Denver Seminary > Articles > Review of "The Passion of the Christ"

Review of "The Passion of the Christ"

Dr. Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor Of New Test
Feb 15, 2004
Series: Dialogue on Contemporary Issues

Mel Gibson’s new movie about the last day of Christ’s life has generated more advance acclaim and censure than any other recent film. Now that it is available for the general public to observe, one may assess the merits of that advance commentary. After placing the text of Isaiah 53 on the suffering servant in white letters on a black screen, the movie begins with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. We see the genuinely human struggle he underwent there, pleading with God if there be any way he could avoid his coming suffering. An androgynous-looking character, from whom a snake wriggles forth, clearly represents Satan trying to dissuade Christ from his appointed task.

As throughout the movie, all of the dialogue is in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic and Latin with English subtitles. Missing is any realization that it was in fact Greek that was the lingua franca of the Roman empire. Jews would, of course, have spoken one of the Semitic tongues among themselves. But few, if any, would have learned any Latin; and Roman officials in the eastern half of the empire would have had to learn a fair measure of Greek to converse with the inhabitants, including Jews. Otherwise, the additional dialogue that is necessary to flesh out the fairly sparse Gospel texts to create a full-length feature movie is for the most part realistic.

Commentators debate whether the terminology for the “guards” in the Gospels includes Roman as well as Jewish officials. But in the film only Jewish guards sent by the high priest, Caiaphas, arrive in the garden to arrest Jesus. We watch riveting and plausible scenes of Judas agreeing to betray his master; his kiss, portrayed in slow motion, that identifies Jesus to the arresting officials; the br ief fighting that ensues; the slicing off of Malchus’ ear, and Christ’s miraculous restoration of that ear.

The scene shifts to the hurriedly convened Sanhedrin as charges are sought. Numerous criticisms of Jesus from throughout his ministry (such that he works his miracles by the power of the devil) are marshaled. Eventually, Caiaphas puts the question directly to Jesus, asking if he is the Christ, the Son of God, to which he replies verbatim as in Mark 14:62, “I am, and you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven . . . ” At this point the high priest tears his robes, the Jewish gathering are in an uproar, and Jesus is led off, chained, to a dungeon.

As throughout the movie, we then have a flashback, here to Peter’s earlier promises not to deny Christ, now so dramatically contradicted. Other flashbacks will create similar sharp juxtapositions—Jesus preaching about loving one’s enemies, interspersed between his agonizing torture at the hands of the Roman soldiers, or scenes from the Last Supper and the Upper Room highlighting the significance of Jesus’ upcoming death interrupting portions of the crucifixion itself. For the reader familiar with the contents of the Gospels, that these are flashbacks will appear obvious. It is less clear if the uninitiated will quickly catch on.

After Judas regrets his betrayal and returns the blood money, we see him tormented by Satan, as well as by a throng of little children attempting to beat him up. He eventually finds a rope, still intermingled with a rotting corpse filled with maggots, and proceeds to hang himself.

At this point the story turns to the role of Pontius Pilate and his wife who, as in the Gospel of Matthew, tries unsuccessfully to urge her husband to let Jesus off. Critics have rightly pointed out that Pilate seems like the nicest official among Jews and Romans alike throughout these proceedings, whereas both in the Gospels and secular history he is portrayed as a much more intricate combination of ruthlessness and compassion. The words ascribed to him, however, do aptly represent the catch- 22 situation he found himself in—needing to prove his loyalty to Caesar and keep the Jews in their place but at the same time not alienating them so much that they would riot and get him in further trouble.

As with several recent cinematic portrayals of Herod Antipas, this Galilean ruler is portrayed as a somewhat effeminate character, surrounded by an opulent court in which even a leopard makes a brief appearance. After Herod refuses to pass judgment on Christ, he is sent back to Pilate. Pilate attempts to release Jesus rather than Barabbas, but the crowds clamor for the reverse. At this point Pilate orders Christ to be flogged, and a prolonged, gruesome depiction of the torture of Jesus ensues.

