A number of reviews of The Passion have called the violence in the film “numbing.” I don't doubt that it can have such effect. Yet no matter how much the multicultis and secularists among us may protest, the death (and resurrection) of Jesus Christ is the central event in the history of our civilization. Gibson has documented this event, even if imperfectly.

And that is how his work differs from Tarantino's.

Nonetheless, it is still a valid question as to whether the violence portrayed is accurate. Donald Sensing argues that the New Testament is spare on the details simply because elaboration was unnecessary:

The people of the time the Gospels were written knew what flogging meant and knew what crucifixion really entailed. The Gospel writers didn't need to describe them.

But as he also notes, we do have the historical record, which is summarized in the discussion of Roman crucifixion found here.

We moderns still recoil with horror when we hear of Christ's crucifixion. But what did the ancients think of crucifixion? They considered it to be the most shameful, the most painful, and the most abhorrent of all executions. The Roman statesman Cicero called it “the most cruel and disgusting penalty” (Verrem 2:5.165) and “the most extreme penalty” (Verrem 2:5.168). The Jewish historian Josephus, who certainly witnessed enough crucifixions himself, called it “the most wretched of deaths.” The Roman jurist Julius Paulus listed crucifixion in first place as the worst of all capital punishments, listing it ahead of death by burning, death by beheading, or death by the wild beasts. […]

How was crucifixion actually carried out? The first thing we learn from the sources is that there was great variety in the way crucifixions were done. The main thing was to expose the victim to the utmost indignity. The Romans appear to have followed the same procedure in most cases, but even they departed from this at times. Seneca points to this reality when he writes in one place, “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet” (Dialogue 6:20.3).

So what form did a more normal crucifixion take? First came the flogging or scourging. The flogging usually was done by two soldiers using a short whip (flagrum, flagellum) that had several leather thongs of different lengths. Tied to these leather thongs were small iron balls or sharp pieces of sheep bones. The victim was stripped of his clothing and his hands were tied above him to a post. The back, legs and buttocks would then be flogged until the person collapsed. With the back and legs thus torn open there would be extensive blood loss. This blood loss from the flogging often determined how long it took the crucified person to die on the cross. The fact that Jesus was not able to carry his cross all the way, and the fact that he died in six hours, indicates that this flogging must have been especially severe. The ancient sources tell us that many some people died just from the flogging.

Basic Christian doctrine holds that the wrath of God against sin was poured out against one Man, and that—though our modern (and postmodern) minds rebel against the thought—blood sacrifice was required for our redemption.

The Crucifixion was not a bad hair day with welts.

The other major charge laid against The Passion is of course that of anti-Semitism. In a separate post Sensing contends that Jews and (American) Christians are in effect seeing two different movies: “Christians tend to see the movie as a theological drama while Jews tend to see it as an historical drama.” The argument is worth the read (as is his full review here).

But let's get some Jewish perspective, first from Seattle-based radio host and movie reviewer Michael Medved.

When I watched a nearly finished version of the movie at the offices of Icon Entertainment, I also felt overwhelmed by its lyrical sweep and devastating immediacy. Unlike most biblical films, with their stilted dialogue and cheesy miracles, The Passion of The Christ offered a convincing, richly imagined recreation of first-century Judea and heartfelt performances.

But it remains a difficult movie for any committed Jew to watch. In discussing my reactions to his work after the screening, Gibson insisted that his movie is meant to make everyone uncomfortable, not just Jews. For Jews, however, there's a special squirm factor in watching the officials of a long-destroyed Temple, which we still revere as a holy gift from God, behaving in a selfish, officious, and sadistic manner. I might have preferred a movie version of the crucifixion that interpreted the Gospels to place primary blame for the death of Jesus on the Roman authorities.

