Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy

by Irwin, William, Gracia, Jorge J. E.

  So there is clearly a balance of sorts in how Jews are depicted in the film. Some of the leaders in the Sanhedrin and their supporters, along with the brutal Temple guards, are depicted as being very bad indeed, whereas other members of the Sanhedrin, along with many humble Jews, are quite supportive of Jesus. If the Gospels are accurate in these matters, the former were evil, while the latter were good, morally speaking.

  There is no anti-Semitism in this film detectable by an open mind and a plausible understanding of the nature and function of racism. Jews today ought to feel a sense of deserved pride in that many of their forebears were among the dissidents regarding the unethical treatment of Jesus, while the remainder of us ought not to condemn all Jews for what only a few cowards did. The evils committed by Caiaphas and his gang of supporters were not done because they were Jewish, but because of their own lack of moral character. As The Passion implies, Jews as a group are not to be blamed for the death of Jesus. Instead, those particular individuals who were most involved with Jesus’s unjust execution are to be blamed for it.

  If The Passion does display anti-Semitism and racism, perhaps it is in its portrayal of what some would argue is Jewish self-hatred in the way some of the most influential Jews of that time and place sought to destroy one of the greatest (and Jewish) liberators of human history. However, further argument and analysis would be required to establish this claim.

  Was Jesus Given Due Process?

  Jesus is provided only a semblance of due process in the film. The most powerful Jewish high priests plotted against him, and they held their own “hearing” of this allegedly “blasphemous” prophet before the Sanhedrin. Jesus was accused of both destroying the Temple and falsely claiming to be the Messiah prophesied in the Jewish Scriptures. Rather than bloody their own hands, the majority of high priests sought to have Roman government officials find him guilty and put to death. They eventually succeeded in having Jesus condemned, though the Romans found no sign of Jesus’s guilt. And when the Jewish leaders and their supporters were offered a choice between letting Jesus go free versus having Barabbas, a convicted killer, do so, the leaders and their followers chose the latter.

  Perhaps it was Jesus’s harsh preaching about the moral hypocrisy of those Jewish leaders (“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Matthew 23:23) that led them to despise Jesus. Perhaps it was the fact that Jesus’s life and teachings to the multitudes threatened their entire way of life. Perhaps it was Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple, a flagrant challenge to the authority of Jewish religious leaders. Perhaps they feared that Jesus would spark a violent and futile uprising against the Romans. Whatever the reason, they are vividly portrayed in the film as hating him so much that they demanded his crucifixion. And this for preaching a religious message that was in certain ways antithetical to the lives, message, and power structure of the Jewish religious authorities of the time.

  Even if Jesus’s words inflamed the passions of some, such that they were incited (perhaps unintentionally) to overthrow the Roman government or even the Jewish religious leadership in Jerusalem, it is unclear that the punishment inflicted on him was just or proportional to the damage that his words may have caused. Some scholars argue that Jesus was indeed a revolutionary, and was deemed such by Jewish religious authorities. This explains, they claim, why Jesus’s reply to Pilate’s question, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (Mark 15:2; Matthew 27:11; and Luke 23:3), appeared somewhat evasive: “You have said so” (Mark 15:3) or “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” (John 18:34). After all, one of Jesus’s followers Simon, was a member of a sect called “the Zealots,” that advocated violent resistance to Roman rule (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13). Indeed, if the Romans perceived Jesus as a potential revolutionary, Pilate might have been swayed by Jewish religious authorities to silence him. But even if Roman and Jewish governing authorities saw Jesus as a threat to their power, this does not justify their putting him to death, and so violently!

