having seen the film, Fredriksen has gathered her thoughts, again in New Republic Online:

Pain Principle
by Paula Fredriksen

I think the article is subscription-only, but you can get a free trial subscription. Some of the article goes over the controversy over the "ad hoc committee" and the script. Although I have commented recently that the allegations of theft should not be made in the absence of a sustained case or an answer to Fredriksen's post, there is still one grey area here. I hadn't noticed it so clearly in the previous article, but there is a question here. How did Fisher get his copy of the script? Fredriksen only talks about his having "received" it and does not explain where it came from:

Later that spring, Gene Fisher, interfaith officer for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) contacted Icon, Gibson's production company, about having the movie's script reviewed by an ad hoc committee of scholars. Gibson was trumpeting the fidelity, historical and scriptural, of his film, and Fisher was offering him some free--and confidential--feedback. Fisher and Eugene Korn of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) assembled an ecumenical group of professors, which I was invited to join. Fisher informed William Fulco (the person who had translated the script into Aramaic and Latin and our main contact on the Icon side) on April 17 that he had received a copy of the script; on April 24, Fisher and Gibson spoke. Icon received our report in early May.

Perhaps we will never know. The rest of Fredriksen's review deals with Gibson's amazing achievement in marketing (what she sees as) a medieval Catholic vision of Christianity to many Protestants; and there is some reflection on the relationship of the film to the Gospels:

. . . . . The Christ that Gibson is selling is not the Christ of the first-century scriptures, though elements of his story are drawn from them. The first-century Christ, presented primarily in the four gospels, redeemed not through his suffering, but through his death and resurrection, which promised his return. The evangelists mediated historical traditions about Jesus' life and teachings, interpreting these through their own understanding of Jewish scriptures. Their meditations on ancient sacred texts especially shaped their presentations of the edges of Jesus' life--his birth and his death. The many narrative details of the gospels' passion stories deliberately echo various verses from the prophets and the psalms. Their point: that Jesus died, and was raised, according to the Scriptures. The matching of event to ancient prophecy established, for the evangelists and for their communities, the authority of their stories.

Gibson missed the evangelists' point. His opening screen flashes a verse from Isaiah 53: "He was wounded for our transgressions; by his stripes we are healed." What served as prophetic authorization for the gospels' proclamation, Gibson takes as an invitation to explore, in lurid and lingering detail, how a human body would look if pulped, pummeled, and flayed. Part of this orientation comes from the Catholicism of his childhood. Part of it, as he has repeatedly claimed, comes from the visions of an early nineteenth-century stigmatic nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich. (Knowing what my catechism classes were like in twentieth-century Rhode Island, I can only imagine what hers were like in eighteenth-century Westphalia.) Part of it, of course, is just Gibson's favorite visual vernacular, on display from Mad Max through Braveheart and beyond.

Thus Gibson's Christ, a theological figure whose origins lie in late medieval Europe, saves not through dying so much as through endless, unspeakable, unbearable suffering. That's the core of Gibson's movie. The rest is window-dressing. The costuming, like the music, is lushly theatrical. The bad guys wear black, their Jewishness coded by prayer shawls, big noses, and bad teeth. The Jewish soldiers who form the arresting party look like visiting Romulan dignitaries, or extras from the chorus of Nabucco. The faces of the two Marys are framed by nun-like veils. (I half expected Monica Belucci to whip out a rosary along the Stations of the Cross.) And Gibson's much-touted use of ancient languages, like the high quality of his celluloid gore, was a nod to verisimilitude, not real history. Pilate chatted in Aramaic; Jesus (at this point in the movie, I confess, I groaned aloud) in perfect Church Latin . . . . .

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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Last night, Newsnight Review had a feature on The Passion of the Christ -- thanks to David Mackinder for mentioning this. You can view the feature here:

Newsnight Review 27 February

Just click on "video" and the programme will begin. It is the first item on the programme and it lasts for about ten minutes. It's a useful discussion. Tim Lott, an atheist, thinks highly of the film and he says that it made him want to read the Gospels again. He also commented that the use of Aramaic helped to make the most retold of stories seem fresh and different. They all use the word "visceral" and Mark Kermode sees it as a horror film, speaking of the ominous dread of what is coming up next. There is also a clip of the film -- the first I have seen outside of the trailer. It is the arrest of Jesus and you get to hear some Aramaic. That's one thing I am looking forward to seeing (hearing) in the film.

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There is a most interesting article by Adele Reinhartz in the latest edition of The New Republic. I may be wrong, but I think the only way to access the article is to subscribe and then download the whole issue (as a PDF); I've done so without having to part with money. Anyway, the reference is as follows:

Adele Reinhartz, "Jesus of Hollywood: From D. W. Griffith to Mel Gibson", The New Republic March 8 2004: 26-29.

An excerpt:

Does Gibson’s film, do all these films, foment anti-Semitism? The matter must be considered carefully. If the question is, do they intend to stir up hostile feelings toward Jews that under certain conditions might lead to physical violence, the answer is no. Each film has its own theme and emphasis, but none of them, Gibson’s film included, with the possible exception of Der Galiläer, aims to be anti-Semitic. But if the question is, do these films help to perpetuate certain beliefs and stereotypes that have been implicated in anti-Semitism, then the answer must be yes, Gibson’s film included. Whatever film-makers’ intentions might be, they cannot exert complete control of the message that people will take away from their films. I do not anticipate any anti-Semitic incidents at my neighborhood cineplex as viewers of Gibson’s melodrama leave the theater. But it is appalling that this film, like most of its predecessors, has added to the visual library of images in which the Jews are portrayed as conniving, bloodthirsty Christ-killers. The Passion of the Christ is morally careless, and now it, too, is upon us and our children.

Reinhartz, you may recall, is something of an expert on Jesus films in general, and the depiction of Jews in particular. See, for example:

Adele Reinhartz, “Jesus in Film: Hollywood Perspectives on the Jewishness of Jesus”, Journal of Religion and Film Vol. 2, Number 2 (Fall 1998).

Or more recently:

Adele Reinhartz, "Passion-ate Moments in the Jesus Film Genre", Journal of Religion and Film Vol. 8, Special Issue no. 1 (2004)

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Thanks to Jim West for this link:

Christians, Critics Sound off on Gibson's Passion
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

This is a useful round-up of different views of the film.

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I mentioned earlier Geza Vermes's comments on The Passion of the Christ now that he has seen a preview (see earlier blog entry). Vermes's full article is not in the on-line version of The Guardian but I've found a version elsewhere, on Mathaba.net:

Celluloid brutality, Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ'
Mel Gibson's film about Christ is horribly gory, historically wrong - and it will inspire judeophobia
by Geza Vermes

I am still in a state of shock having sat through two hours of almost uninterrupted gratuitous brutality, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I hope I will never be obliged to see something as dreadful again . . . .

. . . . . The light element in The Passion of the Christ is supplied by the use of Latin and Aramaic. Not only are Pilate and Jesus(!) fluent Latin speakers, but even the soldiers of the Jerusalem garrison, who were most probably Aramaic- and Greek-speaking recruits from Syria, converse happily in a clumsy Latin with Italian Church pronunciation. I did not find it easy to follow the Aramaic which was mixed with unnecessary Hebraisms . . . . .

Update (Saturday): Vermes article now available on the Guardian Unlimited web site:

Celluloid brutality
Mel Gibson's film about Christ is horribly gory, historically wrong - and it will inspire judeophobia
Geza Vermes

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Helenann Hartley asks about the report that someone had a heart attack while watching The Passion of the Christ, something that was mentioned on Richard and Judy yesterday. Here's the story from Reuters, here reported on MSNBC:

Woman dies during ‘Passion’ screening
She had heart attack during the crucifixion scene

Helenann Hartley also draws my attention to the Church Times who are running a poll to see how many of their readers are planning to go to see the film. It is currently at 60.5% who are and 39.5% who are not. There is what I call a "round-up" article too, which won't tell you anything new if you've been following the news story in recent weeks and months:

Passions run high over violent act of faith by Mel Gibson
by Bill Bowder

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending over the link to this review:

Review: Gibson's The Passion of the Christ
By Victoria Lindrea

There is not a great deal of interest in this one.

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Thanks to David Mackinder for this one from the New Republic Online. Again, these American film critics really know how to write. How about someone sets up a scholarship to send New Testament scholars to wherever it is that these American film reviewers learn their craft? This one is more akin than the previous one to the majority of the reviews that have emerged, pretty sickened by the obsession with blood. It is now the third time I have seen the word "pornography" in connection with the film, this time "pious pornography".

MEL GIBSON'S LETHAL WEAPON.
The Worship of Blood
by Leon Wieseltier

There are still some miracles that movies cannot accomplish. If, in the manner of the bleeding images of the old Christian legends, it were possible for Mel Gibson's film itself to bleed, and the blood with which it soaks its wretched hero to burst through the screen and soak its wretched audience, it would have done so. For The Passion of the Christ is intoxicated by blood, by its beauty and its sanctity. The bloodthirstiness of Gibson's film is startling, and quickly sickening. The fluid is everywhere. It drips, it runs, it spatters, it jumps. It trickles down the post at which Jesus is flagellated and down the cross upon which he is crucified, and the camera only reluctantly tears itself away from the scarlet scenery. The flagellation scene and the crucifixion scene are frenzies of blood. When Jesus is nailed to the wood, the drops of blood that spring from his wound are filmed in slow-motion, with a twisted tenderness. (Ecce slo-mo.) It all concludes in the shower of blood that issues from the corpse of Jesus when it is pierced by the Roman soldier's spear . . . .

. . . . . Gibson is under the impression that he has done nothing more than put God's word into film. No Hollywood insider was ever so inside. "Critics who have a problem with me don't really have a problem with me and this film," he told Diane Sawyer, "they have a problem with the four Gospels." From such a statement it is impossible not to conclude that the man is staggeringly ignorant of his own patrimony. For the Gospels, like all great religious texts, have been interpreted in many different ways, to accommodate the needs and the desires of many different souls; and Gibson's account of these events is, like every other account, a particular construction of them. The Passion of the Christ is the expression of certain theological and artistic preferences. It is, more specifically, a noisy contemporary instance of a tradition of interpretation that came into its own in the late medieval centuries . . . . .

. . . . . The Passion of the Christ is the work of a religious sensibility of remarkable coarseness. It is by turns grossly physical and grossly magical, childishly literalist, gladly credulous, comically masculine. Gibson's faith is finally pre-theological, the kind of conviction that abhors thought, superstitiously fascinated by Satan and "the other realm," a manic variety of Christian folk religion.

It will be objected that I see only pious pornography in The Passion of the Christ because I am not a believer in the Christ. This is certainly so . . . . .

. . . . . The Passion of The Christ is an unwitting incitement to secularism, because it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed. This is unfair to, well, Christianity, since Christianity is not a cult of Gibsonesque gore. But there is a religion toward which Gibson's movie is even more unfair than it is to its own. In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist . . . . .

. . . . . . His notion of authenticity has no time for history. Historiographically speaking, after all, there is no such thing as gospel truth; and so his portrayal of the Jews is based on nothing more than his own imagination of what they looked like and sounded like. And Gibson's imagination has offered no resistance to the iconographical inheritance of Western anti-Semitism. Again, these things are not passively received. They are willingly accepted. Gibson created this movie; it was not revealed to him. Like his picture of Jesus, his picture of the Jews is the consequence of certain religious and cinematic decisions for which he must be held accountable. He has chosen to give millions of people the impression that Jews are culpable for the death of Jesus. In making this choice, which defies not only the scruples of scholars but also the teaching of the Catholic Church, Gibson has provided a fine illustration of the cafeteria Catholicism of the right . . . . .

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Thanks to Jeff Peterson for sending over this link from the National Review Online:

Violence to Scripture?
Viewing The Passion.
By S. T. Karnick

This is an interestingly different take on the film and argues that in spite of the brutality, nay because of it, The Passion of the Christ has a powerful message. My excerpts won't give the full flavour, but I give some anyway:

Rather less of the film is taken up with the violence and brutality toward the Christ than many critics are suggesting. During the atrocious flogging by the Roman guards, for example, the director cuts away from Jesus to Mary, and he follows her through the courtyard and concentrates on her reactions and experiences while we hear the lashes striking home in the background. He certainly leaves the scene of the beating not a moment too soon for most audience members, but he could, after all, have stayed to show the entire thing. Yet he did not. Moreover, during the scenes of torment he cuts away several times to flashbacks that connect aspects of Christ's suffering to moments of his life that once again draw the viewer to consider his own unrighteousness and consequent complicity in the suffering . . . .

. . . . . In addition, Jesus asks God the Father more than once to forgive his tormentors. If he can endure this unimaginable suffering and still not call down fire from Heaven, can we not at least be strong enough to watch it in a movie? The notion that we are too weak even to see a recreation of what Jesus managed actually to endure, and which he underwent without enmity toward his tormentors, is in fact utterly grotesque and fundamentally insulting in the lack of fortitude it assumes of us.

Hence, one could perhaps be forgiven for wondering about certain critics' likely motives in so "warning" potential audiences without sufficiently stressing the reason for this violence. Certainly they cannot wish to spare people the very experience of complicity in Christ's suffering that Gibson takes such pains to establish, can they? For that is the likely effect of their warnings — that some people will avoid the film as too intense. The Passion of the Christ is forceful indeed, and that power makes the film undeniably difficult to endure, but such intensity in films is precisely what these very same critics are usually most likely to praise . . . .

. . . . There are, moreover, positive moments in the film. An important one is the portrayal of Jesus astounding willingness to forgive his enemies even on the point of death and after suffering stupendous agony he did not deserve in the slightest. In addition, some of the visuals are startling in their beauty, inspired by medieval paintings redolent of great piety and faith. The overhead shot of Jesus as he expires on the cross is achingly beautiful, surely as close as mere cinema can come to being appropriate to the moment . . . . .

. . . . . This film is meant to be like the spikes that are so vividly and horrifyingly driven into the Christ's hands and feet as he is fastened to the cross. As Gibson portrays the scene, blood spurts up horrifyingly from Jesus palms, just as it surely must have done two millennia ago. The Passion of the Christ is as pointed as those spikes. It does one thing. It implicates the viewer in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ nearly 2,000 years ago, and it does so with undeniable power.

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Here's an interesting review in Africana:

Africana Reviews: The Passion of the Christ
Mel Gibson has never presented viewers with an intellectual challenge, but with The Passion of the Christ that is exactly what he's done.
Reviewed by Armond White

. . . . Part of the confusion comes from the fact that there has rarely before been a mainstream movie that professed Catholic precepts. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew was essentially a Marxist parable. Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ was a lapsed-Catholic extravaganza. Like Kevin Smith’s Dogma, it was more skeptical than spiritual. Scorsese’s overwrought and hermeneutically ponderous style ignited controversy from Christian spokesmen but his film was simply flashier than such films as King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Hollywood’s previous Christ films were Protestant or ecumenical in approach. Gibson’s movie is extremely Catholic in its focus on hideous/gorgeous suffering. He brings to life the bloody essence of the Crucifixion iconography . . . .

. . . . Gibson must also be defended against critics who suddenly complain about his violent style. It’s Gibson’s previous use of violence without impact that was unacceptable, in The Passion of the Christ the violent scenes are conceived ethically like the sacrifices shown in a war movie. Gibson connects to the old Negro spiritual “By His stripes we are healed” — the black gospel recognition of hideous/gorgeous suffering.

The most beautiful moment in the film is a flashback to Jesus the carpenter building a table that stands high off the ground. It symbolizes Christ elevating mankind from its meanest habits. But this is a rare moment of subtlety and loveliness. For the majority of the film, that proverbial art theme (Man’s Inhumanity to Man) is stressed, even over the primary fact of Resurrection. It proves Gibson has done things the Hollywood way for too long.

For black viewers it’s always been hard to get past the chauvinistic traditions of Christian art — even in Norman Jewison’s visionary 1973 film Jesus Christ Superstar we had to endure a black Judas (played by Carl Anderson whose earnest portrayal won him a Golden Globe nomination). Not even Scorsese could resist this tradition. His The Last Temptation of Christ abetted the idea of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus. (He went against Scriptural description, favoring European hegemony — even though Scorsese himself is a descendant of dark-eyed Southern Italians.) Believers who are moviegoers have to resolve the issue of spiritual representation for themselves, which is why Jesus Christ Superstar still has the most inquiring — most postmodern — moment of all movies about the Passion. During Christ (Ted Neely’s) Garden of Gethsemane aria Jewison edits-in a montage of various fine art renderings of the Passion. By that trope, Jewison opened up the Gospels culturally and aesthetically. Gibson’s movie is not that advanced. Instead, it is powerfully, earnestly traditional.

Nice to hear someone enthusing about Jesus Christ Superstar, still one of my favourite Jesus films.

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An interesting article in today's Guardian:

Gibson film ignores vow to remove blood libel
Director keeps in infamous line - but in Aramaic only
Stephen Bates and John Hooper in Rome

The claim relates, of course, to the inclusion in the film of Matthew 27.25, "His blood be on us and on our children", though not in the subtitles:

Mel Gibson has reneged on a promise to remove the infamous scriptural blood libel, in which the Jews allegedly accepted responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus, from his film The Passion of the Christ, according to one of the world's foremost scholars, who saw a preview showing yesterday.