In light of all of the film’s advance criticism and charges of anti-Semitism, I found it interesting that even at their worst the Jewish leaders are portrayed as somber, outraged, and doing what they believed was God’s will—condemning a blasphemer. It is the Roman soldiers instead who over and over again are portrayed as gleefully whipping the Nazarene, teasing, mocking, and torturing him, far more than was called for even by Pilate’s orders. I certainly appreciate the appalling misuse of the Gospel Passion narratives at key junctures in Christian history, not least in Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century. Nothing in the Gospels even remotely supports the notion that all the Jews of Jesus’ day were involved in his killing. Jesus was of course himself Jewish, as well as his first followers, and the film clearly portrays a backdrop of his supporters, of the wailing women of Jerusalem, and of other nonaligned onlookers grieving and bewailing the torture of Christ. The only person who could plausibly find anti-Semitism in this movie is the one who came to it with a large dose of hostility to begin with. One could more fairly charge the film with an anti- Roman sentiment since apart from Pilate and one of his two closest officials the Roman men portrayed uniformly go out of their way to attack Jesus in the most hostile fashion conceivable.

Critics have also raised the question of whether the film contains gratuitous violence. From one perspective I think it does. Without wanting to minimize the utter agony of one who may have been given as many as thirty-nine lashes, followed by the unspeakable torture of the crucifixion itself, the movie goes much, much farther than any of the Gospel accounts in depicting Jesus’ torture. There actually appear three separate sets of floggings, not merely across Jesus’ back (the standard procedure) but also across his legs and his chest. As he attempts to carry his cross along the socalled Via Dolorosa, he is repeatedly whipped, causing him to fall down many times, both before and after Simon the Cyrene is commandeered to help shoulder his load. Even after he is nailed to the cross, a Roman official gives the order to turn the cross on its side and then allow it to fall with full force onto the ground, with Jesus hitting headfirst. While it is impossible to prove that any of these additional tortures never happened and in the history of the Roman practice of crucifixion at various times they may well have. There is not a shred of historical evidence inside or outside the Gospel to suggest additional physical torture beyond the flogging at the Praetorium and the crucifixion itself. That, of course, is awful enough.

In between all this suffering and gore, we see repeated shots of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene looking both sorrowful and resigned. Yet another flashback to an earlier period in Jesus’ ministry confuses Mary Magdalene with the woman caught in adultery in John 8—a passage, by the way, which is not in the earliest and best manuscripts of John in the first place. At one juncture, Pilate’s wife approaches the two Marys, giving them a large embroidered cloth to help them soak up some of the bloodstains which Christ has left behind and to dry their tears. As Gibson has himself reported, this and several other additional touches in the movie came from the historical novel of a Catholic nun who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and wrote a book entitled The Dolorous Passion of our Lord.

There are a few historical inaccuracies scattered about the film. We know from other Roman and Jewish writings that convicted criminals carried only the horizontal crossbeam. It would have been physically impossible for many healthy men to have carried an entire cross and almost certainly impossible for Jesus, in his greatly weakened state, to have done so. For that matter, the amount of extra whipping that the movie depicts would surely have left Jesus unable even to stand, much less to walk and shoulder what may have been as much as a 75-pound piece of wood. As in much Christian art, the nails are driven through Jesus’ palms, which would have been unable to support the weight of the body on the cross. Rather, we should imagine them being driven through his wrists at the base of his hands. Nevertheless, his powerful cry, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing,” coming even as the nails are being driven through his body into the cross, creates a powerful and poignant juxtaposition (notwithstanding the Gospels’ account that all of Jesus’ seven last “words” came when he was already erect and hanging on his crucifix). Equally powerful are the portrayals of the calls from various onlookers for Jesus to come down from the cross if he truly is the Messiah. The scene of the one thief’s conversion and Christ’s promise that he shall be with him that very day in paradise is another tearjerker. A final gratuitous touch that goes beyond anything history records involves a crow pecking out one of the eyes of one of the criminals hanging next to Jesus.

