'Son of God' Movie - Remembering When Newsweek Bashed the New Testament

And the high priest questioned them, saying, “We strictly charged you not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men.  The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on a tree."
- Acts 5 

The Roma Downey project Son of God appears to be coming out this Easter, and it's difficult to believe that it will be the 10th anniversary of Passion of the Christ.  For almost 10 years now, I've wanted to respond to Newsweek's response to Passion, published before the release date.  But first, let me say ...

The mission of Jesus and the first generation of his followers saw the "new covenant in his blood" as a development of a divine plan that was based on a covenant between the Creator and the Hebrew nomad Abraham. The apocalyptic scripture (the Revelation of John) features a vision of a cosmic woman -- the imagery hearkening to the dream symbols of Jacob's family (Israel) -- who is persecuted by the dragon (representing Satan) after giving birth (to the Messiah Jesus). For most evangelicals and fundamentalists, to share the Dragon's hatred of Israel is to oppose God.  If Abraham is the father of our faith, as is generally thought, then why would we wish any harm on his descendants?  It is the Christian ideal to wish reconciliation and grace for all, even for those who persecute them. Righteousness has come upon all men, as the Apostle Paul said, "to the Jew first and also to the Gentile."  There can be nothing more un-Christ-like and perverse and absurd than trying to avenge Jesus' death--except maybe using such vengeance as an excuse to harm the children of Abraham.

At the time Passion was coming out, my thinking leaned more to the agnostic, much more open to liberal religious points of view than ever, but what I read in Newsweek still bothered me.  Newsweek's editor assigned Jon Meacham the task of stating thoughtfully the magazine's rational response toward the film.  The resulting article essentially criticized Gibson for fundamentally accepting the factual veracity of the gospel narratives of the NT (New Testament) canon and proceeded to attack the veracity of the NT writers.

Meacham didn’t seem to spend as much time criticizing Gibson’s lack of fidelity to the New Testament as his fidelity to the New Testament, as well as attacking the NT writings themselves.  The operative word in Meacham’s essay (and those following in suit) becomes “literal,” but not in the same sense as those who criticize a literal reading of figurative or metaphysical passages; what is rather meant by the term literal is believing that New Testament writers weren’t making up events and words whole cloth in order to pander to the Roman authorities.  The article points out why Meacham and others believe that certain parts of the gospel narratives are false, and then chastises Gibson for not being hip to the received wisdom of the academy.

Let's be clear.  Meacham's article was one-sided and unequivocal in its import and conclusion:  The only rational response to any textual incongruities between the texts is to embrace the generality that the NT writers deliberately pandered to Roman sensibilities by making up stories about the troubled Roman prefect and playing up the role of Jewish leadership in his arrest and their hateful resentment of the impertinent critical rabbi from Galilee.

Where Meacham does seem to equivocate is here:

The Temple elite undoubtedly played a key role in the death of Jesus; Josephus noted that the Nazarene had been accused by those of the highest standing among us," meaning among the Jerusalem Jews. [emphasis mine] 

What Meacham seems to imply indirectly is that Pilate unquestioningly accepted that Jesus was an insurrectionist mostly on the word of the Sanhedrin (while hedging that Jesus might well have been a real "political threat" to Pilate--blaming the victim? defending Pilate now?) How meaningful is it to implicate Pilate and the handful of the brutal Roman soldiers as much as the Jewish leadership that sold out one who many Jews have revered as an ideal prophetic rabbi and who Messianic Jews and Christian Gentiles alike revere as the foretold Messiah?  The NT seems to imply that much more hardness of heart is behind the rejection of Isaiah's foretold suffering servant.

