Documentation
from Christianity Today, March 2004
The Passion of Mel Gibson
Why evangelicals are cheering a movie with profoundly Catholic sensibilities.
by David Neff | posted 02/20/04
In the history of modern evangelical enthusiasms, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ seems to be joining WWJD bracelets and Promise Keepers' conferences as cultural markers. At first it seemed like it might just be a quirky art film: a film about Jesus' passion using only 
Aramaic and Latin—and with no subtitles.
But what started out as news of the weird has turned into a powerful and popular film that is likely to be a major milestone in cinematic history. Gibson has filmed the Passion with his trademark force—and for those whose ancient language skills are a bit rusty, he has added subtitles. In January, Gibson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that the film had already been scheduled to open on close to 3,500 screens—that places it squarely between Finding Nemo and Return of the King at their peak distribution last year. When the film opened on February 25, it was showing on 4,643 screens in 3,006 theaters.
Promoters have produced a Passion lapel pin and witnessing card. Endorsements have poured in from evangelical leaders like Focus on the Family president Donald Hodel and Harvest Crusades evangelist Greg Laurie. Public figures as diverse as
This evangelical enthusiasm for The Passion of the Christ may seem a little surprising, in that the movie was shaped from start to finish by a devout Roman Catholic and by an almost medieval Catholic vision. But evangelicals have not found that a problem because, overall, the theology of the film articulates very powerful themes that have been important to all classical Christians.
The vision thing
Mel Gibson is in many ways a pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic. He prefers the Tridentine Latin Mass and calls Mary co-redemptrix. Early in the filming of The Passion, he gave a long interview to Raymond Arroyo on the conservative Catholic network EWTN. In that interview, Gibson told how actor Jim Caviezel, the film's Jesus, insisted on beginning each day of filming with the celebration of the Mass on the set. He also recounted a series of divine coincidences that led him to read the works of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a late-18th, early-19th-century Westphalian nun who had visions of the events of the Passion. Many of the details needed to fill out the Gospel accounts he drew from her book, Dolorous Passion of Our Lord.
Here is one such detail from Emmerich:
"[A]fter the flagellation, I saw Claudia Procles, the wife of Pilate, send some large pieces of linen to the Mother of God. I know not whether she thought that Jesus would be set free, and that his Mother would then require linen to dress his wounds, or whether this compassionate lady was aware of the use which would be made of her present. … I soon after saw Mary and Magdalen approach the pillar where Jesus had been scourged; … they knelt down on the ground near the pillar, and wiped up the sacred blood with the linen which Claudia Procles had sent."
Gibson does not follow Dolorous Passion slavishly, and at many points he chooses details that conflict with Emmerich's account. But the sight of Pilate's wife handing a stack of linen cloths to Jesus' mother allows Gibson to capture a moment of sympathy and compassion between the two women, and the act of the two Marys wiping up Jesus' blood gives Gibson the opportunity to pull back for a dramatic shot of the bloody pavement.
Evil unmasked
Another detail picked up from Dolorous Passion is just as dramatically powerful, but much more significant theologically. Emmerich writes that during Jesus' agony in the garden, Satan presented Jesus with a vision of all the sins of the human race. "Satan brought forward innumerable temptations, as he had formerly done in the desert, even daring to adduce various accusations against him." Satan, writes Emmerich, addressed Jesus "in words such as these: 'Takest thou even this sin upon thyself? Art thou willing to bear its penalty? Art thou prepared to satisfy for all these sins?'"
Gibson shows Jesus being tempted by a pale, hooded female figure, who whispers to him just such words, suggesting that bearing the sins of the world is too much for Jesus, that he should turn back. And from under the tempter's robe there slithers a snake. In a moment of metaphorical violence drawn straight from Genesis 3:15, Jesus crushes the serpent's head beneath his sandaled heel.
These details from the film's opening sequence announce Gibson's acute consciousness of the cosmic battle between good and evil—between God and the devil—that is played out behind earthly scenes of violence against the innocent Jesus. Gibson's approach to evil impressed at least one expert: The Washington Post reported last July that The Exorcist author William Peter Blatty called the movie "a tremendous depiction of evil."
