Those Who Forget the Past (38 page)

The study of the historical Jesus is a field inclined toward hermeneutical acrobatics, and its scholars routinely disagree not only with lay theologians but with each other. On the subject of Jewish involvement in the Crucifixion, for example, most historical-Jesus investigators believe that the Jewish high priests wanted Jesus dead, as the Gospels attest, and that the only question is why. Sanders believes it is because of Jesus' actions at the Temple during his Passover visit to Jerusalem, when he drove the money changers from the premises and overturned their tables. Fredriksen, though she is an admirer of Sanders, believes that the Temple scene probably didn't happen. She places the initiative of the Crucifixion entirely upon Pilate, almost to the point of absenting Jews from the scene altogether. Fredriksen's theory is that Jesus was so popular among the Jewish people (as evidenced by his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the day Christians call Palm Sunday) that Pilate wanted him dead in order to teach Jews a lesson: Do not rebel.

In order to give informed advice to Gibson, Fisher and his group of scholars needed to see the film, or, at least, a script. When they approached Icon Productions in late March, however, they learned that Gibson was still in Italy, working on the film. Fisher then appealed to Father William Fulco, a Jesuit professor of classics and archeology at Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, who had been hired by Gibson to translate the script into Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Fisher sent along the Bishops Conference's guidelines for dramatizing the Passion, and Fulco assured him that Gibson's script committed no offenses. The scholars wanted to judge that for themselves, and asked for a copy of the script. Fulco said that the screenplay was not his to give. Icon did not respond to the request for a script. The scholars and Icon were at a standoff.

Then, in early April, Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, a Judaic scholar involved in interfaith work in Chicago, returned home to find a large, unmarked manila envelope at his front door. When Rabbi Poupko opened it, he found a script that had no identifying title page. But Poupko realized that the script must be
The
Passion,
and called up a friend in interfaith work, Father John Pawlikowski, who was one of Fisher's team of scholars. Pawlikowski asked to see the script, and Poupko sent it over.

Pawlikowski passed the script along to Fisher, who, plainly delighted by the development, made copies and sent them to each of the members of his panel on April 18—which happened to be Good Friday. By e-mail, he informed Father Fulco that “the Easter Bunny came early to my office and delivered a copy of the script.” Fisher attributed the mysterious appearance of the script to a “Biblical Deep Throat,” and added that he had sent it along to the scholars “in time for their Good Friday meditations.” Fisher's tone was solicitous; he told Fulco that “my own response is that with a couple of very minor adjustments, all is resolved.”

But when the other scholars read the screenplay they were aghast. The script confirmed their worst fears about the Gibson project. Gibson seemed to be violating many, if not all, of the Bishops Conference's guidelines on dramatizing the Passion; the script included the scene from Matthew in which Pilate washes his hands of responsibility, and, worse, it had Caiaphas uttering the line “His blood be on us, and upon our children.” The descriptive portions of the script, which do not necessarily reflect what gets filmed, were filled with inflammatory cues: Peter is “aware of the bloodthirsty nature of the rising chaos”; at the sight of the Cross, “the crowd's bloodthirst redoubles”; when Jesus is crushed by the weight of the Cross, the Roman guards holding the crowd back “have a difficult time restraining the impatient, predatory bloodthirst of the people”; and, most egregiously, as Jesus is reduced to a bloody mass, Caiaphas' eyes are “shiny with breathless excitement.”

Now the tone of the scholars' dealings with Icon became openly adversarial. On Easter Monday, one member of the panel, Sister Mary Boys, a professor at the Union Theological Seminary, in New York, and an interfaith veteran, spoke to a
Los Angeles Times
reporter about the scholars' concerns that Gibson's film could incite anti-Semitism. Rabbi Eugene Korn, the head of the A.D.L.'s interfaith affairs, was quoted in the article as warning Gibson that he should not ignore the scholars' group. “If he doesn't respond, the controversy will certainly heat up,” Korn said. “We are all very vigilant about things like this.”