The scholar concerned is Geza Vermes, who is very critical of the film

Geza Vermes, a former professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford and the author of five books on the life of Christ, writes of the film in today's Guardian: "I have never seen anything so dreadful and I hope I never will." . . . .

. . . . Prof Vermes immediately picked holes in the film, criticising its use of "Catholic church Latin" by the Roman soldiers instead of the Greek they would have spoken, pointing out that Pilate is referred to as the "governor" rather than the prefect of the province and spotting that the wrong Aramaic word for God is used throughout.

And there is critique of the film from British Jews

The British Board of Deputies of British Jews said: "It would have been better if this film had never been made. The glorification of violence and bloodshed and the reinforcement of medieval stereotyping of the Jewish people are extremely dangerous."

But as a Jesus film buff, I am most interested in the following comments from Franco Zeffirelli:

In Rome, the veteran Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli, who himself made a controversial film about the life of Christ, said Gibson was "sinisterly attracted to the most unrestrained violence".

In an article for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Zeffirelli wrote: "[In America] mothers want at all costs for their children to see the film... What conclusion will children in particular be able to draw from it other than that the Jews were to blame for all that bloodshed? This way we set ourselves back centuries."

It will be worth seeing if it is possible to dig out an internet version of Zeffirelli's article. Let's see next if someone can grab Martin Scorsese for his opinion!

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Beliefnet have now posted part 3 of the John Dominic Crossan and Ben Witherington III exchange on The Passion of the Christ and, in particular, the theological issues surrounding it:

Scholarly Smackdown Part 3: Christ's Death: Because, From or For Our Sins?

Witherington has now seen the film. Some comments later.

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I have mentioned William Fulco, S. J. a few times in connection with The Passion of the Christ. On Xtalk, Jeffrey Gibson posts a link to this interesting interview with him:

Father Fulco's Baptism of Fire
What happens when a Jesuit scholar gets deeply moved in a controversial film
Loyola Marymount's William Fulco and Ed Siebert in conversation

The interview is not recent; it's a badly produced PDF, sometimes difficult to follow, but there are some interesting bits and bobs in it and it is easily the most detailed material from Fulco I have seen. One tidbit is that "We (Fulco and Gibson) discussed whether it should be Latin or Greek" and they decided on Latin "for artistic reasons".

What would be interesting to see now would be a fresh interview with Fulco now that the film has been released. What does he make of the final version? What does he make of the criticisms, especially with regard to historical accuracy?

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I mentioned this review in quoting from another, but Dwight Peterson helpfully provides the URL for the review:

NAILED
by DAVID DENBY
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

It's all worth reading, but here's his concluding paragraph:

What is most depressing about “The Passion” is the thought that people will take their children to see it. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” not “Let the little children watch me suffer.” How will parents deal with the pain, terror, and anger that children will doubtless feel as they watch a man flayed and pierced until dead? The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson’s timing couldn’t be more unfortunate: another dose of death-haunted religious fanaticism is the last thing we need.

Will people really take their children to see this? I really hope not. I wouldn't dream of taking mine, not the remotest chance.

Aside from the content of these reviews, which I cannot judge until I've seen the film, some of these reviewers have such a wonderful command of the English language that I am beginning to think I read too much academic prose. I don't suppose I've ever read so many reviews of just one film, let alone over such a short period of time, but my goodness have some of these reviewers got a nice turn of phrase!

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With a month to go until the release of The Passion of the Christ here in the UK, it is finding its way increasingly into our media, if primarily to cast a glance on the way that Americans are reacting to it. I woke up this morning to a report from Los Angeles on the film on the Today programme. And today's Guardian has a feature:

Passion pulls in the multitudes
Opening of film depicting Christ's last hours inspires and inflames US
Tania Branigan, and Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

This is a good round-up article, with highlights from the reviews. It suggests that the film will not make anything like the same impact in the UK, which I think is right.

Update: Thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending this one over from BBC Online:

Crowds and protests greet Passion
The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's controversial film about Jesus, took about $20m (£11m) at US box offices in its opening day, according to a report.

Update: Today's Daily Telegraph has The Passion of the Christ above its main headline, just under the header. There are two articles on-line:

US in awe as The Passion is released
By Oliver Poole in Irvine, California

British Jews angry at Gibson film

Update: Richard and Judy (not a programme I normally watch -- my Mum rang me up!) even had a feature on The Passion of the Christ tonight; three people in the studio chatting about the film, two Jews who hated it and one Catholic who liked it; sorry -- didn't get their names.

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Jim West has set up a new blog to accompany his Biblical Studies Resources pages:

Biblical Studies Resources
A Resource Weblog for all areas of Biblical Studies

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Beliefnet have set up a weblog for news about The Passion of the Christ:

Beliefnet's 'Passion' Weblog
A continuing update of the latest news and commentary relating to Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ.'

There is no RSS feed, though, so you will have to visit specially.

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In Paleojudaica, Jim Davila draws attention to this useful piece at Beliefnet:

'The Passion': What's Not in the Bible--and Why?
Gibson drew from extrabiblical sources to create his version of the Passion. A look at how those sources influenced his film.
By the Beliefnet Staff

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It seems that the competition for the most negative review is hotting up (see earlier blog entry). Thanks to David Mackinder for sending this one over, also mentioned on Paleojudaica: Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. They echo the sentiments of George Pevere, blogged yesterday and use the same word, pornography:

At the same time, the movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it. It doesn't even evoke emotion in the audience. It is designed to prompt the crudest human pity and emotional blackmail - which it obviously does. But then it seems to me designed to evoke a sick kind of fascination. Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before. And you have to ask yourself: why? The suffering of Christ is bad and gruesome enough without exaggerating it to this insane degree. Theologically, the point is not that Jesus suffered more than any human being ever has on a physical level. It is that his suffering was profound and voluntary and the culmination of a life and a teaching that Gibson essentially omits. One more example. Toward the end, unsatisfied with showing a man flayed alive, nailed gruesomely to a cross, one eye shut from being smashed in, blood covering his entire body, Gibson has a large crow perch on the neighboring cross and peck another man's eyes out. Why? Because the porn needed yet another money shot.

The whole review available here. On the theological problem here, see the related comments of Gerald Caron and John Dominic Crossan.

The piece also has an interesting comment on the debate over the film's anti-Semitism. One of the questions I sometimes ask of a Jesus film to get some debate going is whether the depiction of Jesus' Passion in any way enhances the negative depiction of the Jewish leaders, or accentuates the innocence of Pilate. Sullivan is essentially asking this question of The Passion of the Christ:

Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew - fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible - the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent. Again, this reflects part of the Gospels, but Gibson goes further. He presents Pilate's wife as actually finding Mary, providing towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, arguing for Jesus' release. Yes, the Roman torturers are obviously evil; yes, a few Jews dissent; and, of course, all the disciples are Jewish. I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them. To my mind, that is categorically unforgivable. Anti-Semitism is the original sin of Christianity. Far from expiating it, this movie clearly enjoys taunting those Catholics as well as Jews who are determined to confront that legacy. In that sense alone, it is a deeply immoral work of art.

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Jim Davila has collected together and commented on some interesting pieces on the use of Aramaic in The Passion of the Christ:

Aramaic speakers go to see the Passion of the Christ

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On Xtalk, Bob Schacht has some fascinating reflections on The Passion of the Christ. If you are not subscribed, the previous link will take you to his message; here is an excerpt:

Here's my insight(?) on the best way to understand this movie. In Jungian psychology, there's a process of meditation called Active Imagination. When applied to Christian meditation, it means imagining yourself in the situation you're reading about. You read the pericope, then you sit back, close your eyes, and try to visualize the situation, and make it come to life. The text is your starting point, but you are not limited to what is in the text. The goal is to 'flesh out' the text, projecting yourself into its Sitz im Leben.

Gibson comes from a traditional Catholic background. Therefore his texts for the Passion are not just the Gospels as we have them, but the Stations of the Cross, and the Pieta. If you were to do a survey of traditionalist Catholic churches, I'll bet you'd find a Pieta in most of them (there's one in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary a few blocks down the street from the Episcopal Church that I attend), as well as Stations of the Cross-- at least during Lent. As I think of the movie, I think every one of the Stations is represented. Although there is some variation about the stations, perhaps the most popular traditional Catholic version is that of St Alphonsus de Liguori (1696-1787), with 14 stations (For an illustrated online version, see http://www.catholictradition.org/stations.htm.) The importance of this for present purposes is that 5 of these 14 are non-scriptural (i.e., not to be found in the canonical Gospels), and Gibson has all 5. The other 9 are taken from, or implied by, passages from all 4 canonical Gospels (e.g., John 20:25 is used to imply that he was nailed to the Cross). Michelangelo's Pieta is not one of the Stations, but its place in Catholic Tradition is so great that any visualization of the Passion can scarcely ignore it.

In addition to the Stations and the Pieta, the whole thing is framed by a quote at the beginning of the movie from one of Isaiah's Servant Songs, 53 . . .

. . . . . So the basic script for the movie, IMHO, was set by Isaiah 53, the Stations of the Cross, and the Pieta, fleshed out by Gibson's own "active imagination." In his active traditionalist imagination, Romans speak Latin (isn't that what they're taught in school?), so that's what they speak in the movie. The quote from Isaiah at the beginning tells us that it is irrelevant whether the Jews or the Romans were to blame; Jesus' suffering was required by the doctrine of Atonement, and since our (collective) sin is so great, his suffering had to be great enough to match. This accounts for the gratuitous extra images of suffering, such as the Roman soldier who pulls Jesus' shoulder out of its socket in order to stretch his hand out before nailing it to the cross, which are part of Gibson's act of Active Imagination."

I've not seen the film yet myself, but from what I've read and heard, this sounds like a pretty compelling way of looking at it. It sheds light on Gibson's reticence to have named academic advisors for the film.

Update: see this article on Beliefnet for more on the relationship of the film to the stations of the cross:

What's Catholic About 'The Passion'? A Lot
The Stations of the Cross, the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, and Catholic mystics' visions shape Mel Gibson's work.
By Jennifer Waters

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Holger Szesnat referred me to a the Mikra discussion group for some ebay links to some extraordinary merchandise, mugs, oval pewter pocket reminder (pocket piece), an oval pewter lapel pin, and a pack of 25 witness cards. I suppose one should have expected all this, but it hadn't occurred to me that we'd be experiencing the true horror of Passion mugs! I'm afraid there's a whole web site devoted to this stuff, ShareThePassionOfTheChrist.com. The motto used on all this tat is "Dying was his reason for living", which, if you ask me, is pretty dubious theologically.

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Thanks to Holger Szesnat for sending over a link to John Paul Heil's homepage. I have added this to the NT Gateway Scholars: H and in due course I will link to several useful on-line articles he has made available. In the mean time I wanted to draw attention to this topical piece:

John Paul Heil, "The Blood of Jesus in Matthew: A Narrative-Critical Perspective", Perspectives in Religious Studies 18 (1991): 117-24

His conclusion (since there's no abstract):

Our investigation of the theme of the blood of Jesus in the Matthean narrative has led to the proposal of a new, additional meaning to the whole Jewish people's calling down of the blood of Jesus upon themselves and their children (27:25). The innocent "blood" of Jesus that all the Jewish people are willing to accept the full responsibility for shedding is the same "blood" that Jesus at his last supper designated as "my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many for the forgiveness of sins" (26:28). Precisely and paradoxically because the whole Jewish people brought upon themselves the tragic "price" as well as the salvific "value" for shedding the innocent blood of Jesus as a "prophet" and the suffering "righteous one" of God, they make possible the forgiveness of the sins of all people, including Peter who wept bitterly in remorse after denying Jesus (26:59- 75), Judas who repented his sin of betraying Jesus' innocent blood (27:3-10), and the whole Jewish people who invoked his atoning blood upon themselves and their future generations.

Update (1 March): link to this article added to Matthew: Books, Articles and Reviews page.

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Thanks to Jeff Peterson for sending over the link to this funny and poignant take on the Passion hullabaloo by a Jewish actor and humorist in the Weekly Standard

Passions
We're all holding our breath on this one.
by Larry Miller

. . . . JESUS KNEW he had to suffer and die on the cross. He wasn't alone, by the way. Two hundred and fifty thousand other Jews were crucified by the Romans in the same period. (Probably not according to Mel's father, but still . . .) Yet out of all the victims of this astonishing cruelty, Jesus Christ was the only one who rose and became God to two billion people, unless you count Miramax . . . .

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I referred to Geoff Pevere's Toronto Star review of The Passion of the Christ as the most negative I'd seen so far. David Mackinder refers me to Gregg Easterbrook's widely-read Easterblogg. In the entry dated 02.25.04, he refers to Mel Gibson's deeply cynical accomplishment and says:

"The Gospels emphasize Christ's suffering on the cross; Gibson has decided to emphasize Christ's suffering via the whip. Strange that Gibson should feel he understands Jesus' final hours better than the Gospel writers did. Maybe this is simply his artistic interpretation--but remember, Gibson is presenting his movie as the long-suppressed truth, not as an artistic interpretation that may or may not be right.

Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. Gibson's film career has been anchored in glorification of violence (the Mad Max movies) and in preposterous overstatement of the actual occurrence of violence (the Lethal Weapon movies). Gibson knows the sad Hollywood lesson--for which audiences are ultimately to blame--that glorifying or exaggerating violence is a path to ticket sales. So Gibson decides to make a movie about Jesus, and what one thing differentiates his movie from the many previous films of the same story? Exaggerated glorification of violence."

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National Geographic has an article on Mary Magdalene featuring some comments from Karen King; it is spurred on, as usual, by the Da Vinci Code:

Da Vinci Code Spurs Debate: Who Was Mary Magdalene?
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
February 25, 2004

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Thanks to David Mackinder for this link from PBS's Religion and Ethics News Weekly

INTERVIEW: Jim Caviezel by Kim Lawton

You can read this story or watch a four minute feature combining the the interview with clips from the trailer and some kind of news conference.

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This is pretty much the most negative review I've seen so far, and the first from Canada, from the Toronto Star:

A dark and bloody spectacle
As sex is to the body in hardcore porn, violence is to the ruin of the body of Christ in The Passion
GEOFF PEVERE

. . . . Even from my position of relative spiritual impoverishment, I have no doubt that Gibson believes completely and utterly in the divinity of his mission. From precisely the same position however, I also believe, just as completely and utterly, The Passion Of The Christ to be a work of fundamentalist pornography. What graphic sex is to the use of the body in hardcore porno, graphic violence is to destruction of the body of Christ in this Passion . . . .

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Thanks to David Mackinder for these links in today's New York Times:

Good and Evil Locked in Violent Showdown
A. O. Scott

. . . . . What makes the movie so grim and ugly is Mr. Gibson's inability to think beyond the conventional logic of movie narrative. In most movies — certainly in most movies directed by or starring Mr. Gibson — violence against the innocent demands righteous vengeance in the third act, an expectation that Mr. Gibson in this case whips up and leaves unsatisfied.

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, "The Passion of the Christ" never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure. The Gospels, at least in some interpretations, suggest that the story ends in forgiveness. But such an ending seems beyond Mr. Gibson's imaginative capacities . . . . "

Do You Recognize This Jesus?
Kenneth L. Woodward

In this "op-ed" piece, Woodward argues that many evangelicals as well as other Christians will be shocked by what they see:

. . . . . Indeed, Mr. Gibson's film leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus story that contemporary Christianity now emphasizes. His Jesus does not demand a "born again" experience, as most evangelists do, in order to gain salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons, as Pentecostals emphasize. He doesn't promote social causes, as liberal denominations do. He certainly doesn't crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner divinity, as today's nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific.

Like Jeremiah, Jesus is a Jewish prophet rejected by the leaders of his own people, and abandoned by his handpicked disciples. Besides taking an awful beating, he is cruelly tempted to despair by a Satan whom millions of church-going Christians no longer believe in, and dies in obedience to a heavenly Father who, by today's standards, would stand convicted of child abuse. In short, this Jesus carries a cross that not many Christians are ready to share . . . .

Then this piece reports on a panel of experts from different religious backgrounds who were invited to watch the film and then discuss it earlier this week:

'Passion' Disturbs a Panel of Religious Leaders
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

This one is an interesting read and, incidentally, answers my question about Matthew 27.25; David Sandmel in this article confirms that the line is in the film but the subtitle is dropped.

If you still want more, New York Times has also made a special collection of annotated links available:

Spotlight on "The Passion of the Christ"

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The next few articles in Christianity Today's March issue, in which The Passion of the Christ is the cover story, have now been posted on-line. The first is an interesting piece by Michael Medved, a Jewish writer and broadcaster who has spoken out vociferously against the Anti-Defamatiion League's stance on the film over the last year or so:

The Passion and Prejudice
Why I asked the Anti-Defamation League to give Mel Gibson a break.
by Michael Medved

Medved mentions the Paula Fredriksen article just mentioned, commenting:

The rumors about the movie reached such intensity that The New Republic published "Mad Mel," an attack by Paula Fredriksen, a professor at Boston University who had not seen the picture.

