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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 4007 • Posted: Wednesday August 13, 2003  

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USA Today, Aug. 12, 2003
http://www.usatoday.com/
By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

Devout Catholic Mel Gibson’s movie-in-the-making on the final hours of Jesus’ life won’t be on screens until February, but an early version has ignited claims it incites anti-Semitism.

A Jewish human rights organization in Los Angeles already has received dozens of hate calls and letters based on news reports on the film, the Simon Wiesenthal Center told Reuters news service Tuesday.

And another group, the Anti-Defamation League, charges that the current version of the film The Passion “unambiguously portrays Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob as the ones responsible for the decision to crucify Jesus.”

ADL director Abraham Foxman says he hasn’t seen the film, but ADL’s director of interfaith affairs did, and he said it gave him a such a disturbing account that Foxman now fears the film “will fuel hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism.”

“I want to talk with Mel,” Foxman told USA TODAY Tuesday. “He’s not my enemy. I don’t think he’s an enemy of the Jews. I respect his faith, his passion and what motivates him.”

The Passion, a detailed look at Jesus’ last day, is so meticulously tied to the Gospel that Gibson insisted on dialogue in Aramaic and Latin.

But Jews are wary whenever the Good Friday story is retold, because for centuries portrayals of the Crucifixion prompted deadly attacks against them.

“Mel abhors anti-Semitism. In no way does his Catholic faith endorse hatred or bigotry or anti-Semitism or blame the Jews for the death of Christ,” says Paul Lauer, spokesman for Gibson’s Icon Productions.

Lauer says the film presents Christ’s death as “a direct result of all our sins” and part of God’s plan for saving mankind. Gibson has been planning to create interfaith programming to go with the film.

So far, 300 religious leaders, scholars and cultural critics — Catholic, Jewish and Protestant — have screened the film since mid-June. Lauer says there already have been revisions.

A line from the Gospel of Matthew that some say puts collective guilt on Jews, “Let his blood be on us and on our children,” has been cut. Shots of Jewish leaders sympathetic to Jesus were restored, and the audio will be altered to bring out those sympathetic voices. “Right now it’s the sound of an angry mob,” Lauer says.

But there may never be agreement over the movie, because both sides read the Bible differently, says Ted Baehr, an evangelical Christian and editor of Movieguide, a magazine of Christian movie commentary.

Gibson, a very traditional Catholic, promotes a literal reading of the Bible, while many Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews do not. One group says you can argue with the text, and the other says you can’t, Baehr says.

“In the end, no one is ever going to be satisfied.”

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