Scathing article on The Passion

Rochelle Altman on Ioudaios points to a really scathing article on The Passion of the Christ in Salon.com:

Inside Mel Gibson's "Passion"
A clergyman infiltrates the grass-roots campaign for Gibson's new Gospel film to catch a screening and reports that Jews, Arabs -- and Christians -- should be worried.
By Cintra Wilson

The author has interviewed Rev. Mark Stanger, "canon precentor and associate pastor of San Francisco's premier mainstream Episcopalian church" who has seen the film and clearly hated everything about it. Much of the article is patently absurd, e.g. the claim that it is somehow anti-Arab on the grounds that Aramaic sounds a bit like Arabic:

Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim. Some of those words in Aramaic sound a little bit like Arabic -- Arabic is a Semitic language too. [In the film, it came off like] nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus. So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out.

I'm sure I don't need to point out the weaknesses in this! Much of the rest of the article is in the same vein and is pretty useless. But there were two elements of interest to me. One was a link to a site all about The Passion Outreach which features a short interview with James Caviezel (two and a half minutes). The other was the dismaying news that it seems Mel Gibson is still caricaturing Biblical scholarship:

Mel Gibson in his remarks after the film took a potshot at contemporary biblical scholarship -- he called scholars "revisionists" who think the gospel writers had agendas.

We need to add the rider that this is only a reported impression in an often silly article, but if it is accurate I think it a shame that this line is still being taken. The idea that opposition to this film comes from contemporary liberal Biblical scholars who do not want the Bible story retold is nonsense, especially in the light of The Gospel of John, which used several Biblical scholars of "liberal" leaning and otherwise, including Christians and Jews, and which is a literal word-for-word retelling of the Gospel of John, of all the Gospels the one most open to charges about anti-Judaism. It may well turn out that there is nothing to worry about over The Passion of the Christ, but if there is it will not be because it is somehow too close to the Passion Narratives of any or all of the canonical Gospels.