  Those of us who prize freedom of conscience and expression, as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, find the treatment of Jesus nothing short of morally blasphemous and evil. This is precisely why freedom of expression ought to be protected by a total separation of religion and state. Recall that Jesus himself is reported to have argued that people ought to render unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and unto God what is God’s. As depicted in The Passion, such a policy would have allowed the Roman government to tell those Jewish religious leaders to go to hell. For any religion that cannot cope with the freedom of expression of its adult members is a religion not worth having. When due process and fundamental human rights are violated as badly as they were in the case of Jesus, it is high time to question the very morality of those individuals and institutions directly responsible for the resultant evil. We would want to argue similarly if Moses, Mohammed, or Bertrand Russell were treated as Jesus is depicted as having been treated in Gibson’s film.

  Due process of law and freedom of expression are correctly regarded as basic human rights, and their violation—which the high priests in question carried out—cannot be permitted. Morally speaking, we can only hope that there is a just and fair God and that those most responsible for the unjust death of Jesus will receive precisely the treatment that Jesus received, but for eternity.

  Was Jesus given due process? We have scant information about Jewish criminal procedure in Jesus’s lifetime. But scholars have pointed out that many procedures that were in place two centuries later were not followed in Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin. Certainly the trial itself left itself open to manipulation by forces of evil which in this case led to an innocent person’s death. Morever, due process was clearly violated when, as depicted in the film, Jesus was beaten by Temple guards immediately after his arrest and on the way to his hearing before the Sanhedrin. However, even if Jesus did violate some religious norm, this would not entail that he was guilty of any moral wrongdoing—clearly these are not the same. For he might well have been on the side of truth in protesting an unjust religious norm. The evidence could not rightly convict Jesus even on religious grounds, so a policy that permitted Roman officials to free one convict each year allowed Jesus’s detractors to exchange his death for the liberty of a killer. Legal justice? Perhaps. Ethical? Absolutely not! The plotting against Jesus by the High Priest Caiaphas is a case of religion gone evil. Any self-respecting Jews today would do well to disavow such evil so as not to allow anyone to think for even a moment that they support it.

  In short, according to the Christian Scriptures, certain Jewish high priests were primarily responsible for the death of Jesus. If this is true, and Jesus was innocent of the charges brought against him, then the Jewish leaders in question bear the responsibility for the death of an innocent person, and are thus guilty of evil. This makes it all the more obvious that religious Jewish leaders today ought to disassociate themselves from the evil that was caused by some of their religious forebears.

  This is not to say that “the Jews ought to apologize for killing Jesus.” Genuine apologies can only be made by those who do wrong, or by those who truly represent them. And apologies can be genuinely accepted only by victims of wrongdoers, or those who truly represent the victims. Jews would need to apologize to Christians only if they as a whole still identified with the attitude of the high priests who were responsible for Jesus’s death. This is why the matter of disassociation is important. The failure of contemporary Jews to disassociate themselves from what happened to Jesus would lead many to think, rightly or wrongly, that Jews today align themselves with the moral evil of unjustly having Jesus put to death. In such a case, today’s Jews would not be apologizing for the death of Jesus caused by some of their forebears, as they cannot sensibly apologize for something they themselves did not do. Rather, they would be disassociating themselves from that evil act so in order to remove any question as to whether or not they support what was done to Jesus by Caiaphas and
his cowardly crew. We are often responsible for our failures to act, not just for our actions and attempted actions. It is incumbent on us to disavow, symbolically or otherwise, evils if for no other reason than to show the world that we take a stand against injustice wherever it raises its ugly head. It can also serve as a way of affirming our support for the person who was treated unjustly as well as demonstrating our solidarity with the communities with which the victim identified.

  Did the Punishment of Jesus “Fit the Crime”?

  This leads us to the issue of punishment. The Passion of the Christ depicts the death of Jesus in a most painful manner, and graphically so. Does the torturous and bloody death of Jesus imply anything one way or another about the justifiability of punishment—specifically capital punishment? Does the brutality that Jesus endured suggest that such punishment is inhumane and ought never to be practiced by a reasonably just society.