Though Fredriksen's polemical language is clearly a bar to any possibility of reconciliation between the two sides, Medved's implication that Fredriksen's attack was unprovoked may be incorrect. The article mentioned was written some time after the events Medved goes on to describe (the ad hoc committe's report on the script) and not before (see previous blog entry).

The next piece is the second instalment of Holly McLure's "Behind the Scenes" series. This is less interesting than the previous one; its main purpose is to tell us what a great chap Mel Gibson is. He wears a red nose and clowns about, apparently:

Behind the Scenes of The Passion
On the set with Holly McClure

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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I commented earlier that since the question of stolen script comes up repeatedly in news stories and now even in an academic review, I would like to comment on this. The gist of the accusation is this. In March-April last year, a committee assembled to look at a script of (what was then being called) The Passion. This "ad hoc" group was made up of Eugene Fisher from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Eugene Corn from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and seven New Testament scholars, four Catholics and three Jews. The group issued a fairly critical report on the script, in particular drawing attention to alleged anti-Semitism. It was this report, just under a year ago, that began the controversy that has surrounded the film ever since. Now, was the script which the "ad hoc committee" obtained stolen? This appears to have been alleged by Icon Productions after the group had published their report but to my knowledge the accusation was not investigated or followed up in any way. Two members of the ad hoc committee, on the other hand, have commented on the accusation in print. The first is Paula Fredriksen, who in an article published in The New Republic On-line on 25 July 2003, explained the situation from her perspective at some length. Unfortunately, she uses some rather polemical language at points, but the article is at least detailed and specific and leaves little doubt that as far as she is concerned, the script was not stolen:

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GIBSON.
Mad Mel
by Paula Fredriksen

Here are the relevant parts excerpted:

. . . . . On March 25, the day before they invited me on board, Fisher and Korn exchanged communications with one William Fulco, S.J., who teaches in the department of classics and archaeology at Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles. He had served as Gibson's librettist, translating the script from English into Aramaic and Latin. His intimacy with the script was perhaps the reason that he assumed, or was assigned, his role; for as long as the dialogue lasted, Fulco was the main contact on the Icon side.

Fisher and Korn had faxed Fulco two documents on criteria for evaluating dramatizations of Jesus's Passion, one issued by the USCCB in 1988, the second produced jointly by the USCCB and the ADL in 2001. In response, Fulco thanked them, and assured both men that the script was devoid of any hint of antiJewishness. In fact, he claimed, it was "totally in accord with the [USCCB/ADL] documents." Fulco's struggles with the translation, he says in this e-mail, had engraved the script in his memory. ("I know [it] almost backwards.") Shooting had concluded, Fulco said, only the prior week. Fulco then added two points of information relevant to future events--that he was "preparing accurate subtitles" (what had happened to Gibson's "point of honor"?) and that "the film follows the script quite faithfully." (Since the reporter from The Wall Street Journal had mentioned seeing "a first look at a rough cut of the film," it must have been substantially assembled before March 7.)

A few weeks later, on April 14, Fisher wrote to the group of scholars and to another USCCB officer: "I have just received the good news that we will receive the script for our analysis and comment within the next couple of days." The scholars had to promise confidentiality: we could not circulate the script outside of our group, "though of course your comments can be public." On April 17, Fisher informed Fulco that he had received the script and had sent copies out to the scholars. We received them and read them over Easter weekend.

The whole group heard again from Fisher on April 25. "Gibson called me last night," Fisher began. "He had with him McEveety [another Icon producer] and Fulco." Gibson said that he wanted Fisher to convey to the scholars that he does not share his father's views, that some of his best friends are Jewish, that he is sensitive to anti-Semitism and opposed to it. "As an Irish Catholic Australian," wrote Fisher in his e-mail, Gibson "knows more than a bit about religious and social prejudice and [he] relates to Jews as fellow sufferers from it.... He's open to what we have to say, but still a bit cautious." At this point Fisher still thought that we could work with Gibson to try to improve his film . . . . .

. . . . . The script, when we got it, shocked us. Nothing of Gibson's published remarks, or of Fulco's and Gibson's private assurances, had prepared us for what we saw. Each scholar, independent of the others, wrote his or her own comments on the document. We then boiled them down, bulleted our points, and made the whole discussion easy to digest. The first section of our report explained the historical connection between passion plays and the slaughter of European Jews, the dress rehearsals for the Shoah. Then we summarized our responses to the script. We pinpointed its historical errors and--again, since Gibson has so trumpeted his own Catholicism--its deviations from magisterial principles of biblical interpretation. We concluded with general recommendations for certain changes in the script. Four short appendices--two historical, two directly script-related--traversed this same terrain from different directions. A final appendix provided excerpts from official Catholic teaching.Receiving criticism is never easy. As teachers and as scholars, who regularly give and get criticism, we knew this. We also knew that we were asking Gibson to revise his script substantially. We knew that we were working against his enthusiasm, his utter lack of knowledge, and his investment of time and money. We pinned our hopes on his avowed interest in historicity, on his evident willingness to hear what we had to say, and on his decency. In retrospect, we also functioned with a naïveté that is peculiar to educators: the belief that, once an error is made plain, a person will prefer the truth.

Fulco knew by April 27 what the substance of our response had been: Fisher had already communicated privately with him. By May 2, we had our eighteen-page report assembled. Fisher and Korn co-wrote the cover letter on USCCB stationery, and sent the report to Icon by May 5. On May 9, members of the group received our copies. We waited. Icon was silent. When Korn phoned Fulco on May 12 to get his sense of the report, Fulco declined to share his views. He did mention that he, Gibson, and other Icon executives were scheduled to meet the following day. More silence.

Meanwhile, disturbances began to accrue. After a story about Gibson's movie ran in the Los Angeles Times, one of the group's members, Mary Boys, S.N.J.M., received "three vicious letters filled with personal attacks and anti-Semitic drivel." (Boys is a chaired professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, an adviser on ecumenical affairs to the USCCB, a member of the Catholic Biblical Association, and a tireless worker in the area of Catholic-Jewish relations. She knows anti-Semitic drivel when she sees it.) At the same time, another member of the scholars group, Father John Pawlikowski, O.S.M., professor of social ethics at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, mentioned an unhappy encounter that a friend of his--like Fulco, a professor at Loyola Marymount--had had with other Jesuits following Loyola's commencement ceremonies on May 11. On that day, Gibson had received an honorary doctorate. These Jesuits informed Pawlikowski's colleague that "Father Fulco has written a beautiful script; how could we possibly attack him? How could anyone criticize the story of the Passion? They were all aware of our report, so Fulco is obviously spreading the word."

We were surprised: we had understood that, for the time being, our report, like Gibson's script, was meant to be kept between us and Icon. "They"--Fulco, Gibson, and company--"are simply going to discredit us," Pawlikowski concluded. On May 16, the truth of his words, and the reasons for Icon's silence, became clear. On that date, Fisher, Korn, the ADL, and the USCCB received a letter from Gibson's attorney. Dated May 9, written within days of Icon's receipt of our report, the letter had sat for a week while we waited for their response, and Gibson collected his degree, and Fulco avoided Korn, and the Icon executives and Fulco conferred.

"As you are fully aware, you are in possession of property stolen from Icon, namely a draft of the screenplay for the Picture," the letter began. "At no time did Mr. Gibson authorize the release of this material to you or to any other third party for dissemination to you." The lawyering went on for another page: "You have admitted that you came into possession of this stolen property by means that are illegal." "You are now attempting to force my clients to alter the screenplay to the Picture to suit your own religious views." Our side was threatening to discredit the film, and to intimidate Gibson. ("This act is itself illegal--it is called extortion.") All scripts were to be returned by 5:00 p.m. on May 13. (Poor organization, since this letter was faxed three days after its own deadline.) Court orders, lawsuits, reserved rights and remedies, and all sorts of terrible consequences might and could and would follow. Very truly yours, et cetera.

"Gibson, Fulco and McEveety were all on the phone with me well before," Fisher wrote to me on May 20. "They knew we had the script, as they had known for some time, and did not ask for it back." Icon's new claim also made nonsense of the earlier condition of confidentiality to which we had assented before seeing the screenplay: who else would have required that? No matter. Lawyers were in the saddle; reason was dying . . . . ."

If Fredriksen's perceptions are right, there is little doubt -- the script was not stolen. Her report is backed up by a second member of the ad hoc committee, Amy-Jill Levine:

The Real Problem with "Passion"

This was published on Beliefnet also last summer, but it is not dated. Levine writes:

After questioning our panel's motives, Mr. Medved referred to the Gibson camp's charge that we used a "stolen" script. Indeed, Mr. Gibson's backers have consistently accused this committee of being underhanded and immoral: first, they claim, we obtained the script illegally. This is wrong: Gibson's company, Icon Productions, knew we had it, and Mr. Gibson personally expressed interest in hearing our views.

As far as I know, there have been no published attempts to refute Levine's and Fredriksen's explanations of the matter. They remain the only accounts, and Fredriksen's is the only rigorous, blow-by-blow account available. Until any published refutations of these accounts appear, I would suggest that the accusation of theft is dropped by those who comment on the film.

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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The Passion of the Christ is released today in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I won't get a chance to see it myself until a preview screening next week, so if any blog readers who see it soon would like to offer their thoughts, please send me an email. (Please note, of course, that I cannot guarantee that I will reproduce your thoughts). I'd be particularly interested to hear a couple of factual things that haven't been cleared up yet: (1) Does the film have a postscript as petitioned here and discussed frequently in this blog? (2) Has Caiaphas's "His blood be on us and on our children" been included in the film or not? You might need some Aramaic for this since the most recent report said that the line was included but not subtitled. Many thanks.

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Instead of adding to my continually updated mega-post of yesterday, Passion of the Christ: News and Reviews round-up, I'll begin fresh posts for news and reviews today. Thanks to Jeff Peterson for the link to this overwhelmingly positive review:

Gibson’s Passion
Russell Hittinger and Elizabeth Lev
First Things 141 (March 2004): 7-10.

It finds it "the best movie ever made about Jesus Christ"; here are some excerpts:

. . . . . Zefferelli’s movie is comparable to a Ghirlandaio painting—exquisite, but the figures occupy only half the canvas. By contrast, Gibson’s figures are in the style of Michelangelo, filling the screen, looming over us, threatening to enter our space. It is unnerving art. When the Roman soldiers call out “vertere crucem” the audience tenses. The soldiers lift the cross, prop it on its side for an agonizing moment, and then let it fall over towards us. As it crashes to the ground, an audible gasp sounds in the theater. The viewer is denied the detachment of looking through a window into a faraway world and is drawn into the scenes as a humble, perhaps helpless, participant . . . .

. . . . . But all of this makes Gibson’s Passion nearly the opposite of the arcane and politically fraught tradition of the passion play. Such performances were often staged to incite the audience to choose sides, to “save” the integrity and honor of Christ by constituting a kind of party against Judas, the Jews, and the mob in Pilate’s courtyard. Had Gibson used the power of film to give this twisted but all-too-human political stereotype a new lease on life, concerns about the film stirring up anti-Judaism or hostility against nonbelievers would be justified. To his credit, however, Gibson denies the audience any shred of political or religious triumph, or, for that matter, defeat. Even a viewer who already knows and religiously believes in the final outcome of the story must struggle to keep watching, which is humiliating in its own right. There might be reason for scholars and religious authorities to raise questions about Gibson’s synthesizing of distinct scriptural accounts of the passion, or about his use of extra-biblical iconography. But it is hard to imagine anyone coming out of Gibson’s movie with an appetite for a religiously politicized passion. If anything, this is the definitive post-passion-play passion . . . . ."

The review also comments: "theological criticisms and concerns were expressed on the basis of an unofficial script apparently stolen from Gibson’s production company". Since this material about a "stolen" script is still getting regularly repeated, in my view unfairly, I will add a comment on this later.

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Thanks to Holger Szesnat for sending over the link to this homepage:

Petros Vassiliadis

I've added the link to my Scholars: U-Z page. Vassiliadis is at the University of Thessaloniki and he has made his homepage available in Greek and English versions. I am know him from his stuff on Q. The good news is that he has lots of full text reproductions of his own articles (though the font is absolutely awful -- you might need to copy and paste); go to his Detailed Bibliography and scroll down a bit.

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With the release of The Passion of the Christ in the USA tomorrow, it's time to round up some of the news and reviews. I commented earlier on Christianity Today's coverage; the second of the two articles there mentions that Mel Gibson's feet appear in the stoning of the woman taken in adultery scene; so now we know that we see both his hands (crucifixion scene) and his feet.

Thanks to Helenann Hartley for these two from BBC News:

Christ film 'riddled with errors'

Bible belt devoted to Christ film

The first of these is a version of the Reuters story commented on earlier.

This Reuters story provides a useful round-up of all the early reviews of the film, which show some interesting variety:

Critics Pan and Praise Gibson's 'Passion'
By Arthur Spiegelman

. . . . "One of the cruelest movies in the history of cinema," says the New Yorker's David Denby in a negative review that also calls the film "a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminated procession of treachery, beatings, blood and agony."

Critic Denby adds, 'For two hours ... we watch, stupefied as a handsome, strapping, at times half-naked young man is slowly tortured to death. Gibson is thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ and is so meagerly involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus's message of love into one of hate.". . . . .

. . . . . Daily Variety's reviewer Todd McCarthy was more positive about the film, saying, "If an age produces the renditions of classic stories that reflect those times, then 'The Passion of the Christ,' which is violent, contentious, emotional, extreme and highly proficient, must be the Jesus movie for this era.

"It is also gravely intense and the work of a man as deeply committed to his subject as one could hope for or, for that matter, want.... (The picture's) notoriety might soon be mitigated for mainstream audiences by word of mouth centered on the prolonged suffering and very vivid gore; at the same time, many true believers ... will be deeply moved. ..."

McCarthy rejected the idea that the film was anti-Semitic and added, "The passion according to Mel is potent stuff, but rather like a full course of bitter herbs without as much as a taste of honey." . . . . .

. . . . . Newsweek's David Ansen said, "Relentlessly savage, 'The Passion' plays like the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade. The film that has been getting rapturous advance raves from evangelical Christians turns out to be an R-rated inspirational movie no child can, or should, see. To these secular eyes at least, Gibson's movie is more likely to inspire nightmares than devotion."

He added, "It's the sadism, not the alleged anti-Semitism, that is most striking. (For the record, I don't think Gibson is anti-Semitic; but those inclined toward bigotry could easily find fuel for their fire here.)"

Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, in a review headlined "The Goriest Story Ever Told," said the audience for this film is fairly narrow: True believers with cast-iron stomachs; people who can stand to be grossed out as they are edified. And a few movie critics who can't help admiring Mad Mel for the spiritual compulsion that drove him to invent a new genre --- the religious splatter art film -- and bring it to searing life, death and resurrection.

There are some great one-liners there -- "the goriest story ever told" sounds like something that is going to stick. There is a theme that crops up repeatedly in the reviews -- the graphic, brutal violence -- and makes a much stronger impression than anything else.

The article briefly mentions the following review from the Chicago-Sun Times, which is also blogged by Stephen Carlson on Hypotyposeis:

Review of The Passion of the Christ
Roger Ebert

. . . . . If ever there was a film with the correct title, that film is Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Although the word passion has become mixed up with romance, its Latin origins refer to suffering and pain; later Christian theology broadened that to include Christ's love for mankind, which made him willing to suffer and die for us.

The movie is 126 minutes long, and I would guess that at least 100 of those minutes, maybe more, are concerned specifically and graphically with the details of the torture and death of Jesus. This is the most violent film I have ever seen . . . .

. . . . . David Ansen, a critic I respect, finds in Newsweek that Gibson has gone too far. "The relentless gore is self-defeating," he writes. "Instead of being moved by Christ's suffering or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins."

This is a completely valid response to the film, and I quote Ansen because I suspect he speaks for many audience members, who will enter the theater in a devout or spiritual mood and emerge deeply disturbed. You must be prepared for whippings, flayings, beatings, the crunch of bones, the agony of screams, the cruelty of the sadistic centurions, the rivulets of blood that crisscross every inch of Jesus' body. Some will leave before the end.

This is not a Passion like any other ever filmed. Perhaps that is the best reason for it. I grew up on those pious Hollywood biblical epics of the 1950s, which looked like holy cards brought to life. I remember my grin when Time magazine noted that Jeffrey Hunter, starring as Christ in "King of Kings" (1961), had shaved his armpits. (Not Hunter's fault; the film's Crucifixion scene had to be re-shot because preview audiences objected to Jesus' hairy chest.) . . . . .

. . . . Pilate is seen going through his well-known doubts before finally washing his hands of the matter and turning Jesus over to the priests, but Caiaphas, who also had doubts, is not seen as sympathetically. The critic Steven D. Greydanus, in a useful analysis of the film, writes: "The film omits the canonical line from John's gospel in which Caiaphas argues that it is better for one man to die for the people [so] that the nation be saved.