In Meacham's version of history, a reluctant Pilate can't be the only invention of the NT writers.  The list on cynical inventions must also include Jesus' prophetic criticisms of the city of Jerusalem (and, in some sense, the people of Israel) about its historic murderous attitude towards God's prophets.  It must include the many speeches in the Book of Acts that reprise this theme.  It must include the open persecution and politically motivated murders of Jesus-following Jews by the Jerusalem authorities spoken about both in the letters of Paul and the Book of Acts.  It must include Paul's past as a Christian persecutor authorized by the Sanhedrin.  (Why Meacham didn't discuss the "probable" truth about the resurrection itself, we can only guess at.)

Meacham presumably was not able to attack the traditional evangelical view of these matters.  Many evangelicals and Protestants around the globe look at the past theocratic nature of Constantine's Rome and the Holy Roman Empire as an aberration, a political and hierarchical travesty of the true Body of Christ.  Many more still see the use of Holy Rome's political power to retaliate against the early Jewish persecution of the first century Church as an abomination with respect to both the love of Jesus and God's covenant with Abraham.  Regarding the Jews most directly responsible for his death, Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them."  Where the blood of Abel cried out for punishment, the blood of Jesus has continually cried out for mercy.

Among the reviled coalition of Catholics and evangelicals supporting the film, it is the exception rather than the rule for Christians (especially in America) to see any justification for holding modern Jews accountable for the murder of Jesus.  The effort to censor the New Testament based on how and whether they are misinterpreted is a red herring.   Since Muslims seem to be prohibited from making unto Mohammed any graven image, we may never get to see how tolerant the politically correct police would be to filming objectionable statements from the life and times of their great personage Mohammed.

Joe Carter states that the evangelical tradition is out of the loop on the historical Catholic hostility toward Abraham's descendants.  He attributes to this both a cluelessness about Jewish antipathy toward Yeshua of Nazareth as well as a helpful innocence concerning the deep anti-Semitism of Europe.  More often than not, the evangelical (American especially) has a child-like optimism about the modern children of Israel.  He or she celebrates the faith of Abraham, and the descendants that God gave him for an inheritance, because of his chesed (faithful covenant love) for him. As Carter states pithily of his fellow evangelicals, "our heroes have always been Hebrews."

Even given the (mostly) unrequited love of the evangelical for the children of Abraham, the sheer number of crazy Westboro-type cults would have almost guaranteed some sort of rise in anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians.  But the lack of expected violence was like the proverbial deafening silence.  Foremer Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward called this silence the "dog that did not bark."   As critic Rabbi Eric Yoffie observed, the Christian viewers saw a completely different film that deeply moved them.  They saw only a Creator showing the depth of his love for wayward humanity in sacrifice and they "really do not understand the charge of anti-Semitism."

So understanding how profoundly the detractors misjudged the impact of the film, with Christians perceiving only the grace and mercy of their Lord ("the dog that did not bark"), what of the purportedly ugly motivations that seeped from Mad Mel's mind into the movie?  I recall one article (can't remember which) that claimed that Jews are the only people depicted as reveling in the violence toward Jesus and that the only mean-spirited Jews were recognizably Jewish.  A later Newsweek article in 2009 has Lisa Miller pronouncing:

The film is, in fact, anti-Semitic. Those most thirsty for Jesus’s blood are the Jews whose brown teeth and matted hair disallow any individuality. 

Actually, the most bloodthirsty people are the various Roman soldiers who delight in the torture and carnage and blood in an unfettered sadism that is unrivaled in the rest of the film.  The Romans squeal with satisfaction as ribbons of flesh are flogged off of Jesus.  Later, having already nailed one hand to the cross, one soldier demonstrates the finer points of arm-stretching as he wrenches Jesus' arm out of its socket in order to place the second nail, with an inhumane look of satisfaction.  As one commentator reacted,

Did the Newsweek editor forget that, other than Pilate’s wife, it was Jewish characters who did the most to try to alleviate the sufferings of Jesus?  It was Veronica, who couldn’t have been mistaken for a Roman, who wiped the bloodied face of the condemned Messiah and tried to offer him a drink. It was the Jewish Simon of Cyrene who, after his initial lack of sympathy, lashed out at the Romans after Jesus fell to the ground. Miller also neglected that the ones who reveled the most in Jesus’s sufferings in the film were the Roman soldiers who scourged him and crowned him with thorns, not the Jewish religious leaders who arrested him and accused him.

