Abstract

The Protocols of Mel Gibson

The author argues that Mel Gibson's film, "The Passion of the Christ," presents reactionary and stereotypical views of Judaism and Christianity. Gibson claims that there are good Jews and bad Jews in the movie, as in the Gospels. This is true, but disingenuous: In "The Passion," the high priest Caiaphas and his faction are not just bad, they fit neatly into ancient Christian stereotypes: They are rich, arrogant and gaudily dressed; they plot and scheme and bribe; they cleverly manipulate the brutal but straightforward Romans; they are gratuitously "cruel" and "hard-hearted," to quote Anne Catherine Emmerich, the nineteenth-century German nun whose visions of the Passion Gibson relied on for some of the more disgusting tortures he inflicts on Jesus. Physically, they are anti-Semitic cartoons. These visual characterizations follow not just the Oberammergau Passion Play that Hitler found so touching but a long tradition of Christian New Testament iconography in which the villains look Semitic and the heroes, although equally Jewish, look Northern European. Gibson claims he's only telling the story as written in the Gospels, which he calls eyewitness accounts. Yet when called on his inaccuracies and distortions, Gibson claims artistic license. Gibson adds considerably to the Gospels in ways that emphasize Jewish villainy. It's a mystery to me why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has given this crude and kitschy film a thumbs up. Even stranger is the enthusiasm for the film among Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists, who seem not to realize how specifically Catholic Gibson's theology is. "The Passion" is nondenominational bigotry: Jesus wept.