"Had Gibson retained this line, perhaps giving Caiaphas a measure of the inner conflict he gave to Pilate, it could have underscored the similarities between Caiaphas and Pilate and helped defuse the issue of anti-Semitism." . . . . .

. . . . . Is the film "good" or "great?" I imagine each person's reaction (visceral, theological, artistic) will differ. I was moved by the depth of feeling, by the skill of the actors and technicians, by their desire to see this project through no matter what. To discuss individual performances, such as James Caviezel's heroic depiction of the ordeal, is almost beside the point. This isn't a movie about performances, although it has powerful ones, or about technique, although it is awesome, or about cinematography (although Caleb Deschanel paints with an artist's eye), or music (although John Debney supports the content without distracting from it).

It is a film about an idea. An idea that it is necessary to fully comprehend the Passion if Christianity is to make any sense. Gibson has communicated his idea with a singleminded urgency. Many will disagree. Some will agree, but be horrified by the graphic treatment. I myself am no longer religious in the sense that a long-ago altar boy thought he should be, but I can respond to the power of belief whether I agree or not, and when I find it in a film, I must respect it.

Next, thanks to David Mackinder for this link from the New Republic Online

Passion Players
by Reihan Salam

This article describes itself as "TNR's "Guide to the Passion Pundits" in which "we explain what the most prominent players on both sides of the Passion debate have said, and what you can expect them to say in the weeks to come."

This article from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has some good informed comment from NT scholars -- John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and Amy-Jill Levine:

What do the Gospels say?
Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' raises anew the question of why Jesus was crucified
By JOHN BLAKE

There is a useful line or two in this opinion piece from yesterday's Daily Telegraph, including one I excerpt below:

Mel Gibson's 'Passion of Christ' is an act of faith, not hatred
By Barbara Amiel

. . . . . It puzzles me that someone as bright as Mr Foxman can still fall into the "Banned in Boston" trap. Audiences who would never dream of going to see a film with dialogue entirely in Aramaic and Latin – as this film is – have now had their attention drawn to it by this controversy. No one can seriously believe that dormant anti-Semites will be awakened by this film, no matter how villainous the depiction of the Sanhedrin or bloodthirsty the mob. Any latent anti-Semite has far more virulent snake charmers to bring him out of his basket . . . . .

Here's another interesting review of the film, this time from Metromix.com; it is wonderfully written with a great turn of phrase; I've added a couple of excerpts afterwards (I'm updating this blog entry as I spot stuff, so I apologise for the relatively haphazard order here):

Movie review: 'The Passion of the Christ'
By Michael Wilmington
Chicago Tribune Movie Critic
2-1/2 stars (out of 4)

. . . . . No movie version of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection — a story filmed many times in many ways by directors as various as Cecil B. DeMille (1927's "The King of Kings"), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1966's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew") and Scorsese (1988's "Temptation") — has ever immersed us in such a cinematic torture chamber, spilled so much believable blood or focused with such savage insistence on Christ's wounds and manhandling. When the crown of thorns stabs Jesus' forehead or the nails crunch into his palms, I felt less epiphany than empathetic pain . . . . .

. . . . Gibson is a talented, ambitious filmmaker who takes real chances, playing "Hamlet" or directing "The Man Without a Face" — and though he didn't really deserve the Oscar he won for directing "Braveheart," it's good to see him taking even riskier shots here. "Passion" certainly avoids the picture-postcard religiosity of the standard Hollywood Bible epic, and it's not at all boring. But though Gibson's vision — so tactile and violent — may be a world away from the sometimes saccharine treatments of DeMille or Franco Zeffirelli ("Jesus of Nazareth"), it's also distant from the transcendence that might have made this either a great film or moving religious testimony.

"Passion," for all its high intent, lacks artistic and even spiritual balance. At the risk of being glib, this "Passion" has more power and gore than power and glory, more blood and guts than blood and redemption. Focusing on the excruciating agony of the flagellation and crucifixion, Gibson and Caviezel never really take us deeply into Jesus' heart or soul, as Scorsese did in his much-reviled but richer film of Nikos Kazantzakis' "Last Temptation." . . . .

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In Paleojudaica, Jim Davila comments on the question of Mel Gibson and holocaust denial, pointing to the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which had commented on Peggy Noonan's Reader's Digest interview with Gibson. In my own opinion, too much has been made of Gibson's comments in this interview. David Bernstein says:

An interviewer asks, do you believe the Holocaust happened? Gibson doesn't just say, "yes, it did, of course." He doesn't even say, yes, of course, and we should remember it, along with other great tragedies of the 20th century.

Actually, Gibson does say "yes, of course"; the problem arises from the fact that he says it halfway through the paragraph in question:

Peggy Noonan: "You're going to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?"

Gibson: "I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union." (emphasis added).

What one has to remember is that this is not a carefully worded, written response to a question but an orally delivered answer. The unequivocal answer to the question comes half-way through the paragraph. This is actually pretty natural in orally delivered answers. When one reads transcripts of radio interviews, for example, it is remarkable to see how often the written version loses a key element that the ear picks up instinctively. I think Gibson is trying to answer the question unequivocally with his "Yes, of course" but is prefacing it by saying that that this is not just hearsay -- he knows it personally from friends and parents of friends. Bear in mind that Maria Morgenstern, who plays Mary the mother of Jesus in the film, is the daughter of a holocaust survivor; her grandfather died at Auschwitz (see blog entry on).

The reason I am sure that this is the right way to read the comments above is that more recently, his answer has been even clearer -- the ABC interview with Diane Sawyer, e.g. reported by WNBC:

'Passion' Strife Swells With Gibson's Dad's Holocaust Dispute

Mel Gibson has largely remained silent when asked about his father in interviews. He told ABC's Diane Sawyer Monday, "Gotta leave it alone, Diane," when the interviewer probed him about Hutton Gibson's reported anti-Semitism.

Mel Gibson did tell Sawyer, however, his viewpoints about the Holocaust.

"Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do, absolutely," Mel Gibson told Sawyer. "It was an atrocity of monumental proportions."

"And you believe there were millions -- 6 million?" Sawyer asked, to which Mel Gibson responded, "Sure."

My own feeling is that this is something of a red herring in the discussion of The Passion of the Christ. It seems likely that we may need to take the charges of anti-Semitism in The Passion of the Christ seriously -- I don't know until I go to see the film next week -- but I don't think Gibson is a holocaust denier.

Update (22.45): On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila updates his piece with reference to the Diane Sawyer interview.

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Christianity Today has now posted on-line more of the material from its latest issue, in which The Passion of the Christ is the cover-story. This interview was released on-line yesterday:

'Dude, That Was Graphic'
Mel Gibson talks about The Passion of The Christ
by David Neff and Jane Johnson Struck

In it Mel Gibson talks about the "spiritual warfare" involved in producing the film, from successful prayers for its success, to the technological problems in post-production. There is an interesting detail on the creative process and the adherence to Scripture:

Wow, the Scriptures are the Scriptures—I mean they're unchangeable, although many people try to change them. And I think that my first duty is to be as faithful as possible in telling the story so that it doesn't contradict the Scriptures.
Now, so long as it didn't do that, I felt that I had a pretty wide berth for artistic interpretation, and to fill in some of the spaces with logic, with imagination, with various other readings.

For example, Judas goes to kill himself and I had him being tormented by children. I made up the children idea and that they were somehow diabolical, so they weren't real children. And that he was on a hillside and he looked at a dead goat, and then he goes and kills himself, hangs himself with a halter. I thought, so where's he going to get the halter? Well wait a minute, it should be a dead donkey with a halter on. I mean there's nothing that said there was a dead donkey there, but why not? It just says he "hung himself with an halter" [Matt. 27:5, Douay].

Next, there's a "Behind the Scenes" insight from Holly McLure:

Behind the Scenes of The Passion
On the set with Holly McClure

McClure acted as a kind of consultant on the film and explains how she contributed to the depiction of Mary Magdalene:

. . . . . Two weeks later Mel called me and asked me what I thought. I told him it was brilliant, and that Christians would love it. He asked if I had any suggestions. And I did.

I saw a potential problem with Mary Magdalene. Mel had her in every scene with Mary (Jesus' mother) and John, but there was no scene to connect this woman to Jesus. I asked, "Is she his sister? His wife? A lover? You have to pretend like no one knows this story. You have to ask why this woman would follow Jesus so faithfully."

After a pause, Mel said, "You're right. I need a flashback to connect her relationship to him. I've been working on this script for almost nine years and no one has ever pointed that out to me."

I smiled and said, "Well maybe it takes a woman to see that Mary needs an introduction—and so people don't get the wrong idea. Maybe you could add a scene like the one where men are going to stone a woman and …" Mel jumped in excitedly and said, "Yeah, Jesus steps in and saves her, and I'll show the guys dropping the stones one by one and Mary looks up at Jesus!"

So it seems that the film perpetuates the identification of Mary Magdalene with the woman taken in adultery in John 8, which is in so many of the Jesus films and really milked in Last Temptation of Christ. So in spite of all the publicity Mary Magdalene has received in the popular media recently, her rehabilitation has been put on hold and the image of her as an adulterer and a prostitute looks set to be reaffirmed once again. Incidentally, the woman taken in adultery is played by a different actress from the one playing Mary Magdalene in The Gospel of John.

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Further to my previous blog entry, I've dug around a little more on William Fulco. This is from an article published in Deseretnews.com on Saturday, an articled headed "Director Mel Gibson defends his Passion":

Once the script was written (in English), Gibson brought in a Jesuit scholar who specializes in Aramaic and Latin — the Rev. William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University — to translate. Fulco also offered technical advice and occasionally served as chaplain for the cast and crew.

Fulco became aware of Gibson's more conservative views, but the priest says it never bothered him.

"My viewpoint is that the church is a very big tree in which many colorful birds make their nests. And Mel is a pretty colorful bird."

This article from newsobserver.com of January 21 fills in a little more:

TERRY MATTINGLY: The passion of Mel Gibson

Jesuits rarely receive frantic calls from Hollywood megastars rushing to finish movies that are causing media firestorms. But the Rev. William Fulco is getting used to it, as Mel Gibson completes his cathartic epic, "The Passion of the Christ."

While mixing dialogue the other day, Gibson hit a scene in which a man standing at a door lacked something to say. The director needed a line - right now. Fulco's first question was unique to this project: Was this character supposed to speak Latin or first-century Aramaic? "Mel said the camera was not on the speaker's face, so we did not need to synchronize what he said with the movements of his mouth," said Fulco, who translated the screenplay into the two ancient languages, with English subtitles.

"The character needed to say something in Aramaic in the ballpark of, 'What do you want?' So I had him say in rather colloquial early Aramaic, 'MAH? MAH BA'EH?' That is literally, 'What? What wanting?'" That worked.

It has been nearly two years since Fulco answered the telephone and heard a strange voice blurt out: "Hey, Padre! It's Mel!" Gibson's proposal was unusual, but fit the Jesuit's skills as a professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Fulco began digging into Hebrew texts seeking the roots of the now-dead Aramaic language, while simultaneously exploring dialects such as Syriac spoken today in tiny Christian enclaves in Iran, Syria and Turkey.

He also stepped into heated academic debates between those who favor a more Italian-friendly Latin and those who reject this approach.

"I'm getting hate mail about Latin pronunciations," said Fulco. "On guy wrote who was angry about what he called 'these ecclesiastical bastardizations' of the Latin. Not only was he going to boycott the movie, he said he was going to call his high-school Latin teacher and tell her to boycott the movie as well. ... I have to keep reminding people: This is not a documentary. We had to make artistic choices."

The latter comments echo Crossan's (previous blog entry).

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On RogueClassicism, David Meadows draws attention to this Reuters piece (which you'll find syndicated elsewhere):

Scholars find fault in Gibson's "Passion"
Megan Goldin

John Dominic Crossan has again been on duty:

"Jesus talking to (Pontius) Pilate and Pilate to Jesus in Latin!" exclaimed John Dominic Crossan, a professor of religious studies at the Chicago-based Roman Catholic De Paul University. "I mean in your dreams. It would have been Greek."

Latin was reserved for official decrees or used by the elite. Most Roman centurions in the Holy Land spoke Greek rather than Latin, historians and archaeologists told Reuters."

Crossan adds that it was "so badly pronounced in the film that it was almost incomprehensible". And one of the points I made in the reconstruction of "the face" is echoed here by both Joe Zias (who also worked on "the face") and Lawrence Schiffman:

"He has a long-haired Jesus...Jesus didn't have long hair," said physical anthropologist Joe Zias, who has studied hundreds of skeletons found in archaeological digs in Jerusalem. "Jewish men back in antiquity did not have long hair."

"The Jewish texts ridiculed long hair as something Roman or Greek," said New York University's Lawrence Schiffman.

Along with extensive writings from the period, experts also point to a frieze on Rome's Arch of Titus, erected after Jerusalem was captured in AD 70 to celebrate the victory, which shows Jewish men with short hair taken into captivity.

The article goes on with more detail on the crucifixion and here again they are asking the right person, Joe Zias:

The depiction of the crucifixion was the part of the film most riddled with errors for Zias, who studied the skeleton of a crucified Jewish man from Jesus's time -- the only remains ever found of a crucified victim from antiquity.

Zias said Jesus would not have carried the entire cross to the crucifixion as vertical beams were kept permanently in place by the ever efficient Romans.

"Nobody was physically able to carry the thing (the entire cross).It weighed about 350 lb (159 kg)," Zias said. "He (Jesus) carried the cross-beam, maximum."

Nor would Jesus have worn a loin-cloth in the crucifixion as did actor James Caviezel who portrayed him in the film.

"Crucifixion was a form of state terror. They humiliated the crucified victim. Everybody was naked. Men, women and children," Zias said.

Jesus, he added, would have been tied or nailed to the cross through the wrists, not the hands as shown in the film.

"You cannot crucify a person through the hands because there is nothing there but skin and muscle. It will tear."

This picks up on earlier pieces about the crucifixion, also featuring Crossan and Zias (see blog entry February 20). David Meadows comments:

Seriously, though ... I haven't been able to find any mention of the historical advisers (if any) to this one. I'd be curious to know whether a Classicist was consulted ...

Agreed. One of my own repeatedly expressed concerns about this film is that it does not use an academic advisory board, unlike the two most recent Jesus films, The Gospel of John and The Miracle Maker, both of which avoided many of the problems now dogging The Passion of the Christ. The only named historical consultant on The Passion of the Christ appears to be William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University, who has been named as the person who did the retroversions to Latin and Aramaic. Whether he had any wider role (e.g. in a broader advisory capacity) is not clear, but appears unlikely.

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The number of visitors to the NT Gateway has risen massively over the last fortnight. Up until recently, the site (overall, including the blog) had an average of about 1,300 visitors (4,000 hits) a day. But for the first time last week, there were over 2,000 visitors in a single day (Monday) and then this continued all week. Yesterday there were 2,307 visits (6,013 hits) which is an even bigger rise. It's nice that the site is so popular but I am wondering what is causing the major rise. Although the blog is bringing many of the additional hits, it looks like The Passion of the Christ has also generated many hits, not least because of the context provided by my Celluloid Jesus pages. Still the vast majority of hits appear to come from Google (e.g. try typing "New Testament" into Google and hitting "I'm feeling lucky"). Anyway, many thanks for the support. It's a happy man who gets encouragement for what what he enjoys doing anyway.

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I received my copy of The Good Book pack from the BBC today. I am very happy with the way it has been produced -- it's gorgeous looking and colourful -- not the kind of thing we academics are used to. The pack is basically a 100-page illustrated book written by Nick Margesson (on the Bible and Abraham), Walter Moberly (Moses, David), Hugh Williamson (Isaiah), me (Jesus, Paul) and Rachel Barker (notes for teachers); and with it are three CDs of the radio series narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi. The book is aimed at the interested general reader and schools (aged 14-16). If you would like to order a copy (at £7.95 for a full colour illustrated book and three CDs), this is the URL:

Beyond the Broadcast: The Good Book Pack

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I have only just spotted this while on the BBC Religion and Ethics homepage looking at other things. It's a nine part series being broadcast on Sunday lunchtimes and covering a different theme in each episode:

Bible Mysteries

The first two episodes, Who killed Jesus? and Joshua and the Battle of Jericho went out on 15 February; the third, on Joseph, went out yesterday. I'll look out for future episodes and will try to send out an alert ahead of time. [Anyone at BBC Religion and Ethics reading this blog is welcome to send me reminders of this and anything similar : ) ].

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There was a short feature yesterday morning on the BBC Radio 4 programme Sunday. Roger Bolton interviews Alistair McGrath and Dan Cohn Sherbok:

The Passion debate

It's not clear from the feature whether either of the two have seen the film and my guess is that they haven't, so the discussion a little less focused than it might have been. Dan Cohn Sherbok is concerned that the film could encourage anti-Semitism; Alistair McGrath seems less convinced and is hopeful that the film will provide the opportunity for people to reflect on the Passion Narrative.

Labels: Radio 4

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Thanks to Catherine Smith for this link: last Monday night's Night Waves on BBC Radio 3 featured a discussion of anti-semitism and the Gospels and featured Judith Lieu and Daniel Boyarin. You can listen here:

Nightwaves: Monday 16 February

Go to about 8 and a half minutes in. The feature lasts for ten minutes or so. Tonight's Night Waves is apparently to feature a review of The Passion of the Christ -- listen live from the previous link or later I will post the URL for the archived version.

