MEL GIBSON'S THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
A Roman Catholic View
By Fr. John T. Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union
The continuing controversy over the script of Mel Gibson's yet-uncompleted film, "The Passion of the Christ," has raised important questions about how Christians are to understand the differing Gospel narratives about the circumstances of Jesus' death.
Church authorities, including Pope John Paul II, have clearly acknowledged the sufferings that misinterpretations of the passion narratives have caused the Jewish people over the centuries. In 1997, the pope said that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability (for the crucifixion) have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people."
The pope underscored the importance of this on the First Sunday of Lent, 2000, when he asked forgiveness from the Jews for the hatred and death they have experienced as a result of those teachings. A few months later, he placed these words of apology in the Western Wall during his historic trip to Jerusalem: "God of our Fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations; we are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these (Jewish) children of yours to suffer. Asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the covenant."
It is in this spirit and with Pope John Paul II's historical perspective on anti-Semitism, which he has termed sinful in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, that we must approach any personal reading of the Gospel's passion narrative or dramatizations of these sacred texts.
The first point we need to understand is that the Gospel writers were not historians in the modern sense of the term. Rather, they were interpreting Jesus' ministry, death and resurrection from varying religious perspectives. Hence they felt free to utilize details about Jesus' life and death in ways that would enhance their primary theological perspectives. They were not especially concerned about what we would regard as chronological or historical accuracy.
Second, while Christians consider the Gospels to be divinely inspired, they also reflect the social and political circumstances of their day. We must try to determine these circumstances if we are to attain an authentically "literal" meaning of a text. Often, people who claim to be giving the "literal" meaning of a New Testament text are simply imposing their own uninformed interpretation on that text. That's why Catholic tradition has always been hesitant about reading the Bible without commentaries.
It was Pope Pius XII in 1943 who first affirmed the importance of scientific biblical interpretation for illuminating the original meaning of biblical texts. The Pontifical Biblical Commission has continued to underscore the importance of biblical interpretation several times since.
The late Vincentian Father Bruce Vawter, who taught for many years at DePaul University , once wrote that "the trial and death of Jesus have to be reconstructed rather than read from the Gospels." Scriptural scholars such as Vawter and official church documents make the point that the details of Jesus' death cannot be understood simply by reading the texts in isolation from their social context. Only with such background information can a person arrive at the "literal" meaning of these narratives.
It is in this context that the Catholic and Jewish scholars who examined the original script of Mel Gibson's projected film "The Passion of Christ"---myself included---have found it seriously wanting.
The working script we reviewed, as well as the rough cuts now being shown to select audiences, have as their major storyline a depiction of a cruel and vengeful high priest Caiaphas leading a cabal of hateful Jews to force a weak-kneed Pontius Pilate to put Jesus to death. In the end, they blackmail him into doing their dirty deed. But from biblical and historical scholarship we know that Pilate was a powerful tyrant who fully controlled the political situation. No way could the Jews of Palestine have blackmailed him.
He, not the Jewish leaders, was primarily responsible for Jesus' death. That is where the film is not in keeping with Vatican II and Catholic teaching. Gibson also relies on extra-biblical materials from the mystic Venerable Catherine Emmerich which are tinged with anti-Semitism. Certainly films can present Jesus' suffering and death in a powerful way. But they must remain faithful to the church's current understanding.
"The Passion of the Christ" does not. Gibson, in fact, rejects those teachings as well as modern biblical scholarship and thus stands outside of official Catholicism today.
Father John T. Pawlikowski, a Servite priest, is director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program of the Cardinal Joseph Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. A leading champion of Catholic-Jewish relations, he was one of nine Jewish and Catholic scholars who reviewed an early script of the movie. Most of the revisions they urged have not been implemented. This article originally appeared in the Catholic New World.