One detractor at Judaism Online states "it’s just Jews whom the movie clearly depicts as the scoundrels. ... the same Gibson who willingly accepts universal guilt for the crime of deicide chooses only the Jews to be singled out as the real perpetrators."  One wonders how many of these people actually viewed the movie. Or are even remotely familiar with the gospel narratives.  "This is a film that makes the Gospels seem almost tame in their depiction of Jewish evil."  Actually, the events that were mainly at issue with Meacham and company are all from the Gospels.  And in the New Testament narratives (not only the Gospel of Matthew) the Jerusalem authorities, and by extension the people they represented, are rebuked prophetically by the apostles and prophets and told to repent.

Rabbi Blech adds, "like the one [scene] showing Jewish guards brutally beating Jesus as they take him to the High Priest—that have no basis in any New Testament source."  Possibly he hasn't read the 14th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, or thinks that Gibson should have portrayed the Sanhedrin beating Jesus instead of their Temple guards doing it?  But he seems to be blaming Gibson for unscripturally depicting anyone other than Romans brutalizing Jesus.  According to the Marcan narrative, Jesus was beaten while in custody of the Temple guards. 

Aside from some events directly out of the Gospels (the Jerusalem crowd releasing Barabbas, the Sanhedrin trial, events Rabbi Blech says that a Pope declared to be a sin to portray), detractors point to extrapolations, such as interactions between Pilate and Claudia which are used to bring up Gospel-derived staples: Pilate's hand being forced and Claudia's sense of foreboding.  Unlike the written medium, movies often need to replace narration with expository scenes.

Meacham ironically appealed to the gospel narratives for historical evidence --  Pilate's sign on the cross and the release of Barabbas -- to prove that Pilate had nothing in his mind other than exacting Roman justice on the seditionist Jesus.  It never seems to occur to him that had Pilate been forced to execute the one Messiah that was preaching forgiveness instead of rebellion so as to do the Temple elite's dirty work for them, hanging "King of the Jews" on his cross instead of "Insurrectionist" was a pointed way to spite them.  

Maybe the brutal prefect would have rather not executed an innocent (and recently popular) gadfly prophet who advocated praying for one's enemies and saved the wrath of Rome for the ones actually stirring up the  people against the Romans?  Just a thought.  As Meacham indirectly notes, the Pilate of the Gospels certainly doesn't recoil from executing Barabbas or the accused men that die next to Jesus.  As unthinkable as it may be now, could it be that the evil Roman despot actually was troubled by something he saw in the young rabbi's eyes?   Could he have been spooked by his wife's dreams, and thought that he might be executing the son of a god?

If narrative inconsistencies between the gospel accounts give us pause, it would seem that the "observant Episcopalian" like Meacham might have had a more nuanced view than simply that the ultimate arbiters of truth be tenuous cultural sensitivities and historical inferences -- since, it would seem, there is no fundamental factuality to any of the gospel sources in his opinion. Which makes me wonder:  Was the phrase "observant Episcopalian" an evasion of the question of whether a believing Christian had been consulted on this issue?

Meacham suggests that it is highly unlikely that Jesus popularity could drop so precipitously in such a short time.  While there are things in the NT narratives that suggest a lot of rabble-rousing against the followers of Jesus following his death, the very political situation that Meacham describes makes it seem likely that the sight of the beaten Jesus may have worked against him.  Meacham seems to underestimate how much the height of Jesus' popularity in Jerusalem was based on the people's hopes of a liberated country.  Many may have felt that a man who let the people call him "Son of David" was either a fraud (as many Pharisees had been saying) or might reveal his glory when faced with certain death.

