The Passion of Apostates: Salon.com on 'The Passion”

Note: The Salon interviewer’s questions are in bold. My comments are in brackets.

Where were the screenings?

There were two showings, and they were at the two premier modern suburban Evangelical churches in the country. One was at Saddleback Community Church in Orange County; the other, where I went, was at Willow Creek in Barrington, Ill.

Somebody told you it was a real red-neck, weirdo community, right?

[Well, of course. These are, after all, evangelical churches.]

This guy I know said he wouldn't set foot in there -- not without shots, at least.

[It's true. We fundies are infectious.]

These places are highly successful. [Willow Creek] is like a modern hotel conference center, with a food court ... the worship space is a huge auditorium, with multi-screens, that seats 4,500 people. As someone from a fairly sensible church, I really felt uneasy in the crowd. I could really see how church freaks some people out. I couldn't put my finger to it, but there was this atmosphere of giddiness and anticipation...

[I suppose “mainstream Episcopalians” have a sense of dread when they step into their churches.]

Star-struck craziness...?

Yeah, and also everyone there was white.

[Unlike the minority dominated Episcopalian church.]

Any identifiable clergy that I saw were male. There may have been female clergy, but it seemed to be male clergy with their wives in tow, or male clergy with their clergy buddies, or a lot of young male youth-leaders.

Do you think they were mostly Evangelical-style Christians?

I would think so.

[“Evangelical-style”? Makes it sound like we throw on our evangelicalism like a leisure suit. Fundie-wear for Christians.]

This film is being touted as the most factual representation of the crucifixion possible; Mel Gibson has called it the most authentic and biblically accurate film about Jesus' death.

It's absolutely not.

[Yeah, I don't remember the part about a commando raid in the original Gospels. If there was I would have paid more attention in Sunday School.]

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each give different views of the crucifixion.

Mel Gibson in his remarks after the film took a potshot at contemporary biblical scholarship -- he called scholars "revisionists" who think the gospel writers had agendas. They absolutely did have agendas.

[If you count telling the truth as an agenda then I guess he’s right.]

It's hard to know if [the film is] historically accurate, because Gospel writers were not trying to do an eyewitness report -- they were producing theological, practical documents of faith to answer questions that were appearing in their communities a half-generation and a generation after the death of Jesus. So it was as if the gospel writers themselves were movie makers. They were trying to interpret things in a way that their people could understand it. They're works of art, theological works, not eyewitness reports. But even a CNN eyewitness report has an agenda.

So, Mel Gibson seems to be arguing that the gospels are factual documents.

Exactly.

[Damn you, Mel. What were you thinking?]

And that all of the references to the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, were proof of fulfillment of prophesy, whereas it's most likely that in order to make sense of the events surrounding Jesus' death, the gospel writers searched the Hebrew scriptures to find things.

[Because, of course, if the they were proof that might imply that Jesus really was God. And of course that’s just too silly for a good San Francisco Episcopalian to believe.]

So, after the crucifixion, writers of the New Testament were looking back at the Old Testament and finding connective threads to make sense of what they were writing?

Yes, exactly, the way anybody looks into their own faith tradition to make sense of traumatic events in their own life. Also, some of these [New Testament authors and their communities] were already being persecuted themselves for their beliefs. So, the way to make sense of that is to show Jesus as a model of patience under suffering.

[Maybe I’m not reading the same Gospel because I don’t remember Jesus having much patience for stupidity.]

One of the ways [Gibson] tries to produce an air of authenticity in the film is to have the principals speaking Aramaic, the dialect of Hebrew that Jesus would have spoken, and the Roman soldiers and Pilate speaking Latin.
But very chillingly, in the interview after the showing, Mel Gibson said the reason that he had [his cast] speaking those original languages -- and I didn't misinterpret him, because he told a long story to illustrate it –

[Warning: Gibson’s statement is so shocking, so very chilling that if you are pregnant or have a heart condition you might want to skip ahead. Small children should also be asked to cover their eyes.]

…he said, "If I was doing a film about very fierce, horrible, nasty Vikings coming to invade a town, and had them on their ship with their awful weapons, and they came pouring off the ship ready to slaughter -- to have them speak English wouldn't be menacing enough."

[What! Vikings that don’t speak English! Okay, Mel, I’m all for freedom of speech but you’re carrying it too far, man!]

How did that hit you?

I almost puked.

[Personally, I was so shocked that I wet myself a little.]

It was so xenophobic: The good guys speak English; the bad guys speak these other languages.

[Wait a second, did I miss something? Where does Mel say the good guys speak English. And why is Mel afraid of the Xenos?]

It wasn't a consistent view, because in the film Jesus was speaking the same language as his tormentors, …

[Huh? Wouldn’t that be a consistent view? I guess it’s inconsistent if you are trying to put words into Mel’s mouth.]

