Passions on The Passion

It's one of the most violent, bloodsoaked films ever made - and when it opened in America on Wednesday it provoked a religious furore. Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ depicts the last 12 hours of Jesus's life in agonising detail, from savage beatings to crucifixion.

Many critics were appalled at its unrelenting savagery and claim it could incite hatred against Jews. Gibson, an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, insists he just wanted to be realistic and true to the Bible. The Mail sent five writers with very different outlooks to make up their own minds...

The Catholic
Dr John Casey, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

This is an atrocious film that is about atrocity and little else, and one that lacks any sense of the spiritual. It is ostensibly about Christ's Passion, yet it conveys no understanding of the meaning that Christians have attached to the sufferings and death of Jesus.

How could it, when the figure of Jesus, according to Mel Gibson, is so vapid - a handsome young man of impressive physique and virtually no capacity for emotional expression, being slowly tortured and beaten to death over two hours?

The Gospel accounts of the Passion and death of Christ are among the most compelling narratives in existence, but they do not exist alone.

Their intense tragic power comes from all that has gone before in the Old Testament: the prophecy of an unlikely Messiah, a humble man of sorrows rather than a great military and political saviour of Israel, who is unjustly condemned to a death that is hideously at variance with the gospel of peace and forgiveness he preached.

Hardly anyone, whatever their beliefs, can fail to be fascinated by the transcendent, transfixing personality of Jesus as it comes to us through the New Testament - his wonderful eloquence, knowledge of the individual human heart, the kingdom of peace he seems to create for the individual soul.

None of these features in Gibson's film. True, he has his Jesus utter a few sentences from the Sermon on the Mount, institute the eucharist at the Last Supper, and niftily heal the ear of the servant of the High Priest after Peter had cut it off. But that is it.

The man who has been intensely loved and imitated beyond any human being who ever lived, and whose life has inspired painting, poetry and music, seems unknown to Mel Gibson. All we have is sado-masochism disguised as religion, a concentration on physical suffering that rivals the most degraded literalism of the Middle Ages.

But at least mediaeval artists, when they dwelt on the sufferings of Christ in hideous detail, always saw them as emblems of something spiritual - the destructiveness of human sin.

The pointlessness of Gibson's work extends to his portrayal of the Jews. The High Priest Caiaphas and the rest are given no motive - except perhaps an unexplained envy - for murdering Jesus.

One explanation from scripture - that the priests and Jewish leaders were prepared to sacrifice Christ to save the Jews from the Roman authorities who might fear 'sedition' threatened by his followers - is left out entirely.

And yes - the film is intensely antisemitic in its effect, if not in its intention. The Chief Priests are shown as smug, impenetrable by any spiritual sense or even ordinary compassion.

They shout and scream at Pilate who, following the notably anti-Jewish Gospel of St John, is shown as a decent British-style colonial Governor striving to do the right thing in the midst of a mad rabble manipulated by the Jews' cold-hearted leaders.

Anyone - myself included - who has had a serious Christian education can have their religious heartstrings easily plucked by a filmed depiction of Jesus, and especially by one that avoids - as this film does - the kitsch of such Hollywood warhorses as The Robe and Ben Hur.

I must admit that several times I was moved almost to tears, yet I knew that these were false emotions.

The worst thing about this film is that Christians will go to it expecting some sort of religious experience. What they will have instead is two hours of dismal, death-devoted theatre of cruelty suffused with a curiously free-floating hatred.

Gibson is undoubtedly sincere, but he knows not what he does.

The C of E Curate
The Rev Joanna Jepson, St Michael's Church, Chester

Frankly, this is not a film I was looking forward to. I knew to expect an onslaught of brutality and it did not fail in that respect. What I did not expect was a compelling film that, at the start of Lent, has shocked me into a greater understanding of Easter.

Certainly, it is not a film to enjoy. It was two harrowing hours of watching Christ being made to endure the bloody and relentless scourging of a criminal's punishment. Frequently I had to close my eyes.

For that very reason, I can well understand why critics have immersed themselves in intellectual debate about the politics and accuracy of this film, its alleged antisemitism and its theological sources.

Yet it seems to me that the detachment afforded by remaining at a critical distance, and concentrating on these intellectual arguments, is a way of avoiding the discomfort of being changed by the Christ Story.

Amid the torture shown in the film, it was the poignant flashbacks on Jesus's life - at home with his mother, talking with his disciples and teaching the Beatitudes - which provided the most moving and inspiring insights into who this man really was.

Without these, the agony and death would be meaningless, as only the love and beauty of Christ's life allows otherwise gratuitous violence to be understood in terms of the eternal vision of Love that it is. In my view, The Passion has arrived none too soon and with its gritty portrayal of Jesus, the man, it will widely convey the message that the Church has failed to do. It is a much-needed wake-up call, which will allow no room for another fluffy, sanitised Easter to complacently pass us by.

The Athiest
Professor Lewis Wolpert, University College, London

As an atheist, I feel The Passion is a poor advertisement for a major religion in which love and compassion are claimed to play a central role.

Exactly how many cuts and weals does one want to see on that blood-drenched face and body? Is it really necessary to see bits of flayed flesh, or to watch each nail being driven through his hands and feet? What of value does it add other than the titillation, almost pornographic, of violence?

