Posted on 02/29/2004 9:12:37 PM PST by churchillbuff
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: March 1, 2004
Columnist Page: William Safire
WASHINGTON — ...Mel Gibson's movie about the torture and agony of the final hours of Jesus is the bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen.
...[snip] — the bar against film violence has been radically lowered. Movie mayhem, long resisted by parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.
What are the dramatic purposes of this depiction of cruelty and pain? First, shock; the audience I sat in gasped at the first tearing of flesh. Next, pity at the sight of prolonged suffering. And finally, outrage: who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?
Not Pontius Pilate, the Roman in charge; he and his kindly wife are sympathetic characters. Nor is King Herod shown to be at fault.
The villains at whom the audience's outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval "passion play," preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as "Christ killers."
Much of the hatred is based on a line in the Gospel of St. Matthew, after the Roman governor washes his hands of responsibility for ordering the death of Jesus, when the crowd cries, "His blood be on us, and on our children."
Though unreported in the Gospels of Mark, Luke or John, that line in Matthew — embraced with furious glee by anti-Semites through the ages — is right there in the New Testament. Gibson and his screenwriter didn't make it up, nor did they misrepresent the apostle's account of the Roman governor's queasiness at the injustice.
But biblical times are not these times. This inflammatory line in Matthew — and the millenniums of persecution, scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly from its malign repetition — was finally addressed by the Catholic Church in the decades after the defeat of Naziism.
In 1965's historic Second Vatican Council, during the papacy of Paul VI, the church decided that while some Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the death of Jesus, "still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."
That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith progress.
However, a group of Catholics rejects that and other holdings of Vatican II. Mr. Gibson is reportedly aligned with that reactionary clique. (So is his father, an outspoken Holocaust-denier, but the son warns interviewers not to go there. I agree; the latest generation should not be held responsible for the sins of the fathers.)
In the skillful publicity run-up to the release of the movie, Gibson's agents said he agreed to remove that ancient self-curse from the screenplay. It's not in the subtitles I saw the other night, though it may still be in the Aramaic audio, in which case it will surely be translated in the versions overseas.
And there's the rub. At a moment when a wave of anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD? Is art served by presenting the ancient divisiveness in blood-streaming media to the widest audiences in the history of drama?
Matthew in 10:34 quotes Jesus uncharacteristically telling his apostles: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." You don't see that on Christmas cards and it's not in this film, but those words can be reinterpreted — read today to mean that inner peace comes only after moral struggle.
The richness of Scripture is in its openness to interpretation answering humanity's current spiritual needs. That's where Gibson's medieval version of the suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame, fails Christian and Jew today.
Knowingly allowing an innocent man to be sadistically tortured and beaten just because one washes ones hands is what passes for sympathetic in the age of klinton.
Really, Mr Safire, most of us know that that is evil.
I, personally, believe that quote is fabricated - simply because it is out of context for someone in a bloodthirsty mob to call down curses on their own descendents. I think whoever wrote (or edited) the gospel of Matthew added that at some point, out of hatred for the Jews - and not because they killed Christ, but because at the time the Gospel was written, the friction between Christianity and Judaism over doctrinal matters was very intense. Christianity at that time was not quite its own religion, but still a schismatic sect of Judaism, and the Jews were attacking it as heresy, and the Christians were retaliating in whatever manner available to them (such as adding the preceding to their canonical texts).
Just a theory... but as I said, the quote is completely out of context in the circumsatances in which it is claimed to have been uttered. To reiterate, "His blood be on us", while screaming for Jesus' death, makes sense in that context - but to invoke a curse on one's descendents? I don't think so...
But it's too much to hope for a reflexive scribbler like Safire to even have pondered the Gospels enough to analyze them to that extent... it's easier to just come unglued and shoot the messenger.
Faced with a clearcut choice of doing what was right or what was wrong, Pilate chose to do a very quick visual poll of the populace....
OK. Is there a conspiracy of Jewish writers trying to create a wave of anti-semitism in America?
Unitarians come to mind as the most open to theological change. I see their meeting houses draped in homosexual agenda. They despise Christian prayer, hymns, and the like. I guess Safire would fit right in with them. Unitarians have drifted from lukewarm attachment to theology in the early Republic to spiritual humanism of today. Gaia is OK with them. I soon expect to see witch doctors dancing in their meeting houses.
No conspiracy. Just paranoia.
There is no peace without a sword! Stupid but true.
As long as people view themselves as victims they can never be victorious.
Any port in a storm. Before becoming a Christian I used any excuse to justify why I wasn't one. Christ kept knocking, however, until one day I opened the door. I pray that it happens for Safire....
The Catholic Church never taught anything other than what Vatican II taught. I am sick of THIS particular libel--that the Catholic Church taught anti-Semitism UNTIL 1965.
The villains at whom the audience's outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval "passion play," preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as "Christ killers."
OK. I have been hearing a lot of screaming that Gibson is blaming the Jews and he really should have set the record straight that it was the Romans. Funny thing though. No one has put forward a compelling reason why the Romans would kill a man preaching peace to a conquered people. It would seem to me he was doing work they wanted. On the other scapegoat that Safire posits, Herod; wasn't he a Jew?
I would think that Jews would be better off not panicking and tone down the hysteria. The difference between Jew and Christian is not that much. Both adhere to the Old Testament. The rituals in a Synagogue parallel a Protestant church. Both hold the same moral beliefs. The differences between Judaism and Christianity are far less than that between other religions. If the Jews keep up the paranoia, they will begin to wear on those who who be their friends.
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