A Passion That Offends - Al Hunt's WSJ oped

[question everything]

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Five deeply spiritual, religiously knowledgeable men and women bring different perspectives but all agree that the most popular religious movie in years, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," is too violent, unfaithful to history and incendiary. "The repeated violence and the sameness of the violence is numbing," says Diane Wudel, a New Testament scholar at the Wake Forest University Divinity School. Elements of this movie are "quite disturbing," worries Charles Kimball, chairman of Wake Forest's Religion Department.

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Substantively, however, they were troubled by the film. The violence -- the pain inflicted upon Christ starts early on and is punishing and cruel throughout -- bothered them. This pervasive brutality, like the relentless scourging of Christ, doesn't reflect the gospels, despite Mel Gibson's insistence he followed scripture. Notes Prof. Wudel: "If you add everything up in the gospels, there'd be three minutes of scourging."

On the historical inaccuracy, the scholars note that the four gospels were written decades after Christ died and "we're only getting highlights," observes Professor Kimball. Then the movie picks and chooses from them, with John the dominant one. "Gibson plays fast and loose with the gospels," says Prof. Foskett. One example: the scene when Jesus is in front of the high priest and his answer is taken from Mark, but the question isn't. Thus, says Diane Wudel, the viewer is presented with "an altered question, an answer from Mark, a trial from Luke and a dialogue from John."

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Curiously, it's noted that for all of the support from Fundamentalists very few mainstream Catholic leaders and almost no liberal Catholics have had anything good to say about "The Passion of the Christ." These Protestant academics suggest that's probably because Catholic leaders understand some of Mr. Gibson's propaganda better than the Fundamentalists do.

Bill Leonard says the most overarching critique is that the story shortchanges God. "When you limit the gospel story only to the crucifixion -- when you don't have the story of the prodigal son, the words of the Sermon on the Mount," he says, "It doesn't tell the story that Jesus shows us what God is like. The love of God is not simply revealed in the brutality of the cross."

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http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108017501579864944,00.html

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