As Jesus dies, a violent wind whips up, clouds cover the face of the sun, and an earthquake sends the onlookers rushing for shelter. In fact, it appears that an oversized teardrop falling from the sky in slow motion is what triggers the quake. The remaining soldiers quickly chop off the legs of the other two criminals, recognize that Jesus is dead, but prove it by thrusting the spear into his side, and again in a blown-up, slow-motion format, we see blood and water spew forth. Quickly the camera shifts to a picture of the androgynous character that has portrayed Satan now writhing in agony as Christ’s death not only atones for the sins of humanity but vanquishes the ultimate power of the devil.

In light of the various portrayals of the life of Jesus in movies of the last generation, the viewer is naturally curious if Gibson will leave it at that or try to do something with the resurrection. In fact, he chooses the latter route, albeit briefly. After the screen goes completely dark for a few moments, we begin to see glimpses of light and realize we are looking at the stone covering an entrance to a walk-in tomb being slowly rolled away. On the floor of the grave lie empty garments, slowly falling to the ground, and flattening themselves out. The astute viewer will recognize that the invisible corpse of Christ is departing. We then see a brief photograph of Jesus looking healthy, as earlier in his life, with scars in his hands from the nails. At this point, the film finally ends, and the credits roll.

This movie is not for the faint-hearted. Gibson spares the viewer the worst of the floggings and the nails but only just barely. And there is plenty of gore, fully meriting the film’s “R” rating. Not knowing what would or would not be graphically depicted, there were times when I averted my eyes. Sounds of what was transpiring were awful enough. Viewers have wondered to what extent Gibson’s Catholicism has influenced the specific details of his portrayal of Christ’s passion. My response would be that the long-standing Catholic tradition of magnifying the sufferings of Christ, and from both a Protestant and Eastern Orthodox perspective not always adequately celebrating the resurrection, is the major way in whic h this movie reflects that tradition, especially when we recognize how many additional blows to Christ’s body are shown, far beyond anything Scripture records. It is easy to wonder if one of the emphases is an unhealthy and perhaps even inappropriate overemphasis on the suffering. Even one of today’s Olympic body-builders could hardly have lived to make it to the site of the crucifixion, given what Gibson’s Christ has to endure.

On the other hand, it is probably fair to say that contemporary American culture, perhaps more than any other culture in the history of the world, does not adequately appreciate the immensity of suffering that most of humanity has experienced throughout time. Not surprisingly, American Christianity is therefore infrequently faulted for having an inadequate theology of suffering. If this film helps Christians to better understanding something of what it means to “carry the cross” that their master shoulders, it will have been worthwhile. Far more importantly, if it challenges unbelievers to recognize the utter depravity that lurks within every human heart, awaiting only the right (or wrong!) circumstances to produce an outward expression of raw evil, then the movie will have accomplished one of its key purposes. But of course if we are so hopelessly sinful, then we need a savior, and there is no other religion or ideology in the history of humanity that has ever claimed to worship a person who was both human and divine and who died not merely a martyr’s death but one that paid the price that all of us deserve to pay for our sins. There is no other “ism” which claims that such a founder rose from the dead in bodily form, objectively appearing to hundreds of people and vindicating the claims of his life, including those about the significance of his death.

Christians and non-Christians alike have to give an adequate answer to the question of what birthed the Christian religion. How did a group of Jesus’ followers, in the first years exclusively Jewish, set aside the clear claim of the Hebrew Scriptures that “cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree”? How did they reject one of the eternally immutable Ten Commandments to rest and worship on Saturday, the Sabbath, in favor of the first day of the week? Something more than mass hallucination or subjective impressions—something datable to one particular Sunday morning—must have occurred so supernaturally and so dramatically to make these disciples change their beliefs and practices, emerge from behind locked doors, and boldly preach a message of a resurrected Jesus, even in the face of possible martyrdom. If “The Passion of the Christ” helps viewers of all backgrounds to face such questions forthrightly, then it will have been an overwhelming success whatever comparatively minor criticisms might be made of it otherwise.

Craig L. Blomberg
February 2004