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David Meadows has sent out the latest Explorator (6.43). It includes a link to this New York Times article (free subscription necessary):

What did Jesus really look like?
David Gibson

The article begins, inevitably, with The Passion of the Christ:

The title role is played by Jim Caviezel, a dark-haired, blue-eyed star whose brooding good looks have been compared to those of Montgomery Clift. He doesn't exactly fit the archaeological evidence that the average man of Jesus' day was about 5 feet 3 inches tall and a bantamlike 110 pounds. Given the harsh conditions, especially for working stiffs like the members of Jesus' family, combined with Jesus' ascetic lifestyle, which included walking everywhere, scholars agree that he was most likely a rather sinewy peasant, as tough as a root and about as appealing.

But it goes on to discuss depictions of Jesus throughout Christian history, coming eventually to a new image produced for a television programme to be broadcast in the USA today:

Trying to run back through the gantlet [sic] of images and icons built up over the centuries and rediscover the true face of Jesus is no mean feat. While filming a new documentary about the historical Jesus ("The Mystery of Jesus" on "CNN Presents," tomorrow night at 8, Eastern time; 7, Central time; and 5, Pacific time), our production team sought the most accurate idea of what Jesus might have looked like. We chose a retired British medical artist, Richard Neave, who has made a career out of reconstructing the faces of famous historical figures from scant archaeological traces. Mr. Neave had worked with the BBC on a similar project a few years before, making a composite cast of three Semitic skulls from first-century Palestine and using them as the basis for fleshing out the face of a contemporary of Jesus, if not Jesus himself.

The facial overlay that the BBC then put on Mr. Neave's work didn't please him or many others, however. He wasn't upset that some thought that the face made Jesus look like a New York taxi driver. Rather, he didn't like the eyes and the mouth, and what the historian Robin M. Jensen, writing recently in Christian Century, called "a particular dumbfounded — one might say stupid — expression."

Since I was involved with the construction of this face, let me fill in some details here.

(1) This is the first I have heard about a "composite cast of three Semitic skulls". As far as I was aware, and in the discussions I had with the others about this, there was one skull and this one chosen by Joe Zias, who is the first person you see in the feature at the end of the third episode of Son of God (called Jesus: The Complete Story in the USA). However, looking again at the video of Richard Neave at work, there are other skulls in his lab so it is possible that there were three and that this was simplified to one in the production and publicity.

(2) I am interested to hear that Neave was dissatisfied by the eyes and mouth on the face since these were modelled by Neave himself. However, it may be that Neave's concern is with the appearance and colour of the eyes and mouth that came about as a result of the computerisation process. This process was carried out by Redvision in Manchester, who did all of the CGI work on the series (and won an award for it). This was where I became involved with the process. After a series of phone-calls and emails about the face with the series producer (Michael Wakelin) and director (Jean Claude Bragard), I spent a day at Redvision in Manchester filming the sequence that was included in the documentary. Though I'm oversimplifying, my main contributions were essentially (a) to draw attention to Paul's remarks about hair length in 1 Corinthians 11; and (b) to show the team pictures of the way that Jews were depicted in the wall paintings in the synagogue at Dura Europos (mid third century CE). This resulted in a change in the way that the face had originally looked -- it had had long, sandy hair and beard and a paler complexion. You can still see this original version in the Son of God book produced by Angela Tilby; I imagine that the newer version was not ready when her book, loosely based on the series, went to press. They were actually a little annoyed about my thing about hair length given that the actor who played Jesus in the documentary had the long hair (e.g. see the picture here). But to their credit, they wanted to try to get it right.

(3) I am inclined to agree that the look of the face was not ideal, though I thought it not so much "stupid" looking as rather anxious looking. Some thought it neanderthal; others that it looked like someone who might appear on Crimewatch. When I was on Channel 4's Big Breakfast, one of the production staff suggested that it was Dave Lee Travis (an old Radio 1 DJ in the 1970s and 1980s). But all of these, like the current article, missed the point and not surprisingly so. This was never attempting to be "the face of Jesus"; it was never claiming to be "the face of Christ". It was simply an attempt to build up and represent as accurately as possible what one average Jew from that time and that place might have looked like. So where did the "face of Jesus" stuff come from? Here's my reading of the situation. The BBC, quite understandably, wanted to get some good publicity for this expensive, landmark series. This face handed the BBC a golden opportunity for worldwide publicity on a plate. At a news conference, the BBC were unveiling their spring schedule for 2001, the face was released and the media lapped it up. The next morning, there it was on the front of The Times, "Is this the face of Jesus?" Of course in media-speak, a headline with a question mark should usually be answered with a resounding "No"; but once the link has been made, it doesn't go away. A side-note: Tom Wright, who was one of the consultants on the programme, was not that enthusiastic about the face, but commented that at least it got Jesus onto the front page of The Times!

So with that extra background, now back to Saturday's New York Times article by David Gibson with which we began:

Hoping to rectify the problem, we hired a New York artist, Donato Giancola, and reworked the portrait, using Mr. Neave's skull and information from other experts. The results, to my mind, were a more noble, even soulful, Jesus, and yet historically believable — I hope something closer to the itinerant Galilean of history. Even so, the results looked uncannily like Mr. Giancola himself, which was part coincidence — he actually resembles the face Mr. Neave produced — and part inevitability. Artists are always painting themselves, just as believers are always making themselves the models for the divine.

I suppose my problem with this is that it confuses what was originally being attempted by us all (to create an approximation of what an average first century Jew from Israel might have looked like) with the hype and publicity the attempt generated ("Is this the real face of Jesus?" etc.). The fact that there was no attempt to make the face look "soulful" or "noble" was, in a way, the point of the exercise. And just because we might find a particular look more appealing, can that really bring us "closer to the itinerant Galilean of history"? I don't think I can see how it could -- this is uncannily like those discussions about how often the scholarly portraits of the historical Jesus resemble the portraits of the the scholar doing the painting.

One further comment: although I appear in The Son of God / Jesus: The Complete Story, and in March 2001 did a lot of the publicity in connection with "the face" (one reporter told me that Richard Neave was too expensive), I am now rarely credited with any role in it. I'm not alone in this. One major example is a feature which uses material I and others contributed to the project (albeit now in rather garbled form) but only mentions Neave; neither Joe Zias nor Redvision are appear. Indeed it does not even mention the BBC except in locating the source of the photograph:

The Real Face Of Jesus
Advances in forensic science reveal the most famous face in history.
BY MIKE FILLON

This was the cover story in Popular Mechanics in December 2002, admittedly not a journal many New Testament scholars read on a regular basis. At first I was still a little annoyed not to get a mention in what is attempting to be a thorough and detailed piece, but later I realised that it was good news because of the way this was always going to get treated by the media. Notice that here even the question-mark has disappeared. It is now announced as "the real face of Jesus". It is remarkable how quickly this has developed from an interesting experiment in a TV documentary, to "Is this the face of Jesus?", to "the real face of Jesus". Given the derision I've experienced from some academic colleagues (one senior colleage shouted across the car-park: "Mark, this is not reputable stuff"), perhaps a little anonymity here is welcome.

Update (24 February): Thanks to David Meadows for these links to the older news material which he had featured in Explorator at the time. The first is from ABC News and even mentions me! It is typical of the kind of thing I was talking about above. At the time I was amazed that several scholars were reported as saying that we simply did not know what Jesus looked like. Since this was one of the things that we were saying ourselves, it was a useless criticism and I felt a bit embarrassed for them.

Your Own Personal Jesus
Documentary Uses Computer Imagery to Create Reconstruction of Jesus' Face
By Jennifer Askin [March 27 2001]

And here are two from the BBC:

Looking for the Historical Jesus
Alex Webb

BBC Unveils Hi-Tech Jesus

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Also in Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson comments on the on-line availability of the article by Annette Yoshiko Reed:

This brings me to one of my favorite points. Had her article not been freely available on-line, I probably would not have come across it recently while I was looking for something else, read it, and then recalled it when commenting on Irenaeus. Serendipity often plays a role in scholarship, but the chance discovery of another's important work requires access, and free availability on-line of articles is a good way to provide that access.

I could not agree more -- there are many articles that I have run across on-line in the last few years that I would never have seen if they had not been on-line. One of the odd things to me about this point is that there was a ferocious debate recently in my institution when some of the current periodicals were removed from the open shelves of the library to the stack on the grounds that these could now be accessed on-line via our institutional subscriptions. Several academics in the debate tried to explain to the library people that this meant the end of serendipity and the casual browsing of recent journal articles. It was odd to me because it was the exact opposite of my own experience -- I have read the journals more regularly and more up-to-the-minute since they've been available electronically. But the best way to get your stuff known remains to put it on-line yourself, available for all. The journals usually give permission to do this and it gets your stuff read far more widely than if it is only in the journal. Long live academic serendipity in the internet era!

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In Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson draws attention to an on-line article by James A. Kelhoffer, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature at St. Louis University, and links to his web page. I've added the link to my Scholars: I, J, K page and will add some links to the articles too in due course.

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The latest Christianity Today magazine not surprisingly has The Passion of the Christ as its cover story and has some interesting pieces:

The Passion of Mel Gibson
Why evangelicals are cheering a movie with profoundly Catholic sensibilities.
by David Neff

Mel, Mary, and Mothers
by David Neff

Christian History Corner: Why some Jews fear The Passion
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ gives Christians the chance to disavow a shameful history of anti-Semitism.
By Collin Hansen

The first of these articles is interesting in drawing attention to features in the film that are apparently drawn from Anne Catherine Emmerich's The Dolorous Passion of our Lord. In earlier reports on The Passion, this book was often mentioned as a source for the film and it was one of the elements that caused some controversy in the critique of the early script by the so-called "ad hoc committee", especially in view of the depiction of Jews in Emmerich's visions. More recently, the book has been played down as a source for the film's script; the tendency has rather been for it to be claimed the book simply inspired Gibson. But Neff points to two elements derived from The Dolorous Passion. The first is Pilate's wife's provision of pieces of linen for Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus and their use of the linen to wipe up the blood after Jesus has been scourged. The second is:

Another detail picked up from Dolorous Passion is just as dramatically powerful, but much more significant theologically. Emmerich writes that during Jesus' agony in the garden, Satan presented Jesus with a vision of all the sins of the human race. "Satan brought forward innumerable temptations, as he had formerly done in the desert, even daring to adduce various accusations against him." Satan, writes Emmerich, addressed Jesus "in words such as these: 'Takest thou even this sin upon thyself? Art thou willing to bear its penalty? Art thou prepared to satisfy for all these sins?'"

Gibson shows Jesus being tempted by a pale, hooded female figure, who whispers to him just such words, suggesting that bearing the sins of the world is too much for Jesus, that he should turn back. And from under the tempter's robe there slithers a snake. In a moment of metaphorical violence drawn straight from Genesis 3:15, Jesus crushes the serpent's head beneath his sandaled heel.

But the temptation theme is of course key in the Synoptic account, and the snake, the garden, the devil are common elements in Christian meditations based on Gethsemane. So it does not seem necessary that Gibson has derived his Gethsemane scene from Emmerich. The snake is a key (and obvious) symbol also in The Last Temptation of Christ and in the recent Jesus (Roger Young, 1999), the devil incarnates himself in Gethsemane as he had earlier at the Temptation, this time showing Jesus all that is to come in the future.

The female Satan figure is another feature in common between The Passion of the Christ and The Last Temptation of Christ. In the latter, the little girl leads Jesus through his last temptation while on the cross (though of course you only find out it's the devil at the end of the sequence, if you had not already guessed). This marked a contrast with Scorsese's source material, Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation in which the devil was manifested as a small boy.

Back again to the Neff article, note also these comments:

All of this—the sense of one's own sins being responsible for the Crucifixion, the sense of the enormous weight of the world's sins on the Savior's shoulders, the horror of the suffering that Christ endured, the way the story grew inside Gibson—accounts in part for the film's bruising bloodiness. The extremes of brutality are not simply a translation of Gibson's secular visual vocabulary from Lethal Weapon and We Were Soldiers into the sacred sphere.

"The enormity of blood sacrifice," as he put it, is important to Gibson. Unlike liberal Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) who deny the importance of the shedding of blood in the Atonement, Gibson grasps firmly the sacred symbol of blood and spatters the audience's sensibilities with it. Never one to run from a compelling symbol, Gibson presents the truth of Leviticus 17:11 in all its power: "The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life."

These offer an interesting commentary on the remarks both of Gerald Caron and John Dominic Crossan on the matter of blood and sacrifice.

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Beliefnet has now published round two of John Dominic Crossan's and Ben Witherington III's email exchange about issues arising from The Passion of the Christ:

Scholarly Smackdown: 'The Passion'

[Click on Round 2: Dom]. The exchange features some discussion of the anti-Semitism issue and Crossan has an interesting bit of exegesis on the way that "the crowds" function in Mark's Passion Narrative. Crossan asks:

I emphasize immediately that even if all of Jerusalem was responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion, anti-Semitism would always have been as invalid as anti-Italianism arising from the Roman roots of Pilate and his soldiers. But, granted that, my question is how, as a conscientious Christian, knowing what has happened across two millennia, one should tell or film "The Passion of the Christ" so as to cauterize the potential venom of anti-Semitism.

But Witherington does not tackle this head on, not least because he feels:

"I don't think there are any anti-Semitic texts in the New Testament, which was, after all, written entirely or almost entirely by Jews (Luke-Acts might be an exception)".

My own attempted answer to Crossan would be that we can be informed by looking at other Jesus films and asking which have most successfully avoided the charge of anti-Semitism and how have they done this? And one does not have to look very far. As I have commented repeatedly, it is really worth thinking about why The Gospel of John has avoided the charge, and in a film based word-for-word on the Biblical text which -- along with Matthew -- has tended to be most open to the charge of anti-Semitism.

One further comment to echo what I also said last week: it seems clear that Ben Witherington III has still not seen the film. Surely beliefnet need to get a preview copy to him or get him to a preview screening as soon as possible; it does not make a lot of sense having an exchange about a film that one of the participants has not seen.

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I went through a phase where I could not find a decent aggregator / blog reader and tried lots of different ones. I have now settled happily on Bloglines. I've used it for several weeks and it's just what I was looking for -- all the blogs I want to read are represented in an easy-to-read format; it is web based; it has a nice "notifier" that alerts you when someone has updated their blog; you can subscribe and unubscribe straightforwardly from a given blog; and it allows you to channel email subscriptions to it, so you can read your e-lists on there too.

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Latest in the SBL Review of Biblical Literature:

Evans, Craig A. and Paul Copan
Who Was Jesus?: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue
Reviewed by Andrew Lloyd

Green, H. Benedict
Matthew, Poet of the Beatitudes
Reviewed by Richard Beaton

Hoehner, Harold W.
Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary
Reviewed by Serge Cazelais

Jung, Franz
ΣΩΤΗΡ: Studien zur Rezeption eines hellenisticschen Ehrentitels im Neuen Testament
Reviewed by Angela Standhartinger

Penner, Erwin
A Guide to New Testament Greek
Reviewed by Mark A. House

Schweitzer, Albert
Edited by John Bowden
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
Reviewed by James P. Sweeney

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There is so much on The Passion of the Christ over the last couple of days -- literally dozens and dozens of articles and opinion pieces -- that I will just select a couple that have drawn my interest. This one was recommended by Zeba Crook on Xtalk:

Our cross to bear
Mel Gibson's movie is anti-Jewish, theologically flawed and historically dubious, says Roman Catholic priest GERALD CARON

Father Gerald Caron is a professor of biblical studies at the Atlantic School of Theology, Halifax and his article is informed and very interesting. Caron is convinced that the film is anti-Jewish but goes on:

This aspect of the film, however, is overshadowed by another issue that I had not expected to find: the gory depiction of the scourging of Jesus. The theology that underlies this depiction makes me shudder. What takes up no more than a few sentences in Luke (22: 63-65 and 23: 22) and half a sentence in John 19: 1 -- Matthew and Mark do not speak of flogging, only of mocking -- unfolds during more than 30 minutes of horrific and disgusting scenes of torture. By comparison, the Crucifixion comes almost as an anti-climax . . . .

. . . . . It is as if the more blood there is, the easier one will be convinced of the love of God. It is this emphasis on the blood and suffering of Jesus that I find so disturbing. The fact that God would require Jesus to pay such a price "for our sins" may say a lot about how Mel perceives our humanity, but what picture of God are we left with -- a loving Creator or a sadistic destroyer?

It is not the quantity of blood and suffering that has redeemed us, but Jesus's death -- crowning a life of "service" as Mark says in 10: 45. It was Jesus's dream of God's reign that led him to the cross -- not the other way round.

It trivializes Jesus's sacrifice to offer such a spectacle of Jesus's Passion and death totally disconnected from his message and life mission . . . . .