Either way, an honest insurrectionist like Barabbas gave them more hope than a false Messiah whose powers suddenly dried up under the Roman scourge.  It wasn't Barabbas that was welcomed into the City of David on palm leaves.  So fixed was the desire for a glorious political liberation in their imagination that the insolent thief crucified next to Jesus (which Meacham points out may well have been a freedomfighter and rioter) embodies this attitude perfectly.  The Book of Acts (the sequel to the Gospel of Luke) gives us the impression that had their hearts not been hardened against the ways of their God, they would have recognized when the very heart of the Torah walked as a man among them, and would have responded differently.  The Gospel of John states that Jesus lost many Judean followers in his final days by pointing out that their hearts were full of hatred and murder.  Moments after they are told that their murderous hearts reveal their true spiritual parentage, his erstwhile followers look for stones to stone him to death.

Of course, what came out of the Passion controversy most clearly was that critics tried to bully Christians into revising their canonical accounts and people reflexively turned on the film in a demonstration of how modern, fair, and, ahem, rational they were.  Charles Krauthammer explains,

Why is this story different from other stories? Because it is not a family affair of coreligionists. If it were, few people outside the circle of believers would be concerned about it. This particular story involves other people. With the notable exception of a few Romans, these people are Jews. And in the story, they come off rather badly.

"With ... the exception of a few Romans," it is a family affair of coreligionists, Mr. Krauthammer.  "His own received him not."  Any other interpretation is its own sort of revisionism, seeing the story through the lens of a different passion play: One in which the Roman Church puts the Jews to death.  This is the passion play that secularists and haters of Christianity want to replay year after year, to stir up a very specific hatred -- anti-Christian hatred.  On the side of evangelicals and fundamentalists there is very little interest in turning the Passion into a Two Minutes Hate of Abraham's descendants.  These evangelicals are, I believe, right in treating the natural descendants of Abraham as a sort of extended family.  As our canon says, those who are "saved by faith" are a branch grafted onto an ancient olive tree.

The gospel narratives, by and large, is not a story that "involves other people."  In the two books of the NT that contain almost all references to "the Jews," the persecution depicted is against primarily Jewish converts to Jesus' Way by coalitions of Judaic practitioners (as well as by pagans) who agree on little other than how much they hate Jesus and his followers, and who conspire to convince Romans that Jesus-followers are troublemakers.   As more and more Gentile followers became part of this Jesus phenomenon, this animosity got directed at them as well.

It is as misplaced to blame today's Jewish people for the early persecution of Christians as it is to blame modern Christians for medieval times.  William Lane Craig takes note:

Thus, we see in the NBC special even a conservative scholar like Craig Evans say, “The Romans crucified Jesus.” What? Are all Romans to blame for the crucifixion of Jesus? Did Cicero crucify Jesus? Did Tacitus crucify Jesus? This is painting with as broad a brush as someone who incautiously says, “The Jews killed Jesus.”

As broad a brush as someone who talks about what "the Christians" did during the Crusades? during the Inquisition?  what "the Muslims" did under Tamerlane?  what "the Japanese" did to Nanking?  what "the Germans" did in the concentration camps?  what "the whites" did in the South?  what "the Israelis" have done to Palestinians?

What Krauthammer and many others have implied is that the only passion play allowed is one that is about a debt of blood, one laid against "the Christians." And what's even more amazing is that "this story that has a story" (as Krauthammer put it) goes back to the earliest times, back when the Way of Jesus was improbably uniting Jews and Gentiles in a movement of nonviolence and love, and a celebration of covenant and Torah values.

Our "people" as Krauthammer rather ludicrously frames them, were united in forbearance of persecution.  And for fear that this story puts the Jewish people as a whole "in a bad light," all that is asked is for the story to be rewritten so that "the Romans" are principally to blame.  Why wasn't it enough for Gibson to remove the "his blood be upon us" line from the subtitles?  Because the problem the progressives have is with the entire New Testament story.