At the January pastors' screening at Willow Creek in
The Apostle Paul hinted at this fact in 2 Corinthians where he wrote that "Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light." Paul said we shouldn't be surprised then "if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness." C. S. Lewis had a similar insight, expressed in a letter to Arthur Greeves: "Evil usually contains or imitates some good, which accounts for its potency."
After the screening, I asked Gibson about his belief in spiritual warfare. "That's the big picture, isn't it?" Gibson replied. "The big realms are slugging it out. We're just the meat in the sandwich. And for some reason, we're worth it. I don't know why, but we are."
Gibson sensed spiritual battle on the set, as well. "Complications happened to block certain things," he said. "And the closer you are to a breakthrough point, the more vigorous it gets, so that you know when the opposition is at its greatest, you're close and you have to keep pressing on."
"That happened a number of times [in production], and it's happened a number of times since.… Production was tough. Post-production has been brutal. You name it, it's happened.… Whoa, the world goes into revolt!"
Getting personal
The world in revolt? That is, of course, the premise of the entire biblical story. Mel Gibson belongs to that group of Christians who believe we each need to personalize that fact. Not only is the world in revolt, but every human being—including Mel Gibson and David Neff—resists God and good. The visionary Emmerich wrote: "Among the sins of the world which Jesus took upon himself, I saw also my own; and a stream, in which I distinctly beheld each of my faults, appeared to flow towards me from out of the temptations with which he was encircled."
When Gibson is accused of making an anti-Semitic film (see Michael Medved's "The Passion and Prejudice"), he stresses that each of us is responsible for Christ's crucifixion. "For culpability," Gibson told a group of
That response hasn't mollified certain Jewish critics, but it does reveal a lot about Gibson. In an action deeply symbolic of his sense of culpability, Mel Gibson the director grabbed the mallet and spikes from the actor who was supposed to be nailing Jesus to the cross. The cameras kept rolling as Gibson wielded the hammer to show how he wanted the nails driven. The close-up cameo of Gibson's hands became part of The Passion.
Gibson also has a strong sense of personal salvation. He has a focused feeling, such as John Wesley possessed when he wrote in 1738 that "an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."
One reason for Gibson's personal sense of salvation is the way this project rescued him from himself. In his foreword to the Tyndale House book The Passion, Gibson says the film "had its genesis during a time in which [he] found [him]self trapped with feelings of terrible, isolated emptiness." He told the pastors at Willow Creek of his "emptiness … regret, despair, pain." At the time, a little over a decade ago, he had been neglecting his faith since he was 17—a hiatus of about 18 years. Gibson said that he had "always believed," but that he had only prayed when he found himself "in trouble." When you neglect prayer, he said, "you fall into chaos." And so he turned once again to God in prayer.
Contemplating God's wounds
When Protestants talk about prayer, they usually mean talking to God about what is on their heart and asking him to deal with life's difficulties. When Catholics talk about prayer, they mean those same things, but they tend to include as well certain practices of contemplation and meditation.
In "The Fountain Fill'd with Blood," Historian Chris Armstrong describes the medieval origins of Cross-centered devotion, which invited the believer to meditate on each separate event of Jesus' passion and each individual wound on his body. Long before evangelicals like Richard Foster began to experiment with guided imagery in prayer, those devotional practices also invited believers to place themselves in their imaginations into the biblical stories. These practices became the foundation for such widely practiced traditions as meditating on the Five Sorrowful Mysteries when saying the Rosary. The structure of Gibson's film conforms exactly to the list of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries: The Agony of Jesus in the Garden, the Scourging of Jesus at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death of Jesus. And it reveals the way that this film is for Gibson a kind of prayer.
In the foreword to The Passion, he writes that the film "is not meant as a historical documentary. … I think of it as contemplative in the sense that one is compelled to remember … in a spiritual way, which cannot be articulated, only experienced." This contemplative devotion has been intensified during the filming of The Passion of the Christ. "This work has turned up the heat" on his prayer life, Gibson told the pastors at Willow Creek. "The past three years forced me to focus heavily on the Passion."
"I went to the wounds of Christ in order to cure my wounds," he told TODAY'S CHRISTIAN WOMAN, a CT sister publication, by e-mail. "And when I did that, through reading and studying and meditating and praying, I began to see in my own mind what he really went through. … It was like giving birth: the story, the way I envisioned the suffering of Christ, got inside me and started to grow, and it reached a point where I just had to tell it, to get it out."