The film is intellectually empty, as there is nothing that provides any real insight as to why all this is taking place. The viciousness of the Roman soldiers is inexplicable. And why does God allow his son to go through all this torture?

I know of no evidence for the existence of God except for the miracles that are assigned to him. But if ever there was a case where a miracle was required, it was when Jesus was on the cross and a Jewish leader challenged God to free him.

Perhaps, for those who believe in Jesus Christ as the son of God, this film could be very moving. It shows his essential strength throughout the tortures, based on his view that God would eventually rescue him. For me it was all rather boring, even if so very well made.

The Jewish Writer
Melanie Phillips, Mail Columnist

As a Jew, I left the screening of The Passion in a state of shock. In the course of two hours, the ancient calumny fuelling centuries of Jewish persecution is boosted by the turbocharge of Hollywood's most sophisticated form of emotional manipulation.

After decades of decent Christian attempts to interpret the Gospels in a way that does not blame the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, this horrific film resurrects the core charge against the Jews of deicide.

It portrays the Jews as a bloodthirsty mob, led by cruel and malicious leaders, who repeatedly bay for Jesus to be crucified.

It makes no acknowledgement of the fact that, writing decades after the death of Jesus and under the yoke of Roman tyranny, the Gospel writers would almost certainly have wanted to present the Jews in the worst possible light rather than the Romans who actually crucified Jesus along with many other Jews. Instead, the film depicts the Romans sympathetically, presenting Pontius Pilate as a decent man facing a dilemma and the Romans in general as baffled and taken aback by the murderousness of the Jews.

The fact that Jesus himself is depicted as a Jew is neither here nor there. The Jews are presented as so vicious they would even have one of their own tortured and crucified.This is a film which unequivocally and deliberately presents the Jews as guilty of the most horrific crime in human history, killing the son of God. And to ram home his point, Gibson bludgeons his audience with the most sickening scenes of violence, torture and sadism, wrenching the final hours of Jesus's life out of context and going far beyond what is actually in the Biblical account.

It shows the Jews themselves beating Jesus; and if the Romans really had scourged Jesus to the horrific extent depicted in the film, it is hard to see how he would not have died of his injuries then and there, let alone been able to support the weight of the cross.

What effect will all this have on those who see this film? There may be Christians who emerge with their faith strengthened, and who will welcome a production which performs such a rare function. Thoughtful Christians, however, may feel distinctly uncomfortable to be confronted so graphically with the charge of racial guilt laid against the Jews which is at the core of the Gospel story, but which the Church is now at pains to downplay. Among others, images of the Jewish mob screaming for Jesus's death will simply be an incitement to hatred. At a time when Jew-hatred has been revived and attacks on Jews are rising around the world, such a film could have an incendiary effect.

Whatever Mel Gibson's intentions, this disgusting film leaves the Jewish people once again vilified, and the oldest hatred resuscitated.

The Critic
Christopher Tookey, Mail Film Critic

Well, this may not be the greatest story ever told, but it's certainly the grisliest. Gibson's emphasis on the violence of Christ's conviction and crucifixion starts out as an effective, realistic corrective to the prim, pious accounts we're used to seeing on the big screen.

But after an hour of incessant brutality, it is hard to know where Mel's religious piety ends and his taste for sado-masochism begins.

Over two extremely-punishing hours, Gibson shows us the suffering of Christ as never before. He explores the process of crucifixion in exhaustive detail, labouring every possible moment of pain and brutality. Skin is slashed to ribbons. Blood spurts and forms in pools. Peter slices off the ear of a soldier. This is Reservoir God.

The hate-filled Jewish rabble bays for Jesus's blood, egged on by their priests. The Romans don't come out of it much better; on this evidence, nine out of ten legionnaires were sadistic psychopaths.

The film is beautifully photographed, and will be found powerful by those who can swallow it as realism. I found it impossible to accept as authentic - the acting may most kindly be described as operatic, and it is difficult to understand as narrative, and not just because it is in Latin and Aramaic (with subtitles).

Gibson is so busy preaching to the converted that he forgets to address the questions that might pop up in the minds of a sceptical audience.

Why exactly does the Jewish mob hate Jesus so much? Why do all the Romans want to beat him up, with the notable exceptions of Mr and Mrs Pilate?

Why does God make Jesus die so graphic and painful a death? Is God a peculiarly merciless sadist?

A casual onlooker might easily get that unfortunate impression: when one of the criminals on the cross starts to annoy Jesus, God sends a crow to peck out his eyes.

And what is the Devil's role in all this? I don't remember Satan being mentioned in any disciple's account of the crucifixion. But in the Gospel according to Mel, he or she - an androgynous figure with no eyebrows and an uncanny resemblance to Wormtongue in The Lord Of The Rings - is omnipresent, but with no discernible dramatic role whatever.

I realise some of these questions have profound theological implications, but there's no indication that Gibson has thought them through on any level. He simply seems concerned to lay on the sado-masochistic detail with as thick a trowel as possible.

At the end of this film, I felt so bludgeoned that I wanted to say: 'Yes, Mel, I understand what you're telling me - Christ suffered a lot - but you don't have to keep yelling that over and over again in my ear.'