Gibson, who had returned to California, was furious. He began to hear negative comments from his friends in the industry, including the advice that he stay away from the Grand Havana Room. Three days after the article appeared, Gibson and his producer, Steve McEveety, had a telephone conversation with Eugene Fisher. According to notes taken by the Gibson team (Fisher won't comment), McEveety asked how the scholars could be trusted after they had gone public with negative comments based on a stolen script. He said that the whole thing felt a bit like extortion. Gibson said he found the article threatening, “a hatchet job.” Fisher was again solicitous, saying that “this whole kind of thing I find very distasteful,” and agreed that the implications of anti-Semitism were “absolutely untrue.” He conceded that the fact that the script was stolen would “taint” any criticisms deriving from it, and said that Rabbi Korn “blew that one” by speaking to the press.

“You guys got ripped,” Fisher said. But he defended the Anti-Defamation League as being a responsible group. He suggested that Gibson and his associates hear the scholars out.

“Whatever opinion you guys come up with are tainted notes,” McEveety replied.

Meanwhile, the scholars worked on their suggestions, which they compiled into a report that they sent to Icon Productions in early May. The report, numbering eighteen pages, contained a long list of the film's transgressions, which “are embedded throughout the script.” Contrary to the “very minor adjustments” of which Fisher had spoken, the scholars' report said that Gibson's film would basically require a remake. “We believe that the steps needed to correct these difficulties will require major revisions,” the report stated.

For Fredriksen, one of the most dismaying elements of Gibson's undertaking was his insistence that his film would be accurate. She notes that Gibson relied on an uninformed reading of the Gospels, as well as upon extra-scriptural Catholic literature, such as the writings of two stigmatic nuns. “He doesn't even have a Ph.D. on his staff,” she says.

Among the many errors that Gibson might have avoided had he followed the ecumenist guidelines is his portrayal of the two men who were crucified alongside Jesus as criminals. Although the men, described in Matthew and Mark, are identified as “thieves” in the King James Version of the Bible, as “robbers” in the International and American Standard versions, and as “plunderers” in the original Greek, the Bishops Conference prefers that they be identified as “insurgents.”

Gibson is unconvinced by such scholarly interpretations. “They always dick around with it, you know?” he says. “Judas is always some kind of friend of some freedom fighter named Barabbas, you know what I mean? It's horseshit. It's revisionist bullshit. And that's what these academics are into. They gave me notes on a stolen script. I couldn't believe it. It was like they were more or less saying I have no right to interpret the Gospels myself, because I don't have a bunch of letters after my name. But they are for children, these Gospels. They're for children, they're for old people, they're for everybody in between. They're not necessarily for academics. Just get an academic on board if you want to pervert something!”

Gibson responded to the scholars through his attorney, who warned that they were in possession of a stolen script, and demanded its immediate return. What happened next placed Eugene Fisher's panel of scholars in an awkward position. Fisher is the associate director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, but he had acted on his own in forming the group. Fisher's standing (and the fact that he had used the Bishops Conference's letterhead in communicating with Icon) had lent the scholars' group an air of Church authority—an important element in that part of the public debate which emphasized Gibson's schismatic bent. Gibson and McEveety had been surprised to learn that Fisher's panel was an ad-hoc initiative, bearing no authority from the Church. After the Bishops Conference received the letter from Gibson's lawyer, it acted quickly to distance itself from the scholars and their report on Gibson's film. “Neither the Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, nor any other committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, established this group, or authorized, reviewed or approved the report written by its members,” the conference declared in June. Its counsel, Mark E. Chopko, advised the scholars to return the scripts to Icon, and issued an apology to Gibson. “We regret that ‘this situation has occurred, and offer our apologies,” Chopko wrote. “I have further advised the scholars group that this draft screenplay is not considered to be representative of the film and should not be the subject of further public comment. When the film is released, the USCCB will review it at that time.”

