Elaine Pagels on Mel Gibson's Passion

Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion" is important because how Christians view the figure of Jesus is important. Different understandings of Jesus' role and mission will lead to different understandings of how they, as Christians, should act, should treat others, and should interact with society generally.

In The New Yorker, David Remnick interviewed Elaine Pages on the movie and its wider implications:

“Mel Gibson denies any anti-Semitism, and I can’t speak to his motives,” Pagels went on, “but there are narrative devices that are clear. The more benign Pilate appears in the movie, the more malignant the Jews are. To deflect responsibility from the Romans for arresting and executing Christ, which Gibson takes from the Gospels and makes even more extreme, is contrary to everything we understand about history. It is implausible that the Jews could be responsible and Pilate a benign governor. There are many examples in the film of a preposterous dialectic: the bad Jews and the good Romans. When the Temple police arrest Jesus, Mary Magdalene turns to the Romans as if they were the policemen on the block, benign protectors of the public order. But the very idea of a Jewish woman turning to Roman soldiers for help is ridiculous.”

Unlike many of the critics, Pagels was hesitant about analyzing what effect “The Passion of the Christ” would have on its audiences. But her tone was one of regret. Pagels pointed out that the history of western art is rife with representations of the Passion that avoid divisive sentiment. “In the ‘St. Matthew Passion,’” she said, “Bach was very aware of the problem of arousing anti-Semitic feelings and he wanted deliberately to avoid that. So at the moment when there is the cry to crucify Christ, the call comes not from an identifiable group of Jews but from all, from the entire chorus. Bach demonstrated what Gibson claims that he wanted to show, the inclination of human beings, universally, to do violence.” There were other artists, too—from Palestrina to Bill Viola--who depicted the Passion in a similar spirit.

Pagels, like so many other scholars, is concerned that Mel Gibson has ignored hundreds of years of scholarship and work that has been done on trying to understand the gospels. Even if Jesus existed and was executed, Gibson's portrayal of events not only fails to do so in a way that could be considered very accurate, it also manages to succeed in creating a distinctly antisemitic impression. If Gibson's intention were antisemitic, it doesn't seem as though he could do a whole lot more to communicate such a message without being unnecessarily obvious.

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• Roman Catholicism
• Antisemitism
• News and Commentary on Mel Gibson's The Passion