Watching Mel Gibson cleverly build interest in his unreleased film on Christ's execution is like watching an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches.
The immediate temptation may be to let the little brat learn the lesson that burnt fingers will teach. That impulse, however, is quickly overcome -- not only because no decent person stands idly by while pain is inflicted, but also because, if the kid starts a fire, other people may be hurt.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday September 09, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 81 words Type of Material: Correction
"The Passion" -- The Regarding Media column in the Aug. 6 Calendar about Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion" said that officials of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith asked a group of scholars to read a copy of the movie's script. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says neither it nor its committees requested such action, although an official of the Bishops' conference, Msgr. Eugene Fischer, did ask the scholars to convene.
And as the growing controversy over Gibson's "The Passion" spills more widely onto the nation's op-ed pages, into political magazines and even into the halls of Congress, more than rhetorical bruises are likely to be suffered.
Even in steady hands, the Passion narrative is as combustible as material can be. Yeats got it about right:
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all Platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.
For nearly 2,000 years, the synoptic Gospels' account of Christ's arrest and subsequent execution by soldiers of imperial Rome -- and each of the four Gospels offers a different version -- has retained the power to move believers to extremes of self-sacrifice and hatred. Saints have made it the focus of their spiritual reflection and the well-spring of their self-sacrifice; bigots have made it the engine of their obsessive animosity toward Jews. Millions have died as the result of folkloric or intellectually wicked misreadings of the Passion.
Where on this spectrum does "The Passion," which Gibson co-wrote, directed and financed with $25 million of his own money, fall?
The answer is unclear, mainly because Gibson has deliberately made it so. But there already is ample reason for suspicion and apprehension for anyone concerned with the renewal of anti-Semitism around the world.
Last March, interviews Gibson gave during the film's production in Italy led officials of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith to ask a group of nine leading scholars -- five Catholics and four Jews -- to read a copy of the movie's script that had come into their possession. The organizations previously have cooperated to assist Europeans who wished to revise local Passion plays dating to the Middle Ages to eliminate anti-Semitic provocations.
What the Catholic scholars say they found when they read Gibson's script was a repetition of the old deicide libel.