…but even so, I think it was meant to cause confusion and awe in the audience,...

[I’m a bit confused and awed myself.]

… to have these horrible people speaking either a Semitic or an ancient language like this.

[By “horrible people” is he referring to Jesus and his disciples? The Xenos? Who? But he does have a point. Hey Mel, this is America not Australia. In our movies we speak English.]

Did you feel like that the use of these ancient languages was a veiled anti-Semitic comment?

Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim.

[Hold on a second. Having a character speak in the original language is anti-Semitic? So by speaking Aramaic Jesus was being offensive to the Jews? (By the way, Muslims weren’t even around in Jesus day. I’m not sure if they teach that in San Francisco but there are no Muslims in the Gospels.)]

Some of those words in Aramaic sound a little bit like Arabic -- Arabic is a Semitic language too.

[Um, yeah. And words in Latin sound a bit like Spanish -– Spanish is a Romance language too. So when Pilate was speaking Latin was he being anti-Mexican?]

In the film, it came off like nasty foreigners were doing this thing to our beautiful Jesus.

[Wasn’t Jesus one of those “nasty foreigners” himself? Was he speaking English while the “bad guys” were speaking Aramaic?]

So when Mel Gibson said in the interview that the reason for the other languages was to highlight the brutality, that kind of freaked me out. I could see how it would work on an unsophisticated audience.
[We fundies are so unsophisticated that we can’t understand English much less
some Arabesque-Jewy sounding language.]

It's probably the same feeling that people in Guantánamo Bay have, having had soldiers barking at them in English for two years.

[Living at Camp X-Ray is like sitting through a Mel Gibson movie? Have you no mercy, Mr. Ashcroft? Are you not human?!]

Did you feel in the storytelling there were any particularly glaring omissions or otherwise historically inaccurate stuff?

Not really, except that Jesus' crucifixion was made too singular.

[Yeah, what’s up with that? What about all the other guys getting executed that day? Whose going to tell their story? Somebody get me Michael Moore on the phone…]

This was an ordinary event.

[I knew SF was a rough town but if deicide is an ordinary event I definitely won’t be vacationing there this summer.]

Jesus was one of dozens of insurrectionists that the local Roman occupiers would have crucified, but [Gibson] tried to make his suffering especially agonizing and horrible. That was the other subtext -- I thought there was an unspoken assumption that somehow, for Jesus' death to have meaning to believers, it had to be more horrible than any other kind of suffering and death. The film doesn't really say that, but that's the idea, and that's why it has an "R" rating -- for the violence. The protracted scourging.

[Note to Mel: You might want to cut out all that violence stuff. A PG-13 version of the crucifixion would probably sell more tickets.]

You felt it was gratuitous violence?

I thought it was sickening. At the screening they were handing out boxes of Kleenex -- they should have handed out barf bags.

[The smell got to ya? Yeah, those fundies can get pretty ripe after a few hours in a theater.]

Oo! Oooooo!

[What’s wrong? Do you get a whiff of a fundie too?]

There was no reason for this [violence], spiritually or theologically. Do you remember in the movie "Gladiator" that short shot where he comes home to find his wife and family crucified, and there was also a report that she had been sexually assaulted beforehand? It was brutal and ugly and horrible, and you didn't need 20 minutes of blood flow to get the message across.

[Good point. And if Maximus had risen from the dead “Gladiator” might have won a few more Oscars.]

I thought "The Passion" was really perverse and really depraved.

[This would probably be a good time to point out again that this minister lives in San Francisco. I can’t even imagine what his “perverse and depraved” threshold pegs out at. And if “The Passion” is worse than that…]

There's a lot of criticism against the film that it gives a bad picture of Jews -- I think it gives a worse picture of Christians.

[There were Christians in the movie too? Christians, Muslims, Xenos. Mel definitely needs to do some more research before his next historical flick.]

Holding this up as somehow emblematic of something central to our belief -- this preoccupation with both sin and blood sacrifice -- is just absolutely primitive.

[Sin? Blood Sacrifice? How passé. That stuff is so ‘70’s (A.D.)]

The violence is literally gut-wrenching. My pious mom was there and she felt a knot in her gut from the violence, but she also felt the movie was poorly made. She called it "plodding."

[Gut-wrenchingly plodding, huh? Was Ashton Kutcher in the movie too?]

[Cackling] How old is your mom?

She's 76. She was there for the star power. She definitely wanted to see Mel Gibson. That was the other scary thing about the event -- to have 4,500 Christian leaders in one room who were just star struckand gaga.

[4,500 star struck, gaga, funky Christian in one room. The mind reels.]

Do you think this film has the potential to reignite the charge of deicide against the Jews?