Caron also comments on the care necessary with thinking of the film as a particularly accurate historical portrayal, pointing out that there are major roles in the film for Mary the mother of Jesus, who only appears in the passion of John. "Where on earth did Mel get so much information about Jesus's mother?" He also asks about the role given to Satan and the depiction of Judas.

On his Petros Baptist Church Blog, Jim West draws attention to this piece in Mercury News based on interviews with Joe Zias and John Dominic Crossan:

Scholars: Crucifixion portrayal inaccurate
PETER ENAV

This deals with some of the issues I've been mentioning here about filmic depictions of the crucifixion, and especially the contrast with The Gospel of John, which -- I am suggesting -- was dependent on some of Zias's work in its crucifixion scene:

. . . . . . "If you suspended people by their hands and left their feet free you would kill them within an hour," Zias said. "If you suspended them in a way they couldn't exhale they'd be dead within minutes."

Zias said the question of whether Jesus was nailed to the cross or simply tied to it remains a mystery. "There is no evidence whatsoever he was nailed," he said. "The Gospels say he was crucified and leave it at that."

Well John does also mention nails in the hands (John 20.25-27) which probably makes "no evidence whatsoever" a little too strong.

Zias criticized "The Passion of Christ" for accepting the standard version of three nails being used. He said experiments on cadavers carried out by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages have shown that people hanging with nails through their hands will fall to the ground within a relatively short time, pulled by gravity.

The Gospels suggest it took Jesus three to six hours to die.

"All this is Crucifixion 101," Zias said. "People who study these things understand them. But Gibson ignored them in his film."

I am delighted, though, to see New Testament scholars in the limelight day after day! Suddenly people are listening to what they are saying.

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I have followed Rubén Gómez's lead in Bible Software Review Weblog and added a Trackback courtesy of Haloscan. This allows one to see when someone else has blogged about posts in this blog.

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In the Philo of Alexandria Blog, Torrey Seland comments on the change in name from Bible Windows to Bibloi 8 because of potential action from Microsoft. Incidentally, I am sometimes asked why I do not link on the NT Gateway to any of the big Bible software packages like this. The reasons are fairly simple. My basic policy is only to link to material that is freely available over the internet. As soon as I begin to link to and comment on commercially available products, I might be seen to be endorsing one product over another in an environment in which my judgement is normally based solely on the quality of the product concerned. The New Testament Gateway is not a commercial concern. But it is also simply too great an undertaking to provide a guide to the several excellent packages out there and I do not regard this as an area of expertise. This is one of the reasons that I greatly welcome Rubén Gómez's Bible Software Review Weblog and its associated site.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this link from BBC On-line:

Gibson film gets wider US release

. . . . . Distributor Newmarket Films is increasing the number of prints from 2,500 to 4,000 and 2,800 cinemas across North America will now show the film . . . .

Online ticket service Fandango said The Passion, which depicts the last 12 days of Christ's life, was making up nearly 70% of its advance sales.

Fandango said it has become its second-biggest film in terms of advance sales, below current box office smash The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The Passion's release puts it on a par with hits like Something's Gotta Give, which opened at 2,677 cinemas in December.

The article also reports that Hutton Gibson has spoken up again about his holocaust denial -- "It's all - maybe not all fiction - but most of it is." O dear.

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On Hypotyposeis, in a comment on an Arutz Sheva piece on The Passion of the Christ (commented on by Jim Davila in Paleojudaica), Stephen Carlson mentions an interesting article by Annette Yoshiko Reed. If you've not read it yourself, the good news is that it is in the issue of Vigiliae Christianae that Ingenta Select are offering free to all:

Annette Yoshiko Reed, "Εὐαγγελίον: Orality, Textuality, and the Christian Truth in Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses," Vigiliae Christianae 56 (2002): 11-46

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I commented yesterday on the question of filmic depictions of crucifixion, specifically nailing through the wrists. Earlier I checked The Gospel of John's crucifixion scene and as in most of the other recent Jesus films, it does depict the crucifixion with nailing through the wrists, with pieces of wood in between the wrist and the head of the nail. Unusually, Jesus is fastened to the sides of the cross by his ankles, as in the picture in Joe Zias's article, Crucifixion in Antiquity. No doubt this is because the academic advisory committee would have been familiar with the work of Hengel and Zias. Good for them. One other really chilling element in the film is when the soldiers come with hammers to break the legs of the other two men crucified with Jesus. The hitting happens off screen but it's still enough to make your blood go cold. I can hardly imagine how I will cope with watching The Passion of the Christ.

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Christianity Today has a very useful round-up on the latest on The Passion of the Christ including links to and excerpts from the first official reviews of the film, and going on with some news items:

Film Forum: The First Official Passion of the Christ Reviews

. . . . In an article appearing soon at Steve Lansingh's The Film Forum, film critic Stef Loy says, "The Passion of the Christ is a visceral, cinematic pulse enabler, raw and bloody, ready to bite into your heart and cause your eyes to well up with tears. Never before has the language of cinema had the potential to challenge the church at large to wake up to the reality of film. It is here to speak and move, to challenge our preconceived notions about life, to affect us in ways that no other medium will ever aspire to." . . . . .

On the news side, it reports on the Diane Sawyer ABC interview with Mel Gibson, including the following two items:

He revealed that the controversial line spoken by Jews in the film—"His blood be on us and on our children" (Matthew 27:25)—would not appear in subtitles, so as not to provoke misunderstandings of how that line should be interpreted. Those words can be heard, however, by viewers who do not require subtitles.

Gibson also assured us that he would not add a printed message at the end of the film dissuading viewers from behaving hatefully toward the Jewish people. "That assumes that there is something wrong with my film for me to do that, and I don't think there is."

You can read the ABC News feature and watch the video here:

Pain and Passion
Mel Gibson Tackles Addiction, Recovery and the Controversies Over His New Film

The Christianity Today piece also quotes New Testament scholar Eugene E. Lemcio who wrote a letter to the Seattle Times:

In The Seattle Times, Eugene E. Lemcio, Ph.D., professor of New Testament studies at Seattle Pacific University, wrote with concern about the hubbub over the film's emotional impact on its audience. "I am disturbed by some of the reported comments by those who have [seen the film]— those that go along these lines: 'There was not a dry eye in the house,' and 'People sobbed throughout.' Is this what makes a film successful and important—that we can all have a good cry? My hope is that viewers will (re)read the Gospels to discover how restrained they are in depicting Jesus' suffering and death. They do not exploit these obviously emotional events. Unless we ask what the suffering and death were about, unless there is an attempt to see how the end of Jesus' life is related to the beginning and middle (and how physical suffering solves a spiritual problem), we will have denied him (and ourselves) justice."

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This just announced by James Adair on TC-List: Peter J. Williams's review of Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8-20 (ET, Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) is published in the latest TC 8 (2003).

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Thanks to Jacob Knee for some interesting reflections about the relationship between my blog on the Three Wise Men (Saturday February 14) and some of the responses to The Passion (eg Wednesday 18 February); he was going to post as a "comment" but apparently Haloscan won't allow such long comments:

Here are some half-observations without any obvious conclusions:

1. The 'delight' about legendary retellings of the Infancy Narrative doesn't always extend to the Passion Narrative both in scholarship (eg the above referenced discussion of the realism of Gibson's depiction of the wood of the cross) and in popular piety (eg the reformations of the Stations of the Cross during the last century to reflect more closely the biblical story). I'm not sure that 'residual fundamentalism' is the best way to characterise either of these responses.

2. Mel Gibson's film seems in its emphasis on the physical suffering of Christ, to draw on a medieval Catholic theology and aesthetic - not surprising given Gibson's own theological tastes (See eg Grunevald's Crucifixion). Yet unlike the 'Three Wise Men' at this point many scholars want to refer with precision to the 'Gospel narratives'. Whilst perhaps ironically, some of those in the Reformation tradition (who are often suspicious of 'legendary' retellings) seem more than prepared to be carried along.

There is a complicated relationship both in piety and scholarship between legendary 're-tellings' and the 'original' texts. I'm not sure that a 'delight/residual fundamentalism' dichotomy really describes the motivations behind the varied responses within and without the academy. At some points each of us wants (including both scholars and liturgists!) to make a move 'to the original' as a critique of the legendary or an invitation to appropriate the text in a new way, at others points in the story (maybe less politically, ideologically or theologically freighted) we happily affirm the 'delight' of 'legendary' retellings.

For an interesting discusison of whether Matthew's impled readers were intended to understand the magi as kings or wise men - see the chapters, 'The Magi as Kings' 'The Magi as Wise Persons' (pp 136 - 156) in Mark Alan Powell, 'Chasing the Eastern Star: Adventures in Biblical Reader-Response Criticism'. In short Powell argues that the implied readers of Matthews are expected neither to understand the magi as Kings (indeed he argues they are intended to be seen in contrast to kings, as royal servants) nor as wise (Powell claims the readers are expected to repsond, 'God revealed the truth about Christ to a bunch of pagan fools whilst those who were wise enough to figure it out for themselves missed it'.)

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I was commenting yesterday on the question of nailing through the wrists or the palms in crucifixion. Matthew Page comments that he thinks the first film to show nails going through the wrists was Jesus (1979) and that since then Jesus films have nearly all shown them going through the wrists, although there is one that shows them going through both the psalm and the wrists!

I also began to have a sense of deja-vu about this and looked in Paleojudaica's archive to see this pretty well covered in posts on July 19 2003, August 8 2003 and August 30 2003. And I notice that I commented on September 28 2003.

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This morning's Guardian has a short feature on The Passion of the Christ:

Church tries to cool row over Mel Gibson's film about Christ
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

The Catholic church in America was yesterday set to release church teachings on Jews and reconciliation in an attempt to cool religious passions before the release of Mel Gibson's film about Jesus.

It also reports that Mel Gibson had turned down appeals to add a codicil to the film to allay concerns about anti-semitism, that Laura Bush has expressed interest in the film, and that Abe Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, has appealed to the Vatican "to issue a directive to bishops that the film represents Gibson's personal vision of the Gospels".

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In RogueClassicism, David Meadows weighs in on the discussion about footnotes and sidenotes and suggests that perhaps sidenotes are the way to go for print publications too, the only difficulty being how one would deal with the "monster footnote". I agree with David's suggestion that academics should try harder to trim footnotes to matters of substance. There is a joy in the elegant, focused academic footnote, but all too often there is a sloppiness that uses the footnote as a general dumping ground for material that the author cannot make up his/her mind on. Good editorial input from publishers can help here. Trinity Press International made many suggestions for trimming footnotes in my Case Against Q, sometimes suggesting deletion, sometimes suggesting moving to the body of the text and sometimes suggesting trimming. And the book was much better for it.

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Thanks to Matthew Page for this link:

Epic Survey of Jesus Movies
From La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ to The Passion of the Christ by Mike Hertenstein

This is a nicely produced survey of most of the Jesus films with some intelligent commentary from the Flickerings@Cornerstone Festival 2004 web site. I've added the link to my Celluloid Jesus main page.

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Thanks to David Mackinder for this link from PBS Religion and Ethics News Weekly:

NEWS FEATURE: Christian Marketing of THE PASSION

It features a four minute video of the story. The collected links are useful, including especially the following from Boston College, which I've added to my The Passion of the Christ page:

Resources on the Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ

The latter includes a useful Comparison of the Gospel Passion Narratives chart (though using some pretty garish colours).

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On RogueClassicism David Meadows draws attention to this article in Israel Insider by Emanuel A. Winston:

Mel Gibson's fake "Passionate" effects

There is some nonsense, especially towards the end of the article, but the gist of the article points up the problems with the realism of the cross in the film:

. . . . Take a look at the lumber being carried by the Jesus actor. Any carpenter - or even lay handyman - will tell you that the Jesus player is carrying a saw-mill produced 6-inch x 6-inch x 10-foot timber. In the news clips on Fox News you can see that it is neatly trimmed and squared timber which is usually displayed in churches and medallions of the cross.

The problem is that the Romans had been crucifying rebellious Jews for many years and didn't commit the man-hours needed to take a tree trunk and hand craft it to a neatly squared and smooth timber, merely to crucify another Jew. The best they could do would be the familiar technique of building a log cabin where two sides of a tree trunk were laboriously chipped with a mattock on two sides so they could be stacked somewhat flat on top of each other. The Romans would not have bothered to square timber and besides, having already crucified thousands of rebellious Jews over 30 years, they had plenty of posts standing and empty, the bodies having rotted away."

But a couple of questions; first on this:

The Romans used the tree trunks as highly visible torture instruments to remind passers-by that this was the penalty for rebellion against the Roman Empire. Their objective was not to beat their victims to death before hanging them up but, rather to keep them alive for as long as possible. A figure dying slowly over many days, groaning, screaming, pleading for water, was a far better deterrent than whipping a victim so that he would bleed to death in hours - as was displayed in the Gibson film. With the amount of colored ink dribbling down Gibson's Jesus, he would have died in hours from blood loss or infection.

But then John implies that Jesus' death was unusually quick (John 19.33-34) so that is not in itself implausible. One other comment:

I haven't seen a film section where they nail Jesus to the cross but, if the past myths prevail, they will put spikes through his hands. They will have to use special effects because the problem with that depiction is that nails or spikes through the palms cannot hold the weight of a human body before it tears through the flesh of the palms or tears longitudinally through the fingers. Spikes must go through the bones to hold but, the myth of bleeding palms has been firmly established in Christian mythology.

I hope that they "use special effects" whatever method is depicted for nailing Jesus' hands to the cross! It's not always the case that the nails are depicted as nailing through the palms of the hands, either. The Turin shroud famously appears to show pierced wrists; the film The Day that Christ Died has nailing through the wrists and I have a feeling that there are others too though I can't recall them at the moment.

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This piece was published earlier this week by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and is, on the whole, a balanced piece with an appropriately sensitive tone:

A Jewish response to Mel Gibsons "THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST"
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein

(Also available in PDF and hardcopy)

. . . . This moment in Jewish-Christian relations should be viewed, above all, as an opportunity for Christians to educate themselves on the past and to learn about Jewish sensitivities on this issue, with an eye toward redressing past wrongs committed against Jews and to fulfilling the words spoken by the apostle Paul: "...do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you." (Romans 11:18) And it behooves Jews to reach out wisely and sensitively to their Christian friends, recognizing that there may be no deliberate intent on their part to strike out against Jews. Such Christians may even be surprised to learn what many have failed to grasp why Jews are so deeply concerned with the implications and reverberations of this film . . . . .

. . . . . Just as the release of The Passion of the Christ is viewed by many Christians as a singular opportunity to spread their gospel of salvation to the world, so it presents an opportunity for enemies of the Jewish people around the world to spread their doctrine of hatred by reviving the age-old canard of Jews as "Christ-killers." We need to be very sensitive to the anti-Semitic possibilities such a movie can trigger, particularly in areas of the world where anti-Semitic sentiment and behavior already exist. Christians have a special responsibility to ensure that Jesus' death upon the cross the very act that Christians believe to be evidence of God's ultimate love for his creation (John 3:16) is not twisted to evil purposes, or used by the very diabolical forces they profess to oppose.

Still, it would be a mistake to exaggerate this film's potential for ill. In the entertainment industry, controversy often does more to put a movie in the public eye than does a carefully coordinated publicity campaign.

Long after the controversy over The Passion of the Christ has faded, anti-Semitism will persist. After we have spoken our piece concerning Mel Gibson's film and taken the opportunity to challenge misconceptions and right wrongs, particularly concerning the age-old deicide charge, it will be time to continue our educational and coalition-building efforts, presenting a positive, conciliatory message and advancing Christian-Jewish relations . . . . ."

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I am a fairly regular visitor to Christianity Today's Weblog though I'd be much more regular if their RSS feed worked better -- it seems only to deliver headlines and only once a week, and not in line with the updates on their web site. Anyway, it's currently the best source I know of for collected links to articles on The Passion of the Christ, these ones all from the week beginning February 9. Some of the more substantial ones have been blogged here, but I have been far from comprehensive and recently have only commented on features of real interest since about ninety percent of the articles are simply going back over the same old material. But if you've not had enough and want to catch up, here's a good source:

Christianity Today Weblog: The Passion of the Christ

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Don't miss this one, linked on both RogueClassicism and Paleojudaica, from Ha'aretz:

A new-old Tiberias is supposed to rise from ruins

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Wieland Willker on TC-List draws attention to this site which provides images of Mark from Codex Washintonensis (the Freer Gospels):

Gospel of Mark

The host is the Dept of Classics at Beloit College (Beloit, WI, USA).

Update: I have added the above link to my page on TC: On-line images. While there, I noticed that I had not added a link to the Biblical Manuscripts Project so I've now corrected that defect.

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Holger Szesnat has put together a very useful, massive list of internet resources on Biblical Hermeneutics, organised in bibliography-style:

Biblical Hermeneutics

I've placed this at the top of my page on Hermeneutics and at the same time have serviced the links on that page -- changed some URLs and deleted others.

