Word: christe
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Dean Devlin, co-producer of Gibson's Braveheart, is also passionate for The Passion. "I thought it was an amazingly powerful piece of work," he says. "I didn't find it in the least bit anti-Semitic, and I'm Jewish. In the film I saw, everybody turns against Christ. This film doesn't cast blame on anyone. It casts blame on everyone. The last thing Mel wanted was for anyone to try to use this to justify hatred...
Healing is Gibson's prime task, says a seasoned Hollywood marketing executive. "They've got the worst kind of controversy, the kind that goes to the core of their credibility," the executive says, noting that films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Priest grossed less than $10 million at the box office. "Gibson has to show it to Jewish religious leaders, as well as prominent cultural and intellectual figures. The public has to feel there's an overwhelmingly favorable consensus among people who might be offended...
...oops, there it is. Long before The Passion's full release (the scene is from a trailer), Mel Gibson's film has already ignored the guidance of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1988 for dramatizers of Christ's last hours. The advisory warns, among other things, against "changing the small 'crowd' at the Governor's palace into a teeming mob." Why? Such an exaggeration, the bishops claim, would misleadingly suggest that the Jews as a body, indeed as a race, wanted Jesus dead...
...first challenge is the Gospels themselves. All four describe complicity by at least some Jews in Christ's execution. But they differ on details, such as the community's unanimity and its influence with Pilate, Jerusalem's Roman ruler. Matthew, Mark and Luke accuse individuals and Jewish subgroups but leave room for the (likely) possibility that many rank-and-file Jews sympathized with Jesus or were indifferent. John, however, repeatedly refers to "the Jews" as a whole, implying collective guilt. Matthew provides the only report of a seemingly damning oath by the spectators at Jesus' trial: "His blood...
...self-sacrifice. They also imbibed the malignant anti-Jewish spirit of their age, when peasants believed that Jews mixed the blood of Gentile children into Passover matzos. Consistent with such prejudice--and with the black-hat, white-hat needs of early dramaturgy--Passion plays presented Jews as money-grubbing Christ killers, a dramatic rendering that enjoyed a centuries-long run. Attending Oberammergau's famous staging in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler said enthusiastically, "Never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed...