Mamet, a Rabbi, a Vicar and a Priest on The Passion of the Christ

Yesterday's Guardian has a piece on The Passion of the Christ ahead of its UK release next week:

Passion players
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ finally hits our screens next week. If you want to worship, go to church, not the movies, says David Mamet - while three clerics reveal their reactions to the film

Mamet's piece is a bit too clever for my liking and ends up getting so involved that it says little about the film. You can tell that he is pleased with his line about "communion with the divine" being "better celebrated with the traditional bread and wine than with popcorn and Coca-Cola".

The three clerics mentioned in the subtitle are Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Dr Graham Kings, vicar and Father Kit Cunningham. One hated it, one loved it, one had mixed feelings. I am a bit troubled about a comment made by Neuberger:

There is no doubt that the Jews are presented in an overwhelmingly negative way. Caiaphas, the high priest, is a pompous ass. He - and the other priests - are depicted as fat and overdressed, in contrast with the thin and simply attired Jesus and his followers. The crowd of Jews is given Jesus back after the obscenely vicious scene of the scourging - and it is then that "the Jews" bay for Jesus's blood. They ask for him to be crucified - Pilate, who gave in to the Jews before, unwillingly, gives in again to satisfy their blood lust. This is a highly selective and dangerous reading of the Gospels.

Neuberger is right about the overwhelmingly negative depiction of Caiaphas but her use of "the Jews" here in quotation marks strikes me as quite inappropriate. Now it is possible that I missed it, but I did not notice any group in the film specifically characterised as "the Jews" in this way, yet Neuberger makes this into a quotation. Indeed, as I have pointed out before, the only character I remember being specifically characterised as "Jew" was Simon of Cyrene, undoubtedly the most sympathetic character in the film after Jesus and the Marys. I do think that Gibson could have taken more care to avoid elements that have led to the anti-Semitism charge, e.g. by getting some more historical consultants on board, but there is no way that one can have a serious discussion if one is importing elements into the film that are not there (again, subject to correction if I have remembered wrongly).