  One principle of punishment might be that those who unjustly punish others ought themselves to be made to suffer the very same kind(s) of punishment that others suffered unjustly. This would imply that many of the Jewish high priests should have been made to suffer the most horrendous forms of inhumanity. Perhaps there is a God who will be sufficiently just to make their proper suffering a reality in an afterlife. Consider Adolf Hitler, who did not remain alive to be tried and, if convicted, suffer what he genuinely deserved for his crimes against humanity. Some evildoers appear to escape justice in this life. But if there is a way to suffer at the hands of a just God, they will perhaps get what they deserve after all. I say “perhaps,” as it might turn out that God wrongfully forgives those who deserve harsh punishment. In which case, the universe is much better-off without a God. There is no room in a just world (or a world in which many are attempting to be just) for an unjust God.

  But Jesus’s unjust death does not imply that punishment itself, or severity in punishment, is necessarily unjust. What made Jesus’s punishment wrong was not that it was harsh, or that it led to his death. Rather, it was that Jesus was, as far as we know, completely innocent of anything that would have justified such punishment, or any punishment at all. One need not be an avid Christian to believe that this is so. The torture and death of Jesus imply nothing that would suggest that harsh punishment or capital punishment is unjust, unless, of course, it is administered to those who are undeserving. For there is a principle, The Unjust Punishment Principle, that suggests that those who unjustly punish others (or have others punished unjustly) ought to be made to suffer the harm they wrought on those innocents. In the case where someone is made to suffer torture (like crucifixion) or even death unjustly, those most responsible for the unjust punishment ought themselves to be punished in the same ways. This principle in turn assumes a principle of proportional punishment, as well as principles of responsibility for harmful wrongdoing that constitute a plausible conception of desert. How do we know what someone deserves? We know what someone deserves by calculating, however imprecisely, their responsibility for wrongful harm to others coupled with the degree to which they made another suffer harm. This ensures against both over-punishing and under-punishing wrongdoers.

  In short, even if it were true that blasphemy is morally wrong and that Jesus was a blasphemer, what moral right did anyone, even the leaders of the Jewish religious community, have to punish him at all, much less with torture and death? The most that reason would permit would be censorship in the Jewish religious community of which Jesus was a part, or perhaps expulsion from it, or perhaps even a Temple fine. But the punishment administered to Jesus by Roman soldiers, pressed ardently and incessantly by Caiaphas and his evil cohorts, was an unambiguous violation of the moral principle of proportionality in punishment. Apparently, even though Jewish religious norms permitted the stoning to death of blasphemers, Caiaphas was himself too cowardly to kill Jesus, or to have it done directly by members of his own religious community. This is understandable, however, since it is often the most hypocritical among us who attempt to hide their evils by getting others to carry out their foul deeds.

  Against the Death Penalty?

  Can the unjust execution of Jesus ground an argument against the morality of the death penalty itself, as some think? The answer to this question is “no.” Abuse does not negate proper use. More specifically, the unjust punishment of Jesus (or anyone else, for that matter) never nullified morally the proper punishment of persons, namely, those who deserve punishment. Jesus’s execution was unjust because he was innocent of having wrongfully inflicted any severe harm on others; he did not deserve to be punished. That capital punishment was unjustly administered to Jesus in no way implies that capital punishment per se is morally unjust. Surely the Jewish religious leaders who were responsible for the unjust punishment of Jesus deserved the most painful and bloody of deaths, and they serve as counterexamples to the simplistic claim that capital punishment per se is morally wrong. They, along with Hitler, Andrew Jackson, and a host of others, are among the most evil humans on record.

  In sum, The Passion of the Christ is not anti-Semitic or racist in any recognizable way. But I can understand how a viewer who does not pay proper attention to the details of the film might wrongly blame all Jews for the unjust death of Jesus. Since one ought not to blame artists for their audiences’ misunderstandings of their work, neither this film nor its director ought to be blamed for any anti-Semitism and racism that result from the lack of due diligence of audiences. Jesus was accorded due process, at least to some extent, although due process was violated in the sense that he was treated as being guilty until proven innocent. Those who are arrested, whether Jesus in ancient Jerusalem or African-Americans in the U.S. today, ought always to be treated as though they are innocent until they are, by way of proper due process, found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (criminal courts) or by the preponderance of the evidence (civil courts).