At the Willow Creek event, Hybels asked Gibson why so many religious films are, by comparison, not very good. "I didn't try to make a religious film," Gibson said by way of response. "I tried to make something that was real to me."
All of this—the sense of one's own sins being responsible for the Crucifixion, the sense of the enormous weight of the world's sins on the Savior's shoulders, the horror of the suffering that Christ endured, the way the story grew inside Gibson—accounts in part for the film's bruising bloodiness. The extremes of brutality are not simply a translation of Gibson's secular visual vocabulary from Lethal Weapon and We Were Soldiers into the sacred sphere.
"The enormity of blood sacrifice," as he put it, is important to Gibson. Unlike liberal Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) who deny the importance of the shedding of blood in the Atonement, Gibson grasps firmly the sacred symbol of blood and spatters the audience's sensibilities with it. Never one to run from a compelling symbol, Gibson presents the truth of Leviticus 17:11 in all its power: "The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life."
Some will feel simply overwhelmed by the display, but many traditional Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) will see this film and feel Gibson has sprinkled them with the saving blood just as the Israelite priests sprinkled the atoning blood on the altar. For, as Gibson puts it, "In the Old Covenant, blood was required. In the New Covenant, blood was required. Jesus could have pricked his finger, but he didn't; he went all the way."
What impresses Mel Gibson is the total surrender of Jesus to the Father's will in order to be an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the human race. What rewards Mel Gibson is the silence, the introspection, the realization, and the remembering that people do. (Gibson pointed out that the Greek word for truth literally means "un-forgetting.") After seeing the movie, one person simply said, "I'm sorry. I forgot."
David Neff is editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and editorial vice president of Christianity Today International.
Photos by Ken Duncan. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. © Icon Distribution. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
"The Passion of Mel Gibson": March 2004, Vol. 48, No. 3, Page 30
Mel Gibson's 'Passion': Jesus and the Gospels
Rev. Michael Reilly
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Some of Mel Gibson's biggest critics are Catholic theologians.
Believe it or not, they are "accusing" him of following the Gospel accounts of Jesus' passion too closely.
In other words, Gibson hasn't consulted them to receive their guidance and direction in understanding the Gospels.
According to some theologians, the Gospels are theological diatribes thoroughly lacking in historical value and accuracy.
Some theologians believe that the Gospels were written long after Christ's passion and therefore are more reflective of the community than they are of the actual events.
Interestingly, one of the main reasons for their later dating of the Gospels centers around the Jews. When Jesus lambastes the Pharisees in the Gospels, this is supposedly representative of a hostility that did not exist between Christians and Jews before 85 A.D., when the Christians were expelled from the synagogues.
I suppose these theologians discount the martyrdom of St. Stephen in 36 A.D. and the persecution of Christians carried out by
The earliest and most reliable sources available indicate that the Gospels were written by the apostles and apostolic men not long after the events took place.
St. Irenaeus, instructed by St. Polycarp, the disciple of John the Apostle, informs us that Matthew wrote his Gospel before the martyrdom of Peter and Paul in 64 A.D. and that Mark and Luke wrote at the time of their martyrdom. Modern theologians know better?
Likewise, there is no reason to believe that the evangelists in any way sacrificed accuracy to make a theological point.
Ultimately nearly everything we know about Jesus has been handed down by the four evangelists. If we don't believe what they wrote, why would we call ourselves Christian?
The Rev. Michael Reilly is the vice principal of
Archbishop Defends Mel Gibson's 'Passion'
Zenit.org
Saturday, May 31, 2003
This week Archbishop Charles Chaput devoted his column in the Denver Catholic Register to defending Gibson's movie from those who charge that a cinematic portrayal of Christ's passion and death could stir up flames of anti-Semitism.
"I find it puzzling and disturbing that anyone would feel licensed to attack a film of sincere faith before it has even been released," Archbishop Chaput writes. "When the overtly provocative 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was released 15 years ago, movie critics piously lectured Catholics to be open-minded and tolerant. Surely that advice should apply equally for everyone."
