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By Geza Vermes Friday February 27, 2004 The Guardian I am still in a state of shock having sat through two hours of almost uninterrupted gratuitous brutality, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I hope I will never be obliged to see something as dreadful again. Gibson's Jesus is a noble figure and Pontius Pilate a well-intentioned weakling. The Roman soldiers, who do most of the violence, are pictured as sadistic beasts and the Jewish chief priests as self-satisfied smugs who enjoy the humiliation of Jesus. Gibson says his is a correct representation of the Passion and that his movie has been "directed by the Holy Ghost". The crucifixion of Jesus can be considered in three distinct ways. The theological view is simple. Jesus, the Son of God, sacrificed himself for the sins of mankind and each individual must feel personally guilty for crucifying him. Old-fashioned Christians also hold that the Passion story is to be taken literally from the Last Supper, through the arrest, trial and condemnation of Jesus for blasphemy, to his handing over by the Jewish high court to the Romans on a charge of rebellion. The Jews and Caiaphas, their high priest, appear the villains of the story. They take upon themselves and on their children the blame for killing the Son of God. The doctrine of deicide, into which the traditional perception of the Passion story twisted itself, is considered the chief source of Christian anti-Judaism. Leaving aside these non-scholarly approaches, how do the New Testament accounts of the last day of Jesus appear in the light of Jewish and Roman history of the first century? Examined with expert eyes, basic questions arise concerning the purpose of the narratives, the identity of the readership for which they were written, and the broader historical setting. To answer these the Gospels demand to be interpreted. The four Gospels do not agree. The traditional picture of the Passion, which underlies the film, has resulted from a selective reading of them. In the first three Gospels, all the events happen on the feast of Passover, a most unlikely situation; in John (with greater probability) on the previous day. In John there is no trial at all, only an interrogation of Jesus by a former high priest, Annas, with no sentence pronounced. By contrast, Mark and Matthew speak of a night session of the Sanhedrin at which Jesus is found guilty of blasphemy by Caiaphas and condemned to death. But a court hearing in a capital case on a feast day is contrary to all known Jewish law. Mark and Matthew refer to a second meeting in the morning, which is the only one alluded to in Luke. In the morning Caiaphas and his court abruptly drop the religious charge and deliver Jesus to Pilate on a political indictment of rebellion. The Roman penalty for sedition was crucifixion, and Jesus, like thousands of Jews before and after him, died on the cross. The Gospels postdate the events by 40-80 years. They were all compiled after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. By then the large majority of the readers envisaged by the evangelists were non-Jews. After their revolt against Rome (AD 66-73/4), antipathy towards the Jews grew in the Roman empire, and this affected the depiction of Jesus for new non-Jewish Christians. To admit to them that Rome was fully to blame for the death of the crucified Jewish Christ would have made the fresh converts politically suspect. Christians were an unpopular sect. Hence outside Palestine the Gentile-Christian spin doctors moved in and played down the Jewishness of Jesus and his original disciples. He and his apostles were no longer considered as Jews. We find also an obvious effort to exonerate Pilate. The New Testament portrait of a vacillating governor of Judea is totally at odds with the historical truth. The real Pilate could not be bullied by the Jewish high priest. He was his boss and could sack him at will. All the reliable first-century sources depict Pilate as a tyrant who was guilty of numerous executions without trial and unlawful massacres. He was justly dismissed from office and banished by the emperor Tiberius. As for the condemnation of Jesus for blasphemy, no Jewish law would qualify someone a blasphemer simply for calling himself the Messiah or the like. So the death sentence pronounced on Jesus by Caiaphas was an error in law. There are strong arguments in favour of the claim (against John's assertion of the contrary) that first-century Jewish courts could carry out capital sentences for religious crimes without Roman consent. Even Roman citizens risked instant execution if caught by Jews in the Temple. The abandonment of the case for blasphemy and its replacement by a charge of rebellion is left unexplained in the Synoptic Gospels. But the reasoning that underlies the political accusation is easy to understand. It was the duty of the Jewish leadership, Caiaphas and his council, to maintain order in Judea. Caiaphas imagined that Jesus was a potential threat to peace. Jerusalem, filled with pilgrims at Passover, was a powderkeg. A few days earlier, Jesus had created a commotion in the merchants' quarter in the Temple, when he overturned the stalls of the moneychangers. He could do it again. Jesus had to be dealt with in the interest of the whole nation in order to forestall massive Roman retaliation. Caiaphas and his council had the power to punish him, but passed the buck. They therefore bear the blame for surrendering Jesus to the Romans, a fact attested by all four Gospels and confirmed by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. The Roman writer Tacitus also asserts that Jesus was crucified by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Hence the responsibility for the crucifixion was Pilate's, and ultimately that of the Roman empire he represented. So, can the New Testament as such be blamed for fomenting anti-semitism? A nuanced reply is that its stories about Jesus were not originally conceived as anti-Jewish: they were meant to describe a family row between various Jewish groups. But in non-Jewish surroundings they were liable to receive an anti-Jewish interpretation. Anti-semitism is not in the New Testament text, but in the eyes and in the minds of some of its readers. Gibson has repeatedly asserted that neither he, nor his film, is anti-semitic. The real problem is not with his attitudes or avowed intentions, but with the lack of appropriate steps taken to prevent visual images from inspiring judeophobia. Caiaphas and his priestly colleagues often struggle not to smile when they see the defeat of Christ. In the film they allow their policemen to beat him up in open court without protest. In the Gospels itself they are depicted as doing things according to the book and reject the witnesses who testify against Jesus. This does not seem to be so in the film. These are dangerous opportunities for inspiring vengeful sentiments. The light element in The Passion of the Christ is supplied by the use of Latin and Aramaic. Not only are Pilate and Jesus(!) fluent Latin speakers, but even the soldiers of the Jerusalem garrison, who were most probably Aramaic- and Greek-speaking recruits from Syria, converse happily in a clumsy Latin with Italian Church pronunciation. I did not find it easy to follow the Aramaic which was mixed with unnecessary Hebraisms. One point is worth noting. It has been said again and again that the fateful curse "His blood be on us and our children!" has been cut from the film. This is not so. The Aramaic words are there; only the English subtitle has been removed. Crucifixion is not a gentle subject: the great Roman orator Cicero calls it crudelissimum teterrimumque supplicium, the most cruel and abominable form of death penalty. But Gibson poured into his vision of the Passion of Jesus protracted graphic violence. It inflicts great harm on the noble subject. When written by Shakespeare, the words of Mark Antony describing the bloodsoaked mantle of the murdered Julius Caesar and the holes left by the assassins' daggers shake the listener more to the core than the celluloid brutality of The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson. Geza Vermes is emeritus professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University. His latest book is The Authentic Gospel of Jesus.
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