Oh, I think it definitely could. It made a big deal of Pilate trying to save Jesus, which doesn't appear in all the Gospels.

[Was Pilate one of the commandos?]

In the version you saw, did the Jewish priest Caiaphas intimidate Pontius Pilate into going along with the Crucifixion?

Yeah, pretty much.

[Those Romans are so easily intimidated.]

Scholars are objecting to this section and saying it distorts the fact that the Romans were the occupying power.

If people want to read something sensible about this whole thing, Raymond E. Brown -- he died about a year ago -- was a great, great Catholic scripture scholar. He wrote a mega-work called "The Death of the Messiah" in 1994 -- two volumes, 1,600 pages. But then he digested [it] down and did a little tiny popular work, a $5 paperback, 71 pages, called "A Crucified Christ in Holy Week." I think that would be the sanest possible book anyone could ever read.

[From 1,600 pages down to 71? Wow. That’s impressive. Too bad we can’t cut this interview that short. Oh well, maybe we can cut out a few non-essential paragraphs.]

…

So, Mel was reverting back to Book of Jeremiah, burn-in-a-lake-of-fire, angry God of Abraham stuff?

Oh, yeah. If you believe in monotheism, there is only one God. There's not an Old Testament God and a New Testament God. And there's not a Muslim God and a Christian God. To Mel Gibson's credit, afterward in the interview -- the auditorium got pretty quiet; I almost got up and cheered -- he said, "I believe that through the merits of Jesus' sacrifice, even the people of the Old Testament were all saved." So David is a saint, and Elijah is a saint. And even people who don't know Jesus are able to be saved, but through him. I know that sounds condescending, but it's still a fairly generous remark and that's really the best of Catholic tradition.

[Um, isn’t this what all Christians believe? Does anybody think that David and Elijah are going to hell because they didn’t say the “Sinner’s Prayer?”]

Still, the God Mel described then sounds like a God that is a lot more friendly than the one portrayed in the film.

I think ["The Passion"] was meant to be a shocker and a moneymaker. And I don't think it's going to make money, and I think that's why they've had to suck people in. At this showing, there was no room to not like the film. We were supposed to all like it. We were supposed to all be weeping into our Kleenexes. We were supposed to all see this as the greatest opportunity of all time, and then Lee Strobel, "former atheist," who wrote "The Case for Christ" and "The Case for Faith," said ["The Passion"] was "An anointed piece of art." That God "selected" Mel to do this.

[Well, God did select him for “Mad Max” so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch.]

That's spooky. Frank Rich made an interesting point in his New York Times column: that the audiences that have been selected to see this film before the release are all very conservative Christians like the Senate Republican Conference, the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, and Rush Limbaugh -- but it hasn't been shown to critics or Bible scholars or Jewish groups. Do you think Mel knows he has something to worry about, here?

I just don't think it's very well done.

[Maybe he should have changed the plot. Add something more upbeat, perhaps.]

I think if someone wants to get into some interesting cinematic treatments, they should go see "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" by Passolini. Or even the old Hollywood blockbusters.

[Or what about the Matrix? Neo was very Christ-like in that first one. And you have all the kung-fu stuff as well. (Note to Mel: Maybe you should edit in some martial arts scenes. Pit Jackie Chan against the Xenos or something.]

["The Passion"] reflects a very morbid kind of theology. If the idea is to just provoke, it may do that. I thought it was a lot of dull, unless you like watching protracted torture scenes.

[If I wanted a protracted torture scene I would just watch another Democratic Presidential debate.]

So you didn't feel like it was going to be a tool of great conversion or anything.

No, not at all. It's 100 percent Hollywood trash.

[Billy Graham can breath a sigh of relief. “The Passion” won’t be putting him out of work after all.]

There's so many stories that can illumine the meaning of suffering and redemption and forgiveness, and renewal of life, and they're not all in the Bible.

[Like the Lion King, for example. Now that was a conversion movie.]

What would be your advice for would-be moviegoers?

I'd say don't bother. I think it's a big bore.

[Jesus being tried, crucified, resurrected. Yawn.]

I think a 5-year-old who has to get cancer surgery and radiation and chemotherapy suffers more than Jesus suffered; I think that a kid in the Gaza Strip who steps on a land mine and loses two limbs suffers more; I think a battered wife with no resources suffers more; I think people without medical care dying of AIDS in Africa suffer more than Jesus did that day. I mean, I don't want to take away from that, but this preoccupation with the intensity of the suffering, I think, has no theological or spiritual value.

[Yeah, what’s with all this “Crucifixion is horrible” stuff? Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a gay woman trapped in a man’s body? Do you? No. Oh, well maybe that’s just my own cross to bear…]

Update: There's more. Here's part II of The Passion of Apostates.