Religion

Orcinus provides an in depth review of The Passion of Christ:

Is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? In a word: Yes. But not in any kind of obvious fashion, like what you might find in Jud Suss or The International Jew or “The Prioress’s Tale” in Canterbury Tales. It’s more pernicious than that.

Gibson clearly identifies the Jewish high priests with evil throughout the film — from the use of ominous music to the Jewish soldiers’ presence to the slithering of Satan among the robed set. And he does use ancient stereotypes to depict them — their hook noses, their conniving manner, their sinister intentions.

What is striking is the narrative choices that Gibson makes throughout. The Gospels, of course, give conflicting accounts of Jesus’ death, and Gibson’s version borrows freely from each of them and then tosses in his own “details” and rearranged timeline for good measure. At each step, Gibson’s choice shape the kind of narrative he tells.

The final shape that emerges is a narrative that places the blame heavily on the Jewish high priests as causing Jesus to be crucified and nearly exonerates Pontius Pilate — though he, of course, proves to be easily manipulated by the scheming Jews. A more balanced narrative might have noted, for instance, that one of the reasons the Jews may have had to arrest Jesus was the Roman preoccupation with violently suppressing uprisings, and Jesus’ teachings had created a revolutionary fervor likely to bring down the wrath of Pontius Pilate. The Romans, in other words, could just as easily have been the chief culprits; but Gibson chose the Jews.

However, the anti-Semitism seems incidental to the larger worldview at play here. And what becomes clear is that Gibson’s Catholicism is not merely conservative — it is positively medieval. In that context, the anti-Semitism is a noxious and fairly constant presence, but it is only a product of its larger thrust, which is a religious politic of domination, the rule by guilt and fear.

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It is timed to be injected into a society still reeling from the 2001 terrorist attacks and the fear-mongering environment that has been fostered in the body politic since then. In such a milieu, rife with a host of personal and social dislocations, psychologists say, people are more prone to developing or harboring an extreme dualist worldview — a stark, black-and-white division of everything into good vs. evil. This likewise makes them more susceptible to recruitment into extremist belief systems.