As one rabbi reported, the Christian person weeping next to him obviously was being moved with deep religious emotion and not imbibing the various anti-Semitic messages he was reading into the film.  Why did Christians see a completely different movie?  Because the minority of Jews in the story that love Jesus are who we want to be like, while the majority that ultimately reject him represent what humanity is, what we are, without the direct inner guidance from the Father of Lights.  Paul warned his Gentile disciples to view this hostile majority with the attitude of "there but for the grace of God go I."

The various attempts that were made over the centuries to use Christian scripture to justify persecution of the descendants of Isaac and Jacob are abominations, blasphemies even.  Where at one time, "the name of God was blasphemed among the Gentiles because of" the chosen people, now the name of Jesus has been blasphemed among the Jewish people because of Gentiles acting wrongly in the name of Jesus.   What an irony, a sad, sad irony.  What a travesty of Christlikeness.  Taking revenge for the One who laid down his life willingly?

In the ten years since Passion, what can we say?  Jim Caviezel believes that his career has suffered because of it, and in spite of Robert Downey Jr.’s support, Gibson’s offenses have been less pardonable in Hollywood's eyes than Roman Polanski’s sins.  The new Son of God movie will likely portray Pilate more harshly and less "Hamlet-like," but since the Gospels present a story of a cornerstone rejected by the builders, of a vineyard owner's son who was killed by the "wicked tenants," there will still be cause for revising the Christian canon in the name of sensitivity and anti-discrimination.  Roma Downey likely won't have a sordid parental history for conspiracy theorists to conjecture about, as they did with Mel Gibson, so we may hear instead of "unconscious" and "subtle" anti-Semitism.  Maybe the shifting meanings of "literal" will be resurrected after these long ten years.

Daniel Boyarin writes about how it is only after Nicea that the Resurrection celebration stops being a Christianized Passover holiday and is aligned with the Roman pagan calendar.  Krauthammer and many more like him are reading the New Testament (if they are reading it all) through the revisionism of Roman institutionized church, and therefore cannot see that the NT narratives are not a story about a "people" called  "Christians" and also about "other people" (Jews) as well, but a story where the Christians were mostly a Jewish minority, zealously and proudly persecuted by a Judaean majority, and at their instigation, by the Roman authorities as well.  This results in Krauthammer and the majority of modern Jews tending to not see Yochanan (John), Ya'akov (James), Shim'eon Kepha (Simon Peter), Miriam (Mary) and Shaul (Paul) as Israelites but as part of a wholly "other" people who have a grudge against "the Jews."  The entire history of the papacy is thus anachronistically projected onto the Hebrew disciples of Jesus, so that a sort of blood libel can be held against Christian belief itself.

What has likely not changed in the last ten years are "the wounds we thought had healed" and the "currents of hostility toward Christianity that one would have hoped had disappeared."  After admitting himself that he personally agrees with Meacham's view, Orthodox Jew Michael Medved summarized the situation:

In any event, Jewish organizations must not attempt to take responsibility for deciding what Christians can and cannot believe. If those community agencies insist that Christian traditionalists must disavow their own sacred texts because of the shameful persecutions of the past, then they force a choice between faithfulness to scripture or amiable relations with Jews. The notion that committed Christians cannot have one without spurning the other does no service to Jewish communal interests, nor to the harmony of the larger community.

Of course, Medved was not saying this revisionism was an entirely Jewish effort.  All sorts of secularists and political correctness police were involved in this.  Perhaps the greatest irony in this effort to deconstruct of the gospels is that those who understand the gospels in terms of reductive explanations of political motives do not see their own revised narrative as a social construction that reflects their own desires and aims.