The column follows on the heels of a string of recent attacks on Gibson's film, culminating in an 18-page report of an ad hoc committee of the
The ad hoc scholar's group that produced the report was assembled by
The group's report, dated May 2, criticized everything from the size of the cross used for the crucifixion scene, to the languages spoken, to poor character development. The document's central complaint, however, is that "a graphic movie presentation of the crucifixion could reawaken the very anti-Semitic attitudes that we have devoted our careers to combating."
The report takes issue with director Gibson's decision to focus on Christ's passion rather than presenting a broader vision of "the ministry of Jesus, of his preaching and teaching about God's reign, his distinctive table companionship, his mediation of God's gracious mercy."
The report furthermore disapproves of the film's treatment of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' passion as historical facts. According to the signers, Gibson disregards exegetical theories that the Evangelists' accounts represent later efforts of the Christian community to "shift responsibility from Pilate onto Jewish figures," and accuses the script of utilizing the four distinct passion narratives "without regard for their apologetic and polemical features."
Yet Gibson has recently received support from the Jewish sector as well.
Writing in the
Such an account absolves the Jews from complicity in Jesus' death and places the blame on the shoulders of the Romans. "Our loyalty should be to Judaism and to truth," Klinghoffer writes, "not to an officially sanctioned, sanitized version of Judaism or the truth – which may be neither Jewish nor true."
The ad hoc group report follows on a series of stories that appeared in different news media across
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, for example, denounced Gibson's film for its literal reading of the Biblical accounts of Christ's passion. According to Carroll, "Even a faithful repetition of the Gospel stories of the death of Jesus can do damage exactly because those sacred texts themselves carry the virus of Jew hatred."
Such opinions are not shared by other scholars in the field. Jesuit Father William J. Fulco, National Endowment for the Humanities professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at
In a recent Los Angeles Times article, Father Fulco points out that "the Jewish community portrayed in the film consists of people both sympathetic to Jesus and hostile to him, just as the Roman community is portrayed. Indeed, if anyone does not come off well in this film, it is the Roman community and governing establishment. ... I would be aghast at any suggestion that Mel is anti-Semitic."
This is not the first time the bishops' committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs has gone out on a limb in its interpretation of scriptural texts.
Last August, the committee published "Reflections on Covenant and
Cardinal William Keeler, the
Given that no one has yet viewed the film, Archbishop Chaput recommends prudence. "We'll get a chance to love or criticize 'The Passion' soon enough," he writes. "In the meantime, between a decent man and his critics, I'll choose the decent man every time – until the evidence shows otherwise."
James Hirsen, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Jan. 16, 2003
Mel Gibson stands out in
Gibson has really gone and done it this time. Some folks in the liberal establishment are extremely uncomfortable with the actor/director/producer's latest project. It turns out that his company has underwritten a film that Gibson himself is directing. The working title is "The Passion," and it's about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
This is completely unacceptable to some. Not only is this film not going to demean Christianity, as other flicks like "The Last Temptation of Christ" and "Jesus of Montreal" have done, but Mel is actually using Scripture as his guide and telling the literal truth.
"Tolerant" liberals can't stand for this type of material being disseminated. The anti-Christian types may have already begun their opposition research. In fact, it appears as if the snoop troops are out in full force.
Gibson went on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" and indicated that a print reporter is nosing around his family, friends and even his 85-year-old father. There's apparently an attempt to dig up some dirt in hopes of harming Mel and his project.
In answer to O'Reilly's questions, the filmmaker responded with the directness of a faith-filled individual.
Gibson referred to Christ's death as a "sacrifice willingly taken."
When speaking of those who might appreciate the film, Gibson said, "I think anybody that is in the know about Jesus as God – and they believe in that – realize that he was brutalized and that I'm exploring it this way." That's the statement of an unabashed believer in the deity of Jesus.
Gibson spoke of the actual suffering that will be displayed in the film in this way: "When you look at the reasons behind why Christ came – why he was crucified – he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability."
We all pretty much know this isn't the usual theology of
It looks like the worldview of some folks is seriously threatened by the combination of Gibson's talent and Christ's story. Whatever the case, it's a sure bet that a lot more Americans are grateful to Mel Gibson and won't take kindly to some lefty-led filth-finding expedition. Maybe it's time for such so-called journalists to get a new hobby. Or maybe even find religion.