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The death of Wilhelm Wuellner on Sunday has been reported on rhetoric-l. Wilhelm Wuellner was a professor at Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California and the author of several books and articles on the New Testament and rhetorical analysis. His first book was The Meaning of Fishers of Men (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967). Courtesy of Tom Olbricht, this is his entry in the Directory of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, Watson E. Mills, ed., 1988.
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Born in Bochum, Germany 21 Feb. 27 of Wilhelm and Emma (Beckmann); married Flora May (Slosson), children: Christine, Virginia, Lucy. Edu. Goethe Oberrealschule (Bochum), Abitur, 1946; Evangelische Landeskirche Westfalen, First Theol. Exam, 1951; U. of Chicago, Ph.D. 1958. Pub. The Meaning of Fishers of Men (Westminster, 1967). Member SBL, CBA, SNTS, DIAC, ISHR. Mission House Theol Sem. vstg. asst prof., 1957-58; Grinnell College, Asst. prof., 1958-60; Hartford Sem Foundation, asst. prof., 1960-1965; Pacific School of Religion, assoc. prof, prof. 1965--.
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Read more on rhetoric-l.

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On Paleojudaica, Jim Davila asks the expert Helen Bond what she makes of Vermes's article about Caiaphas. It's an excellent response which provides some useful nuancing of several of Vermes's points. Also on Paleojudaica, Vermes then responds and clarifies a key point. Apparently he read my brief comments too but does not offer a response except to say that he preferred Helen Bond's comments. Goodness; I'll have to be careful what I write in future! Here was I thinking that only about seven people read my blog and certainly none of my former teachers! But perhaps Jim Davila drew his attention to it. I should say that I remain puzzled by the comment that "Jesus and his followers are not really presented as Jews" in the Gospels, but it may be that I am missing something obvious here.

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As always, there's plenty of interest in the latest Explorator posted by David Meadows:

Explorator 6.42

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Geza Vermes has a piece on Caiaphas in today's Telegraph:

Never mind what Mel Gibson says, Caiaphas was innocent

It's a useful and interesting article, as you would expect from Vermes, yet it features several extraordinary claims -- or is Vermes just being more sloppy in writing a newspaper article than he would when writing his books? Take this, for example:

Given this highly specific context [i.e. post-70], it is no surprise that Jesus and his followers are not really presented as Jews. By contrast, it is the Jews that the Gospels - especially Matthew - blame for the death of Jesus.

Jesus and his followers not presented as Jews? What? I can't make any sense of that at all. I found this also odd:

According to the Gospel writers, Caiaphas judged Jesus to be a blasphemer for calling himself the Messiah. Such an assertion did not amount to blasphemy in any Jewish law, Biblical or post-Biblical.

When the High Priest in Mark rents his garments, this is not only after Jesus has affirmed that he is Messiah but also when he has said "you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14.62).

Also in today's Telegraph a longish piece on reactions to The Passion of the Christ by Chris Hastings:

Passion and Prejudice

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An interesting article in today's Observer lifts the lid on the phenomenon of authors using pseudonyms or anonymity to give their own books 5-star reviews on Amazon:

Amazon reviewers brought to book
David Smith

The art of self-reviewing - and coming up with a false identity to fool cyber-police - was last week exposed as one of the literary world's best-kept secrets. Amazon's Canadian site suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had posted anonymous reviews on the American site under signatures such as 'a reader from Alabama'. There were some prominent authors among them.

The gremlins that bedevilled Amazon all week laid bare how writers can exploit the web to praise their friends, rubbish their rivals and even champion themselves in the hope of shifting extra copies. The humiliation ended only after outed reviewers ordered Amazon to fix it.

Wish I'd thought of that. (Only joking). I wonder if there are any Biblical scholars out there giving themselves five-star reviews?

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ABC News is to broadcast an interview with Mel Gibson about The Passion of the Christ tomorrow (Monday). This ABC News article gives several highlights from the interview:

‘Faith, Hope, Love and Forgiveness’
Mel Gibson Tackles Passion Controversy, and Despair That Spurred His Faith

Gibson insists on Primetime he is no anti-Semite, and that anti-Semitism is "un-Christian" and a sin that "goes against the tenets of my faith."

When asked who killed Jesus, Gibson says, "The big answer is, we all did. I'll be the first in the culpability stakes here." . . . . .

. . . . "Critics who have a problem with me don't really have a problem with me in this film," Gibson says. "They have a problem with the four Gospels. That's where their problem is." . . . . .

. . . . . "I wanted it to be shocking," Gibson says. "And I also wanted it to be extreme. I wanted it to push the viewer over the edge … so that they see the enormity — the enormity of that sacrifice — to see that someone could endure that and still come back with love and forgiveness, even through extreme pain and suffering and ridicule."

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Christian History is still steadily pushing out its content on-line from the Fall 2003 issue. The latest on-line article is:

Three Wise Men from the East
The "Cappadocian Fathers" brought the best gift of all: a powerful scriptural defense of the Trinity and Christ's divinity against the Arian heretics.
by Edwin Woodruff Tait and Chris Armstrong

In other words, this article is a good introduction to Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa.

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Jim Davila has been covering the story about a new Church of England prayerbook which apparently decides to refer to "magi" rather than "three wise men". See his blog entry on Magi, Wise Men, Wise Women? and a follow-up More on the Magi. One reflection -- I wonder whether some of these newspaper reports, and perhaps also the CofE's prayer book, witness to a kind of residual fundamentalism which insists that we can only allow ourselves to focus on what is clear from the Biblical text. The evolution of the tradition, the development of the legend -- these are all part of what is delightful about retelling the story. When I go annually to my children's nativity plays at church and school, I don't stand up and say "There are no 'kings' helpers' in my text of Matthew" or "Luke does not specify the number of shepherds" or "How do you know it was a stable?", let alone "There are no lobsters in the Biblical text". I would rightly be thought a fool to do so, the theologian's equivalent of the Lord of the Rings nerds who disapprove of every place where Peter Jackson departs from Tolkien.

When did the number three begin to get fixed, though? There's an interesting web page with some useful background here:

Concerning the Magi and their names

This is from a site called The Hymns and Carols of Christmas by Douglas D. Anderson. The page quotes a certain Otfried Lieberknecht who cites Metzger:

A good study to check in cases like this is Bruce M. Metzger, "Names for the Nameless in the New Testament: A Study in the Growth of Christian Tradition", in: Kyriakon. Festschrift Johannes Quasten, ed. Patrick Granfield & Josef A. Jungmann, vol. I, Münster: Aschendorff, 1970, p.79-99. Metzger has a whole chapter (p.78-85) on "The Names of the Wise Men", which includes a rich bibliography of earlier studies of this topic (p.79 n.3).

According to Metzger, the earliest source giving names to the magi are the anonymous _Excerpta Latina Barbari_, the Latin redaction of a Greek chronicle which seems to have originated in Alexandria during the first or second half of the 6th century: "In his diebus sub Augusto kalendas Ianuarias magi obtulerunt ei mundera et adoraverunt eum: magi autem vocabantur Bithisarea Melchior Gathaspa" (cit. p.80).

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In ten minutes from now as I write, Radio 4 are broadcasting a half-hour programme about Monty Python's Life of Brian in their Reel Histories series. If you're in time, you can listen on-line here:

BBC Radio 4

If not, I'll check after the broadcast to see if it's archived. Here's the blurb:

Sat 14 Feb, 15:30 - 16:00 30 mins

Gerry Northam presents the series exploring the truth behind classic film versions of history.

2/4. Monty Python's Life of Brian

Reluctant messiah Brian Cohen outraged church leaders and the film was banned by local councils across the country. But was there any fact behind the farce? Historians reveal the real Judean Popular Front; classicists explore the fate of a second messianic Jesus, and director Terry Jones explains why the Virgin Mandy sounded like a parrot.

Update: it is archived here for a week:

Reel Histories: Monty Python's Life of Brian
(Fast forward 2 minutes to get to the beginning of the programme)

It's a good programme; Philip Davies from the University of Sheffield is one of the contributors most used; he reflects on the history behind the film, claiming that on the whole Python got it right, e.g. the uprisings that led to the Jewish war, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity" as parodying NT scholarship on the Messianic secret, and more. There are some enjoyable contributions too from Terry Jones who thinks of the film as heretical but not blasphemous. One interesting insight he provides is that many of the extras used in the film were local Tunisians, many of whom had recently been extras in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.

Labels: Radio 4

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The papers read at the Symposium on The Passion of the Christ held at the end of January are now available on the websites of both The Journal of Religion and Film and the Journal of Religion and Society, the co-sponsors of the event:

The Journal of Religion and Film: Volume 8: Special Issue No. 1 (February 2004)
Exploring Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ Symposium

Journal of Religion and Society: Volume 6 (2004)
Special Issue on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ

But use the first of these -- it has the full articles with footnotes and bibliography. I've not had chance to read the articles yet myself, except to glance at Reinhartz's which is as strong as one would expect it to be. But I mention it now so that you can begin to investigate this interesting symposium -- I wish I had been there.

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I've taken a look at Kevin Bush's N. T. Wright page and also the related WrightSaid email list and a couple of updates are worth reporting:

(1) On Easter day, Channel 4 will be broadcasting a documentary about the resurrection of Jesus written and presented by Tom Wright.

(2) Since Bible Review have annoyingly dropped all their on-line articles, Kevin Bush has obtained permission to reproduce the Tom Wright ones for his site:

The Great Debate
Speaking of Good and Evil
The Shape of Justification
Farewell to the Rapture
The Resurrection of the Resurrection
Paul, Leader of a Jewish Revolution

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Stephen Carlson and Rubén Gómez have been exchanging some interesting thoughts about the technology of producing academic articles on the web, and specifically on how to represent footnotes, developing out of Stephen Carlson's piece on In-line Glossary technique. As an element in the discussion, Stephen usefully provides two alternative versions of his article on "Clement of Alexandria on the 'Order' of the Gospels", one with hyperlinked endnotes and one with hyperlinked sidenotes. I agree with Rubén in preferring the sidenotes version -- it helps with the problem that the standard monitors are too wide for representing continuous text -- the reader simply does not find it helpful to read across the long lines that were typical of the early days of the web. But even in his endnotes version, Stephen has not fixed the width of the text, so one can reduce the window size in order to read at the most appropriate width, something I always like to do where possible. Sadly, more and more sites fix the width of the text so that it cannot be manipulated. That's a side issue (!), though, and this is just to say that I would like to see more sidenoted articles in the future.

Five further comments:

(1) If hyperlinked sidenotes are to become more common, the problems with printing out such a version will tend to make it necessary to produce alternative printer-friendly versions. This of course already happens in other contexts a good deal.

(2) The Biblical Archaeology Society used sidenotes to good effect in some of their on-line articles, though not hyperlinked if I remember correctly. Alas, most of these have now been removed (as previously commented) and those that remain don't appear to be using the side-noting system.

(3) The rise of PDF as a quick, convenient way of representing articles on-line may well be slowing killing off the art of producing good on-line articles or reproductions of articles using hyperlinked endnoting. Since hyperlinks can be incorporated into PDFs, it is possible that we will see PDFs with hyperlinked footnotes but I doubt it.

(4) Another option that appears to be getting less popular is the one used by the on-line Biblica which uses frames for endnotes so that one can preview on the screen the notes that also appear at the end of the article. I think that this is a neat solution, not leasts because it means one does not need to jump around in the document -- text and endnote can appear simultaneously -- but the decreasing popularity of frames make it unlikely to have a resurgence.

(5) One thing I would like to see with the hyperlinked endote technique is something that is rarely provided -- a [Back] hyperlink in the footnote that takes you back to the right point of the text. Too often, it is assumed that the individual simply uses the "back" button on the browser. I like to provide little arrow buttons to take the reader back to the text (see here for example); this is something I picked up from Mahlon Smith (e.g. here). Stephen Carlson uses another useful technique -- you can click on the endnote number and get back to the right point in the text. The only difficulty with that is that the reader might not know to do that.

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I commented earlier on how little The Passion of the Christ has made it into the popular news in the UK; but then I don't read tabloids anyway so how would I know? Helenann Hartley, when visiting a theological college which subscribes to The Mirror, spotted this feature:

THE PASSION OF CHRIST IS GRIM NIGHTMARE
John Hiscock

NOTHING I have ever seen has been more difficult to watch than this.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most violent films ever made - two hours and six minutes of unremitting, relentlessly graphic brutality.

Mel Gibson's controversial story of the last hours of Jesus Christ is a sickening bloodbath and, in my opinion, suitable viewing only for sadists . . . .

This makes me want to see the film even less than I already do, especially after the comments Crossan reports about the lyrical beauty of the violence, which I find sickening. Curiosity will drive me to see it as soon as it is out in March; but I won't be looking forward to it.

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I was asked by an American newspaper reporter today whether news about The Passion of the Christ had made any impact in the UK yet; my answer was that there has been very little in the popular media at all. There have been a few articles in The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, BBC news on-line and so on, but few people I have spoken to have heard about it here. But within a few hours of talking to him, BBC news had a feature on the film in its main news broadcast at 10 p.m. (big box office, anti-Semitism etc.). Also, there's now an official British site:

The Passion of the Christ: Official UK and Ireland Movie Website

Update (Friday): Helenann Hartley has sent over this link from BBC News

Religious battle over The Passion
David Willis

This is the text version of the report that appeared on the 10 p.m. news on the BBC last night.

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Thanks to Charles Miller on Synoptic-L for drawing my attention to this:

Scholarly Smackdown
A liberal professor and a conservative professor debate the movie, the Bible, theology and more.
By John Dominic Crossan and Ben Witherington III

It seems that Crossan and Witherington have been asked by beliefnet to engage in a public email conversation in connection with the release of the film. The first exchange, dated 10-11 February, focuses on the question of the suffering and violence. Crossan's piece makes excellent reading -- he really is incapable of being dull. He focuses on the problematic link apparently made between suffering and sacrifice and draws attention to this issue in this way:

And the second question I would raise for our dialogue is: What is the appropriate separation between suffering and sadism? How do you depict and view actual torture without its sadism becoming pornographic? In the same EWTN interview, Mel Gibson admitted that “I don’t think it’s as brutal as it really was. I’ve stopped short of what I think probably really happened. However, it’s brutal, it is graphic.” Then comes this absolutely breath-taking and profoundly disturbing interchange. Raymond Arroyo: “There is a sense of beauty in the violence, and I don’t quite know if I’m expressing that correctly, do you sense that?” Mel Gibson: “Good, yes, I do, I mean that is a definite intent to do that. To make it lyrical, to make the violence lyrical. In a way, to find the beauty in it.” Despite those terrible formulations, the point is clear. Sacrifice equals suffering and so, to appreciate sacrifice, that suffering must be shown with exact and graphic violence.

Unfortunately Witherington has not yet seen the film so he is labouring at a disadvantage at the beginning of this exchange; I'd suggest beliefnet get a copy to him or an opportunity to attend a preview viewing asap.

Beliefnet also have a massive site on the film with lots of links and discussion; I'm adding a link to my page on The Passion of the Christ:

Beliefnet: The Passion of the Christ.

Additional note: one of the two big "fan sites" on The Passion of the Christ has disappeared over the last two days, so I've added a notice on that ahead of withdrawing the link.

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Matti Myllikoski draws my attention to this:

Bibliothèque nationale de France

It has an excellent collection of texts printed in French including various old books that are very useful for the study of the history of Biblical scholarship including Pierre Bayle, Richard Simon, Jean le Clerc and Voltaire. The texts are produced in photographic reproduction in PDF files which one views a page at a time. The key part of the web site for the digital texts is:

Gallica: la bibliothèque numérique

From there go to "Recherche" and you can search on key texts.

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David Meadows comments usefully on a Jerusalem Post article on The Passion and specifically its over-played It-was-only-the-sadistic-Pilate-who-was to-blame line:

Chatter: Passion Protest

Meadows draws attention to the passage about Jesus in Josephus' Antiquities 18 and the line "at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us . . ." One might add that many leading Historical Jesus scholars avoid the it-was-all-Pilate line including E. P. Sanders, who confesses his admiration for and understanding of Caiaphas alongside the claim that it is highly likely that the High Priest indeed played a key role in the execution of Jesus.

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Torrey Seland commented on the loss of availability of an article from the on-line Harvard Theological Review at Look Smart's Find Articles. I pointed to the Wayback Machine as a means of getting round these lost articles following a lead from correspondent Darko Svenscak. Torrey subsequently comments that Joan Taylor's article on the Therapeutae does not show up there. I've had a look and can find it by adjusting the URL. So typing in http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2399/n1_v91/20512260/print.jhtml does not work but adjusting "print.jthml" to "p1/article.jhtml" does bring up the desired result: here. That's the good news. But the bad news is that it seems only two pages of the article are archived, so this is pretty useless. And it seems that the Wayback Machine is patchy generally. My example of the Adela Yarbro Collins article has pages 1-10 but nothing thereafter.