The controversy, however, did not wane. The Anti-Defamation League issued no apology to Gibson, and the scholars stood by their report; some of them continued to criticize Gibson's film publicly. I arrived in California the day after
The New York Times
carried a front-page article on the dispute. The next morning, the paper published a column that criticized Gibson for refusing to show his film to Jewish leaders, such as Abraham Foxman, of the A.D.L. Gibson stewed all day, and by evening he had reached full pique. He was particularly aroused by the column, written by Frank Rich, which had argued that Gibson's film could do real harm abroad, “where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11,” and which had accused Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, of using “p.r. spin to defend a Holocaust denier”—presumably, Gibson's father. Nierob, who is Jewish, and is the son of Holocaust survivors (and a founding member of the national Holocaust Museum), laughed it off. But Gibson called Nierob that evening, and apologized for “getting you into this.”

Then Gibson expressed his feelings about Rich. “I want to kill him,” he said. “I want his intestines on a stick. . . . I want to kill his dog.” At this, Paul Lauer, Gibson's marketing man, who had been quietly engaged in deskwork, glanced at me, and calmly said, “The thing you have to understand is that the distance between Mel's heart and his mouth is greater than the distance between his imagination and his mouth. He is an artist, and he says these things, and his creative energy kicks in, and he comes out with these imaginative, wild things. But his heart . . .” He shrugged, and went back to work.

Gibson has half-jokingly remarked that
The Passion
may be a career-killer for him. If it is not, if it somehow manages to open, and even to succeed, it will be in no small measure owing to Lauer's efforts. Lauer, whose father is Jewish, is a practicing Roman Catholic who has often heard Gibson's Traditionalist views about the current Vatican (that the last “real” Pope predated Vatican II), and seems mostly unperturbed. More pressing, to him, is the difficult question of opening a movie that, even without the attacks against it, presents some formidable marketing problems: it is a religious film, whose actors speak their lines in two dead languages. Lauer has always known that the make-or-break audience for
The Passion
is the active Christian community, which could effectively kill the film if it discerned even a hint of blasphemy. As Paula Fredriksen has written in
The New Republic,
“evangelical Christians, in my experience, know their Scriptures very, very well.”

For that reason, Lauer began to cultivate Christian groups almost from the start. I first heard about
The Passion
from Billy Graham's public-relations man in Dallas, A. Larry Ross, who had seen the film in late May at the Icon offices. The evangelical reaction to the movie was almost uniformly enthusiastic. When the attacks on the film began, Icon was able to turn its marketing strategy into an effective counter-offensive. This summer, Lauer scheduled a series of screenings and appearances by Gibson before Christian groups and conservative columnists, who praised the film to their congregations and readers. “I can say
The Passion
is the most beautiful, profound, accurate, disturbing, realistic, and bloody depiction of this well-known story that has even been filmed,” the nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas wrote in August. “Its message is not just for Christians, but for everyone. I doubt a better film about Jesus could be made.” David Horowitz wrote in his Web log that “it is an awesome artifact, an overpowering work.” Michael Medved said in a television appearance, “It is by a very large margin of advantage the most effective cinematic adaptation of a Biblical story I have ever seen.”

I accompanied Gibson on several such appearances, and at each he was received with an enthusiasm that seemed to reach beyond the movie itself, to a deeply felt disaffection from the secular world; now an icon of that world was on their side. In Anaheim, Gibson showed a trailer of the film to a convention of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship, and received a standing ovation. Afterward, the daughter of the organization's president laid hands on Gibson and asked Jesus to “bind Satan, bind the press, we ask you, Lord.”

That same evening, Gibson made another appearance—the only one that seemed to make him nervous. It was a screening for three hundred and fifty Jesuits, who had gathered in an auditorium at Loyola Marymount University. After the film, Gibson took to the stage, and, shuffling his feet and staring at the ground, asked the priests if they had any questions. Gibson later explained the reason for his and Lauer's anxiety: “If anyone's gonna kill you, its' those guys, right? We're Catholics, right? We're scared of the Jesuits. Every good Catholic is.” He needn't have been. Some of the Jesuits had eschatological concerns (Couldn't there be more of the risen Christ?), and one elderly priest wondered whether the subtitles might be made larger. The closest that anyone came to suggesting political correctness was when one priest toward the front urged that the language be more inclusive. “Rather than using ‘Jesus, the son of man, maybe Jesus, the son of all'?” The other Jesuits booed him down, and the evening ended with another standing ovation.