Gibson, however, remained determined to bring to the screen what he considers the truth of the New Testament. Certainly, his account of the story—in which the Judean priests and the Judean mob force Pilate's hand in ordering the death of Christ—falls well within the Christian mainstream and corresponds to numerous references in the Gospels. Gibson's critics may resent these elements of the drama, but they must blame Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John rather than Mel. In the past, Passion plays aroused anti-Semitic rage by portraying the Judean officials who persecuted Christ as indistinguishable from contemporary Orthodox Jews, with their beards, hook noses, skullcaps, and prayer shawls. In The Passion of The Christ, however, Gibson emphasizes the Jewishness of Christ and his disciples more than he identifies the priests in the Temple with any current Jewish images. The film seemed to me so obviously free of anti-Semitic intent that I urged Gibson to show the rough cut to some of his Jewish critics as a means of reassuring them.

As Medved describes, Gibson did indeed give such a showing last August 8 in Houston, though the reaction of certain of his coreligionists was less than encouraging.

“Jews Horrified by Gibson's Jesus Film,” proclaimed the headline of Jewish Week's article, while the Internet Movie Database announced its story with the line “Jews Slam Gibson Movie After First Screening.” Korn reportedly engaged in an acrimonious exchange with Gibson after the showing and told the press that the star “seems to be callous to the fear and concerns of his critics.”

There is, in fact, no basis whatever for this charge of “callousness.” In more than a half dozen conversations with Gibson, I heard him express his passionate desire to avoid hurting the Jewish community or its members. He consistently declares that he always wanted his movie to unite people rather than divide them. Before the setback in Houston, Icon had announced plans for a “Jewish initiative” and had begun assembling lists of Jewish opinion leaders to respond to the film and to help shape study guides and educational materials to be distributed along with it. Those plans are now on hold because of Icon's sense of betrayal following the public relations disaster in Houston. […]

Fortunately, many organizations in the Jewish community have … refused to participate in the campaign against the movie. This doesn't mean Jews will flock to see it, or hail its underlying messages, or sponsor benefit showings as synagogue fundraisers. The Passion of The Christ remains an inescapably Christian, not a Jewish, version of first-century events.

We Jews may take exception to the traditional Gospel version of the suffering and death of Jesus, but we must not take responsibility for deciding what Christians can and cannot believe. If we insist that committed Christians must disavow their sacred texts because of the shameful persecutions of the past, then we'll force a choice between faithfulness to Scripture and amiable relations with Jews. The notion that Christians cannot have one without spurning the other serves neither Jewish communal interests, nor the harmony of the larger community.

Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Lapin has rebuked Gibson's Jewish critics (here and here) on similar grounds:

I consider it crucially important for Christians to know that not all Jews are in agreement with their self-appointed spokesmen. Most American Jews, experiencing warm and gracious interactions each day with their Christian fellow-citizens, would feel awkward trying to explain why so many Jewish organizations seem focused on an agenda hostile to Judeo-Christian values. Many individual Jews have shared with me their embarrassment that groups, ostensibly representing them, attack Passion but are silent about depraved entertainment that encourages killing cops and brutalizing women. Citing artistic freedom, Jewish groups helped protect sacrilegious exhibits such as the anti-Christian feces extravaganza presented by the Brooklyn Museum four years ago. One can hardly blame Christians for assuming that Jews feel artistic freedom is important only when exercised by those hostile toward Christianity. However, this is not how all Jews feel.

From audiences around America, I am encountering bitterness at Jewish organizations insisting that belief in the New Testament is de facto evidence of anti-Semitism. Christians heard Jewish leaders denouncing Gibson for making a movie that follows Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion long before any of them had even seen the movie. Furthermore, Christians are hurt that Jewish groups are presuming to teach them what Christian Scripture “really means.” Listen to a rabbi whom I debated on the Fox television show hosted by Bill O'Reilly last September. This is what he said, “We have a responsibility as Jews, as thinking Jews, as people of theology, to respond to our Christian brothers and to engage them, be it Protestants, be it Catholics, and say, look, this is not your history, this is not your theology, this does not represent what you believe in.” […]

Many Christians who, with good reason, have considered themselves to be Jews' best (and perhaps, only) friends also feel bitter at Jews believing that Passion is revealing startling new information about the Crucifixion. They are incredulous at Jews thinking that exposure to the Gospels in visual form will instantly transform the most philo-Semitic gentiles of history into snarling, Jew-hating predators. […]

Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches that nothing confuses one's thinking more than being in the grip of the two powerful emotions, love and hate. The actions of these Jewish organizations sadly suggest that they are in the grip of a hatred for Christianity that is only harming Jews.

