There's Never Been a 'Passion' for the Truth
The pope's reported verdict on Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" -- "It is as it was" -- is what admirers have been saying about every Passion play since the first one was performed in the 12th century.
Though the story line, language, motivation and even the cast of characters have changed over the years, the one constant is that every audience believes that the Passion story they are watching captures exactly what happened to Jesus.
But how does the pope, Gibson or anyone else know how "it was"? After all, our main sources for Jesus' final days are the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Writing a generation or so after the death of Jesus, the evangelists didn't witness these events, their accounts differ and they fail to provide crucial details.
Gibson has said that in making this film he was moved by the Holy Ghost and did little more than direct traffic. But like any Hollywood director confronted with four scripts of a well-known story, he had to do a lot of editing. And he had to go beyond what Scripture says.
The film's trailer, for example, shows the familiar image of Jesus, his torso bare, his head leaning to one side, his body slightly twisted, bleeding from multiple wounds. But the evangelists provide none of these details. All they say is "they fastened him to a cross." (They don't even say who did the fastening, or how.)
In reality, this image of Jesus on the cross comes from the detailed Passion treatises of the 12th through 15th centuries, written to help the pious visualize the events at Calvary. It's hard to underestimate the effect these books had on the paintings, sculpture and dramatic renderings of the Passion in the centuries that followed. What their writers imagined, we now imagine. These stories were compiled at a time when Jews were regularly accused of poisoning wells and committing ritual murder, so it's no surprise they demonized Jews. But the Passion plays that the stories inspired didn't at first make Jews Jesus' main antagonist. Through the late medieval and Renaissance periods, and as late as the 18th century, Satan was the enemy. But by the 19th century, with the rise of realism (and the Catholic Church's growing displeasure with seeing ribald devils onstage), bloodthirsty and money-grubbing Jews took over in the role, with Pontius Pilate, in this streamlined version, becoming something of a hero.