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Latest reviews from SBL's Review of Biblical Literature have been posted today; here are those that come under the New Testament heading:

Danove, Paul
Linguistics and Exegesis in the Gospel of Mark: Applications of a Case Frame Analysis and Lexicon
Reviewed by Charles A Bobertz

Das, A. Andrew
Paul, the Law, and the Covenant
Reviewed by James P. Sweeney

Donfried, Karl Paul
Paul, Thessalonica, and Early Christianity
Reviewed by Lucas Bormann

Edgar, David Hutchinson
Has God Not Chosen the Poor?: The Social Setting of the Epistle of James
Reviewed by Goutzioudis Moschos

Hagner, Donald A.
Encountering the Book of Hebrews: An Exposition
Reviewed by Eric Mason

Kysar, Robert
Preaching John
Reviewed by C. Fritz Boger

Nicklas, Tobias
Ablösung und Verstrickung: «Juden» und Jüngergestalten als Charaktere der erzählten Welt des Johannesevangeliums und ihre Wirkung auf den impliziten Leser
Reviewed by Silke Petersen

North, Wendy E. Sproston
The Lazarus Story within the Johannine Tradition
Reviewed by Mary L. Coloe

Schreiner, Thomas R.
Paul, Apostle of God's Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology
Reviewed by James P. Sweeney

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This item from WorldNetDaily reports the attempts of the ten Boom Holocaust Center in Haarlem, Holland to begin an internet campaign to persuade Mel Gibson to add a postscript to The Passion of the Christ:

Needed: 1 million Christians to write Mel Gibson
By Mike Evans

The extraordinary thing about this is that according to an earlier report in the same journal by the same author, Mike Evans, Mel Gibson had already agreed to do this very thing (see blog entry on and WorldNetDaily article on) at Evans's suggestion. So did Evans get the agreement from Gibson or not? If he did, why the need for the campaign? If he did not, why the original report?

Update: an article from the LA Times answers my puzzlement:

'Passion': Christians join the call
Tim Rutten

Evans said he decided last week to publish an account of the meeting with Gibson on the website WorldNetDaily.com, after reading accounts of Anti-Defamation League officials' dismay over a cut of the film they saw during a screening for Protestant clergymen in Orlando, Fla. When no response from Gibson or his representatives was forthcoming, Evans said he "became concerned. Mr. Gibson has never communicated to me that he had changed his mind."

Over the weekend, Evans and his group set up a website, www.melj.net, that invites like-minded Christians to "thank acclaimed actor-director Mel Gibson" for "working closely with leaders concerned about anti-Semitic tones in the movie 'The Passion of the Christ.' " Readers are then asked to read, sign and return a copy of a letter Evans and the Jerusalem Prayer Team plan to forward to the filmmaker.

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The first British review of The Passion of the Christ is concerned that the film is too violent for viewers to stomach. Thanks to Helenann Hartley for this link from BBC News which quotes from the review by John Hiscock in the Daily Telegraph:

'Violent' review for Gibson film
A newspaper film critic has questioned whether adults will be able to stomach the violence in Mel Gibson's imminent movie The Passion of the Christ.

He wrote: "For, worthy and serious as Gibson's treatment may be, his blood-drenched depiction of the final hours of Jesus' life is harsh and brutal, dwelling almost entirely on pain, suffering and torment."

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The remarkable resource that is Textkit has added several major new full-text, on-line books. As with everything on Textkit (I think?), these new resources are PDFs that can be downloaded for free. Resources are usually out-of-copyright old-fashioned stuff, but often really useful. These new resources have just been announced on the Greek part of the site. Descriptions below taken from the Textkit site:

Sidgwick's Greek Prose Composition Key, Arthur Sidgwick
Learn Greek with this classic Greek Prose Composition key by Arthur Sidwick. The key, in Classical Greek, can be used to check your work against the lessons presented in Sidgwick's Greek Prose Composition.

A First Greek Course, Sir William Smith
Download this free first year Greek book. Sir William Smith's A First Greek Course was popular throughout the United Kingdom from about 1867 through 1960

Pocket Lexicon of Greek New Testament, Alexander Souter
Download this free and very handy New Testament Greek Lexicon. At 297, the Greek to English lexicon presents key New Testament Greek words with English meanings.

The Gospel of St. Luke in Greek, H.R. Heatley
Download this free New Testament Greek reader of the Gospel of St. Luke. This reader provides the St. Luke's Gospel in Greek along with line notes and a helpul vocabulary to assist the Biblical Greek learner.

Labels: lexica

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Thanks to Michael Strickland for this one from Yahoo news / Variety and by Carl DiOrio:

'Passion' poised for heavenly B.O.

. . . . "It's one of the most talked about films since the first 'Star Wars' prequel," said Exhibitor Relations prexy Paul Dergarabedian.

The anti-Semitism debate has probably helped the pic, he said.

"Controversy is a double-edged sword. It can either boost your chances or derail you," Dergarabedian added. With "Passion," "People are intrigued. I've never seen all these pieces of the puzzle come together before." . . . .

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The cover story in this week's Newsweek is on The Passion of the Christ. The main article is the most detailed description of the film I have seen so far, with some intelligent analysis of its relationship to the Gospels and questions about anti-Semitism:

Who Killed Jesus?
Mel Gibson's powerful but troubling new movie, 'The Passion of the Christ,' is reviving one of the most explosive questions ever. What history tells us about Jesus' last hours, the world in which he lived, anti-Semitism, Scripture and the nature of faith itself
By Jon Meacham

Well worth a read; more anon.

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In relation to my previous blog post, Darko Svenscak points out that the example I chose is not a good one because only the first page of that article is cached by Google; I hadn't thought to check the rest. But Darko offers another useful tip:

The Wayback Machine

I saw someone referring to this recently and forget who. It's not something I've visited before and it's great fun. Essentially it is attempting to archive everything on the web so that it can be accessed by future generations. Here's its results on the NT Gateway:

Wayback Machine: NT Gateway

It's quite nostalgic for me to see how it developed. That record begins in June 2000 because that's when I moved the site over to its own domain. One can go further back by typing in its old address. But this is to digress. How does the Wayback Machine help us with finding those Harvard Theological Review articles we are after? As long as one has the old URL, one is OK -- just type it into the Wayback machine box and here is the article we were looking for:

Wayback Machine archive of Adela Yarbro Collins, "Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Jews"

So this could turn out to be a very useful tool.

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Correspondent Darko Svenscak makes the useful point to me that where Find Articles have deleted on-line articles (see blog entry on), they are still present in the Google cache. So if you are looking, for example, for Adela Yarbro Collins, "Mark and His Readers: The Son of God Among Jews", Harvard Theological Review 92 (1999): 393-408 (listed in Featured Links of July 2001), you now get a 404 Not found; but if you paste the title into Google and hit "cached", you can still retrieve it. However, these caches don't last for ever, so if there's something you want to have electronically from Harvard Theological Review, fetch it and save it while you still can.

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The Winter 2003 edition of Biblical Theology Bulletin is now on-line (free to all) at Find Articles:

Piety and Politics: the Dynamics of Royal Authority in Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Old Babylonian Mesopotamia - Book Review
by Robert Gnuse

Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide - Book Review
by Richard B. Cook

Judges - Book Review
by John F. Craghan

Seeing the Psalms: a Theology of Methaphor - Book Review
by John F. Craghan

Scripture and interpretive method: why read scripture as Canon?
by Kenneth G. Stenstrup

"Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers . . . - Revelation 22:15" - Critical Essay
by Rick Strelan

Who should be called father? Paul of Tarsus between the Jesus tradition and patria potestas
by S. Scott Bartchy

Of Eunuchs and predators: Matthew 19:1-12 in a cultural context - Critical Essay
by Carmen Bernabe

Gainful reappraisal - Presenting the Issue
by David Bossman

Labels: Biblical Theology Bulletin

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I commented in December on the revamp of the Find Articles site, which included lots of material from the Harvard Theological Review (free to all). Torrey Seland points out that the on-line issues of HTR are now down to just 2001. I have several links to other issues so will have to remove these if there is no sign of their return. It's another reminder not to trust that anything on the web is going to be there forever.

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Thanks to Helenann Hartley for sending over this link from Saturday's Guardian which I'd missed (no doubt because it is still lying folded up and unread):

Crucified by empire
The blood libel that 'the Jews' killed Jesus sent millions to their deaths
Giles Fraser (Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford)

It's a well-written, informed piece that helps put the debate over The Passion of the Christ in context; an excerpt:

What is going on here is intra-Jewish sectarian polemic. Note: intra-Jewish not anti-Jewish. The attack on "the Jews" in the Gospels is a family argument, and is conducted with the ferocity typical of a family argument. The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures frequently denounced Israel for failing to live up to God's expectations. "These people draw near with their mouths and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me," insists Isaiah. Attacks upon "the Jews" in the Gospels are of a piece with this intra-Jewish prophetic invective. But once Christianity morphed from a small Jewish sect, wrestling to establish its identity against the prevailing religious establishment, to the official religion of the Roman empire, these denunciations became deadly. Torn from the context of an intra-Jewish row for the soul of Judaism, "the Jews" starts to be heard as "them" as opposed to "us". From this moment on, the Gospels are used as justification for the greatest crime in European history - the death of one Jew becoming the pretext for the murder of millions more. Christians have too often preferred an anti-semitic lie to a disturbingly relevant truth: Jesus was destroyed by the logic of empire.

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On Synoptic-L, Wieland Willker asks "why this botch" (The Passion of the Christ) "gets so much attention in scholarly circles". While not knowing whether it is a "botch" or not -- I haven't seen it yet -- I think that there are several reasons:

(1) Some scholars are interested in the way in which the Gospels are adapted in film and fiction, partly because of the renewed interest in Wirkungsgeschichte and partly because the creative process of adaptation might shed light on the interpretative process. For investigations of Jesus (and other) films along such lines, I would recommend the books by Larry Kreitzer on the OT, the NT and Paul in fiction and film; and this book by Barnes Tatum:

W. Barnes Tatum, Jesus at the Movies (Sonoma: Polebridge, 1998)

I would also recommend these two articles by William Telford:

Telford, W. R., "The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar's Perspective" in J. G. Davies, G. Harvey and W. Watson (eds.), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed. Essays in Honour of J. F. A. Sawyer (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995): 360-94

Telford, W. R., "Jesus Christ Movie-Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema" in C. Marsh and G. Ortiz (eds.), Movies and Meaning. Explorations in Theology and Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 115-39.

(2) Interest in this particular Jesus film is accentuated among some scholars because of their involvement with the question of the depiction of Jews in the Passion Narrative. Paula Fredriksen in particular is worth mentioning here since she was on the so-called "ad hoc committee" that strongly criticized an early script of the film for its alleged anti-Semitism (See blog entries here and here). So too is Amy-Jill Levine who was on the committee that composed that report (See blog entry on). Both Levine and Fredriksen have been involved with discussion about the film as a result of that early and robust encounter with the script. And whatever one thinks about the way that that debate has developed, there is no question that the issue of the depiction of Jews in the Passion Narrative has been a hot topic in Gospel studies over the last generation. What this film has done is to push that debate back into centre stage.

I would add, in relation to this point, that much of the controversy over the film could have been avoided if only Gibson had done what Garth Dabrinsky did on the recent Gospel of John (Visual Bible) film and employ a panel of expert consultants. Gibson claims that he has consulted hundreds of Biblical scholars, but what the film lacks is a panel of accountable, named historical consultants from a variety of scholarly and religious perspectives. The Gospel of John has managed to adapt that Gospel word-for-word without a whiff of controversy and I think that this is in no small part due to the likes of Peter Richardson, Adele Reinhartz, Alan Segal and co on its Advisory Committee.

(3) I suspect the film also excites attention among scholars because of its use of Latin and Aramaic. Of course Gibson had to use a scholar to do the translation -- William Fulco of Loyola Marymount University.

(4) If Biblical scholars had nothing to say about major cultural events like this, then that might be further evidence of a retreat into the ivory tower. Interest is generated much of the time simply because the media asks them for their opinion, and they rightly respond.

Labels: Paula Fredriksen

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One of the great things about The Passion of the Christ for those like me who are fascinated by Jesus films is that it is generating a good deal of interest in the history of Jesus films. This article takes a look at what is undoubtedly my least favourite of the Jesus films, the 1979 outing starring Brian Deacon, called simply Jesus, based on the Gospel of Luke:

'The Passion's' Precedent: The Most-Watched Film Ever?

The article is from the New York Times and is by Franklin Foer. I enjoyed his description of the film, including this line:

In terms of special effects, the film offers poofs of smoke and gauzy halos to suggest miracles and angels; a hissing snake and a booming voiceover represent the devil. In the scene in which the Romans beat Jesus, their punches obviously don't connect.

He also quotes The New York Times's Tom Buckley's description of it as "painfully monotonous." It's interesting to see, though, that the Jesus Film Project are not at all afraid of the new film; indeed they are embracing it as an evangelistic opportunity and their web page currently headlines with Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ".

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Don't forget to look at the latest Explorator:

Explorator 6.41

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On the Gospel of Thomas e-list, Andrew Criddle draws attention to this piece:

Lasse Collmann, "Thomas 50 and its context"

This is a post-graduate seminary presentation at Helsinki directed by Ismo Dunderberg whom you may know from his publications on The Gospel of Thomas. The English is a little broken (but I am always lost in admiration for post-grads who write doctoral theses in a second language) and it is still in draft mode, but it's an interesting read for those interested in Thomas. Criddle characterises it this way, "This article draws parallels between the saying and other accounts of questioning of the soul by spiritual powers but emphasises that in some of the closest parallels such as the Jewish Hekhalot material the powers, although potentially dangerous are not intrinsically evil."

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Loads more articles on The Passion of the Christ including this one from The Observer by Paul Harris:

Who killed Christ?
Mel Gibson's controversial film on the Crucifixion has been pilloried by Jewish leaders but is being hailed by US Catholics as the best recruiting tool for 2,000 years, reports Paul Harris in New York

One thing is certain though: the hype surrounding the film is going to ensure a box-office smash. Experts predict Gibson will recoup his $25m investment on the opening weekend alone.

And this one from The Scotsman by Rachel Zoll:

Faithful sell film with a passion

"When they attack him, they attack millions of people in America," said Jennifer Giroux, a Roman Catholic nurse from Cincinnati who created seethepassion.com "We have watched films concerning the Holocaust with compassion, concern and sorrow, and we just want to be able to watch this beautiful movie about our faith."

And this one from DallasNews.com by Jeffrey Weiss:

Passion or prejudice?
New movie about Jesus' death stirs anti-Semitism question

which features this great quotation from Dr. Leonard Swidler, professor of Catholic thought and interreligious dialogue at Temple University:

"What we know about Pilate otherwise is that the governor was a self-centered thug who would sell his mother on Sunday morning to get himself extra breakfast," he said. "He crucified scores of people at the drop of a turban."

This article by James Murrary is from The Australian is one of those nice review articles which goes through several Jesus films (with a predictable title):

Jesus Christ movie star

On past experience, Jesus films usually succeed, if only because there are enough believers to pack the cinemas. Experience also suggests that the reverential approach is preferred: Jesus the miraculous, the sentimental, the sensational, in an ancient landscape with Roman artefacts and gospel goodies and baddies.

The Passion of the Christ may prove too realistic for those who like their religion sugar-coated.

Finally, Jim West emails me to draw attention to a PAX TV one-hour special to air in the USA, "The making of 'The Passion of The Christ'" in advance of film's Feb. 25 premiere on Feb. 22 and Feb. 24 at 9 p.m. Eastern.

The behind-the-scenes look is meant to help viewers understand Gibson's vision for the film, and it will present never-before-seen footage of the actors and directors at work. The special also will feature on-set interviews of the cast and crew and stories of how the sets were created."

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Rubén Gómez has a new web site and a related blog that is likely to be of interest:

Bible Software Review

Bible Software Review Weblog

This corner of cyberspace will be devoted to bringing you all kinds of information about the ever-growing Bible software scene. Our goal (my goal!) is to build a fairly comprehensive repository of tips, news, articles, and reviews of different Bible software products.

The site can only really be viewed effectively in 1024x768. At present it's still being built but most of the Links section is active. Note: it looks like the blog does not yet have an RSS feed.

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The score for the The Passion of the Christ, composed by John Debney, will apparently be available from February 24. There are some excerpts available at one of the Passion of the Christ fan sites:

Passion of the Christ soundtrack excerpts

You can order from there, or click here for Amazon.

So whatever happened to the rumours that Lisa Gerrard was to score the film (Blogged on December 11 2003)? After this was apparently confirmed, it was then announced that John Debney was scoring the film and that Gerrard would be "co-scoring". But now Lisa Gerrard's name seems to have been removed altogether and the news item has been dropped from her web site. So what is the story here? Some interesting light is shed in the forum of Lisa Gerrard's site, in which Lisa's husband Jacek is a participant. He shows some real frustration with this project and states that "We have all worked VERY hard on the Passion", so much so that other projects have had to be sacrificed. He goes on, "I have VERY deep feeling about all this and is better I say nothing . . . . Not to mention that Patrick [co-writer Patrick Cassidy, MG] missed Christmas completely and his mother came to be with him from Eire . . . . we have worked TOOOOOO hard on this project!" He adds that "I just do not think any of LGs and PCs work will be in the final version of the film . . . ." Elsewhere in the forum, Jacek describes the film as a "masterpiece" and Mel Gibson as a "very good person" but the Debney score only as "good but not exceptional". He hints that the decision to go with Debney was not solely Gibson's choice and also that he "ran out of time to include the work that LG did".

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