Even so, other Jewish commentators remain less than charitable in their assessments—The New Republic's literary editor Leon Wieseltier, for one.

The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life. […]

The Passion of The Christ is an unwitting incitement to secularism, because it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed. This is unfair to, well, Christianity, since Christianity is not a cult of Gibsonesque gore. But there is a religion toward which Gibson's movie is even more unfair than it is to its own. In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.

Now that Gibson has made the mistake of allowing people to see The Passion of the Christ—the film was much more interesting before it was released—it is plain that the controversy about its inclusion of Matthew 27:25, the infamous cry of the Jews that “his blood be on us and our children,” the imprecation that served through the centuries as the warrant for the Christian assault on the Jews, was a fake, a cynical game. When Jewish groups objected to this passage in the script, Gibson expediently deleted the English translation of it. I say expediently, because decency would have prevented him from including it, from shooting it, at all. But he may as well have kept it in, because it is entirely of a piece with the Jews whom he has invented. The figure of Caiaphas, played with disgusting relish by an actor named Mattia Sbragia, is straight out of Oberammergau. Like his fellow priests, he has a graying rabbinical beard and speaks with a gravelly sneer and moves cunningly beneath a tallit-like shawl streaked with threads the color of money. He is gold and cold. All he does is demand an execution. He and his sinister colleagues manipulate the ethically delicate Pilate into acquiescing to the crucifixion. (You would think that Rome was a colony of Judea.) Meanwhile the Jewish mob is regularly braying for blood. It is the Romans who torture Jesus, but it is the Jews who conspire to make them do so. The Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil.

(Emphasis added.)

I do not doubt that some Jews are truly offended by the depictions of certain characters, especially of Caiaphas. Note again: I have yet to see the film; but a number of other reviewers have perceived a wide range of reactions to Christ among the Jewish characters, even within the priestly caste. Wieseltier seems to be engaging in stereotyping of his own—and without doubt he is presuming to tell Christians how their Scriptures ought be presented, just as Medved and Lapin charge.

Moreover, Wieseltier's claim that The Passion is an “unwitting incitement to secularism” is absurd, as the box office numbers attest. Rabbi Lapin predicts that—on the contrary—the film “will one day be seen as a harbinger of America's third great religious reawakening.” That, I submit, is what many of Gibson's critics fear. It seems hardly a coincidence that most (though not all) charges of anti-Semitism are coming from committed secularists, and not from religious Jews.

The real issue is not anti-Semitism; it is hostility to orthodox Christianity.

I was intending to argue the thesis more fully, but this piece has already become excessively long. You can go here to see how our nation's putative paper of record has slanted the story over the past year. If you don't want to pay for access to the Times archives, an IHT reprint of a Frank Rich column from January is here. Wieseltier can at least provide justication for some of his criticisms. Rich, on the other hand, is a mere propagandist, as a full reading of the Medved article will demonstrate.

At first, I was going to argue that The Passion of the Christ is merely another facet of our present culture war, as are the battles over gay marriage, and the clashing positions on how to defend our civilization from acolytes of a seventh century worldview armed with twenty-first century weapons. My good friend Tim Collins reminded me that it indeed represents one such front, but much more: this conflict has been raging for two thousand years.

For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

(I Corinthians 1.22-24)

More links:

National Review posted a number of reviews on opening day.
Bryan Preston responds to the numerous charges that Gibson's vision is pornographic and/or sadomasochistic.
King of All Geeks Harry Knowles gives the film an enthusiastic endorsement here.
The American Thinker finds evidence of anti-Semitism—but at the New York Times.
Christianity Today profiles the director, and examines why evangelicals are embracing his profoundly Catholic work.

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