Woodward called Gibson's "nearly fatal flaw" the film's lack of context for the Judaic religious establishment's hatred for Jesus.  On the contrary, I think that might have done more harm than good in a movie that is, as Woodward admitted, much more about Jesus than about them.  The context given is minimal but telling.  In one of Gibson's many cinematic liberties he has Caiaphas explain in front of Pilate why they are asking for Barabbas: "He is a false messiah! An impostor!"  And there Jesus stands looking utterly defeated by the Romans the Messiah is expected to defeat.  Later, at the cross, Caiaphas is right in front of Jesus daring him to prove his Messianic status.  He is not laughing and enjoying it like the Romans are doing.  He is putting on a performance.  He is educating his fellow Judeans in a teachable moment.  And Gibson has him close enough to Jesus to hear his prayer for forgiveness.  In case we are tempted to think that Jesus is praying only for his Roman tormentors, the crucified thief tells Caiaphas, "He prays for you!" Gibson goes out of his way to tell the audience that Jesus does not want even Caiaphas' sins held against him!!

Some people are too busy reliving medieval passion plays and villainizing Christianity to see, let alone explain, these things.  More than one article echoed Rabbi Blech's inaccurate observation that only Jews were depicted as bloodthirsty.  Another article saw some sinister (and medieval!) significance in Satan walking among the Sanhedrin as they watch Jesus being flogged.  One writer spoke of the violence of the scourging that occurs "all while the Romans and the Jews cackle wildly."

Either that writer did not watch the film or he let his imagination run wild as he took notes.  Not a single Jew laughs or even smirks during that whole scene, let alone cackles.  Caiaphas looks Stoic, not cracking a smile.  Several of the Sanhedrin, in fact, get squeamish and visibly upset and the whole Sanhedrin leave before the scourging becomes truly barbaric.  From then on, Romans, with the exception of Claudia, revel in his suffering, cackling and squealing with joy.  And Satan is seen once again, this time strolling among the Roman soldiers.  It is as though Gibson took pains to make the scene in direct opposition to a medieval passion play.

All of it was lost on people that see exactly what they expect to see.  It is no wonder that one of the more reasonable critics referred to "the Scripture-lacking and symbol-impaired commentators."  To ignore the uniformly Israelite context and instead view this as a medieval passion play, one has to not see the disciples, not see the parables, not see the values -- to not see the forest for the weeds beneath the trees.  One article spoke of Jesus' triumphant and purposeful stride out of the tomb in the movie, as a "hard expression" bent on revenge.  As Jesus said, "Seeing, they see but do not perceive."

Rabbi Blech stated emphatically that "the villains are clearly identified as Jews ... it's just Jews whom the movie clearly depicts as the scoundrels."  He says, "I am told [hearsay?] it is almost impossible to walk out of the theater without hating the villains."  He certainly wasn't told that by Rabbi Yoffie.  Yoffie didn't just look at the movie, where he mostly saw what he expected to see; he looked at the audience.  They weren't getting riled up for a pogrom; they were weeping at the forgiveness, mercy, and gentle love of a Savior.  Yet, Blech ominously called Passion "a film that makes the Gospels seem almost tame in their depiction of Jewish evil."  He said Gibson's film made those awful gospels look good.  (I'm not convinced he read the Gospels any more than he watched the film.)  Commentators had mostly (except for a few derisive comments about Caviezel's prosthetic nose) ignored the fact that this allegedly anti-Semitic film has one of the most Semitic Jesuses ever.

The typical evangelical does accept as true in some very real sense that Jesus was rejected by his people, by God's covenant people.  Those that are offended at the evangelical acceptance of this narrative misunderstand the mindset of the typically Judaeophilic evangelical.  Michael Medved may think history tells us that this narrative "can be dangerous," but this rejection is not seen as a debt against the Jewish people living now or then;  this is seen as an event used by God to pave the way for all debts to be paid by His Suffering Messiah, "in Whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile." "For where sin abounded, grace did much more abound."  And it still abounds.