  Finally, does the abuse of Jesus count against capital punishment? Not unless the way he was treated, however unjustly, counts against various other stages and forms of punishment as well. Fault should not be found in the way Jesus was punished after such meager due process. Rather, blame should accrue to those who punished him unjustly. One lesson we learn from reconsidering the life and death of Jesus, as The Passion of the Christ does, is that religion itself does not hold the highest form of truth and justice. It is reason, and reason alone, that is capable of correcting those forms of religion that are so badly in need of reform.*

  SOURCES

  J. Angelo Corlett. 2003. Race, Racism, and Reparations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

  ———. 2004. Responsibility and Punishment. Second edition. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

  Joel Feinberg. 1970. Doing and Deserving. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  ———. 1980. Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  ———. 1992. Freedom and Fulfillment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  ———. 2003. Problems at the Roots of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Is just any criticism of a person truly racist? What is racism?

  2. What really is anti-Semitism?

  3. What sorts of rights ought to be upheld during due process, and why?

  4. Can religious or political leadership always be trusted? Why or why not?

  5. Can imposing the death penalty ever be the right thing to do, morally?

  * This essay is dedicated to my friend and former mentor, Joel Feinberg, who taught me to reason openly and without fear of finding truth and error wherever they might be.

  10

  The Passion of the Jew: Jesus in the Jewish Mystical Tradition

  ERIC BRONSON

  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

  —Psalm 42:3

  Who can forget the haunting opening to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ? Moviegoers are at once transported to a misty, moonlit night in the olive grove, as th
e camera slowly zooms in to the back of a shivering Jesus, his body convulsing to the sound of his own heavy breathing. The dialogue begins with the awakening of the disciples to Jesus’s inner torments. “I don’t want them to see me like this,” he painfully tells Peter. Then Jesus sets out alone again, this time to face down the snake of Satan in a scene fraught with spiritual aching. While the snake scene is not taken from the New Testament, the suffering in Gethsemane is familiar to most Christians. There Jesus’s soul is “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” (Matthew 26:38, Mark 14:34), and because of his anguish, “he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

  Why all this suffering? Many critics of the Passion have argued that throughout the movie, Gibson focuses too much on pain and torture, and not enough on developing the more redemptive and life-affirming aspects of Christianity. In his review for The New York Times, critic A.O. Scott stated that the Passion “is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’s final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath.” This criticism may hold some weight, but before a final judgment is reached, one must keep in mind that Gibson is heavily influenced by a tradition of mystical Scriptural interpretation. One thing not made clear in the movie is that, like the New Testament, Christian mysticism springs from Judaism and Jewish mysticism, which has long emphasized inner pain and turmoil in the tortuous journey to find God. Placing Jesus in the Jewish mystical tradition may help us understand the primary role of suffering in Gibson’s interpretation of Jesus’s life and death.

  First of all, we need to continuously remind ourselves that Jesus was Jewish. Although his faith isn’t in any serious dispute, Jesus’s religious conviction has caused a tremendous amount of discomfort for both Jews and Christians around the world. Jews often downplay Jesus’s Judaism. Even though it is an unofficial Jewish tradition to memorize a list of hundreds of celebrities that have at least an ounce of Jewish blood, Jesus rarely gets mentioned. Jewish comedians have long poked fun at the Jewish naming ritual. Think of Adam Sandler’s “Hannukah Song” in which the three stooges, Captain Kirk, and even baseball player Rod Carew (“he converted”) are credited for their Jewishness. With such a time-honored practice, one would expect that Jews would freely list Jesus as one of their own. If Jews still heap praise on singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, who denied his faith, and comedian Woody Allen, whose personal ethics is not exactly borrowed from a Jewish context, why not acknowledge Jesus?