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"Not peace but a sword" (Safire slams The Passion)
New York Times ^ | Mar 1 04 | William Safire

Posted on 02/29/2004 9:12:37 PM PST by churchillbuff

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: March 1, 2004

Columnist Page: William Safire

WASHINGTON — ...Mel Gibson's movie about the torture and agony of the final hours of Jesus is the bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen.

...[snip] — the bar against film violence has been radically lowered. Movie mayhem, long resisted by parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.

What are the dramatic purposes of this depiction of cruelty and pain? First, shock; the audience I sat in gasped at the first tearing of flesh. Next, pity at the sight of prolonged suffering. And finally, outrage: who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?

Not Pontius Pilate, the Roman in charge; he and his kindly wife are sympathetic characters. Nor is King Herod shown to be at fault.

The villains at whom the audience's outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval "passion play," preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as "Christ killers."

Much of the hatred is based on a line in the Gospel of St. Matthew, after the Roman governor washes his hands of responsibility for ordering the death of Jesus, when the crowd cries, "His blood be on us, and on our children."

Though unreported in the Gospels of Mark, Luke or John, that line in Matthew — embraced with furious glee by anti-Semites through the ages — is right there in the New Testament. Gibson and his screenwriter didn't make it up, nor did they misrepresent the apostle's account of the Roman governor's queasiness at the injustice.

But biblical times are not these times. This inflammatory line in Matthew — and the millenniums of persecution, scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly from its malign repetition — was finally addressed by the Catholic Church in the decades after the defeat of Naziism.

In 1965's historic Second Vatican Council, during the papacy of Paul VI, the church decided that while some Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the death of Jesus, "still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith progress.

However, a group of Catholics rejects that and other holdings of Vatican II. Mr. Gibson is reportedly aligned with that reactionary clique. (So is his father, an outspoken Holocaust-denier, but the son warns interviewers not to go there. I agree; the latest generation should not be held responsible for the sins of the fathers.)

In the skillful publicity run-up to the release of the movie, Gibson's agents said he agreed to remove that ancient self-curse from the screenplay. It's not in the subtitles I saw the other night, though it may still be in the Aramaic audio, in which case it will surely be translated in the versions overseas.

And there's the rub. At a moment when a wave of anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD? Is art served by presenting the ancient divisiveness in blood-streaming media to the widest audiences in the history of drama?

Matthew in 10:34 quotes Jesus uncharacteristically telling his apostles: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." You don't see that on Christmas cards and it's not in this film, but those words can be reinterpreted — read today to mean that inner peace comes only after moral struggle.

The richness of Scripture is in its openness to interpretation answering humanity's current spiritual needs. That's where Gibson's medieval version of the suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame, fails Christian and Jew today.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: blindleadingtheblind; christianity; gibson; gospels; moviereview; passion; safire
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To: okie01
What this buffoon and others do not realize or want to realize is that good and evil do not exclusively belong to any one group, gender, or race. Were Jews calling for the death of Jesus? Yes, but that does not mean that all Jews now living and have lived since are evil. Did Jews help the Nazis herd their own people into the showers and ovens? Yes. Did whites lynch blacks in the south? Yes. Do blacks commit crimes against blacks? Yes. But that does not mean that all whites, Jews, or blacks - now and in the future - should be judged by the actions of these people. When will people begin to realize this?
81 posted on 03/01/2004 4:01:11 AM PST by 7thson (I think it takes a big dog to weigh a 100 pounds.)
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To: churchillbuff
I have never liked this semi-conservative at all.
82 posted on 03/01/2004 4:04:01 AM PST by bmwcyle (<a href="http://www.johnkerry.com/" target="_blank">miserable failure)
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To: churchillbuff
Safire is just another leftist liberal whose condemnation of this film is in effect an approval rating.

Gibson, hopefully, will go on to produce more Biblical epics to further enrage the Godless left.
83 posted on 03/01/2004 4:08:37 AM PST by ZULU (GOD BLESS SENATOR McCARTHY!!!!)
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To: HiTech RedNeck
I got a freepmail pointing out that Mel's church wasn't a breakaway but an actual Rome-recognized arm of the RCC. My bad for the misunderstand and apologies for misleading anyone.
84 posted on 03/01/2004 4:40:24 AM PST by HiTech RedNeck
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To: churchillbuff
where were these guys when KILL BILL/SCREAM were released???
85 posted on 03/01/2004 4:44:44 AM PST by Cronos (W2K4!)
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To: churchillbuff
And finally, outrage: who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?

Which is exactly the response Jesus forbids, in the very same movie Safire sat through.

86 posted on 03/01/2004 4:53:29 AM PST by Taliesan (fiction police)
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To: gipper81

Safire does not love Jesus or he would not attack the Scriptures which testify about the Christ.
87 posted on 03/01/2004 5:00:45 AM PST by kittymyrib
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To: fire_eye
it is out of context for someone in a bloodthirsty mob to call down curses on their own descendents.

Only if you actually believe in the curse, which they did not. If you believe your cause is just, it is a perfectly plausible piece of hyperbole, such as "I swear on my mother's grave." And such hyperbolic moments are ALWAYS reserved for high emotional contexts, which is when something nearly outrageous is required to stand out above the general din and focus the argument. And give assurance to a doubting vote that "if we are SO SURE the blood is innocent, you can trust us on this."

People who are responsible but don't want to be will always borrow extra sincerity from the surrounding zealots, and use it as their own.

Which is precisely what happened in the Gospels, in the most brilliant portrayel of a politician catering to zealots ever painted.

If you follow the dynamic of the argument between the Jews and Pilate, (like the movie did) it fits the context perfectly.

88 posted on 03/01/2004 5:04:10 AM PST by Taliesan (fiction police)
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To: churchillbuff; veronica
re: Another commentator who is really attacking the Gospels (in the guise of attacking Gibson) and putting christians on notice that they are not supposed to take their beliefs to the public square --- or they'll be ridiculed, denounced and, if the bigots can pull it off, financially ruined)))

ping ;-)

89 posted on 03/01/2004 5:21:16 AM PST by Mamzelle
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To: TheMole
I thought Edomites were descendents of Esau--?
90 posted on 03/01/2004 5:25:28 AM PST by Mamzelle
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To: Theophilus
Nobody can say that anybody got sexual pleasure from this movie or the events depicted.

I know of a few who got their kicks out of watching the violence. (One of my friends tried to use this as an evangelistic film for a classmate, who for some reason thought the scourging scene was terribly funny.) But the vast, vast majority were Christians who found themeselves in deeper awe of the magnitude of Christ's sacrfice for them.

91 posted on 03/01/2004 5:28:16 AM PST by jude24 (Would You like to Know God Personally? - http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~tjminter/4laws/4laws.ppt)
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To: Mamzelle
Perhaps the only conclusion to come to, is that all art is open to interpretation, and that a movie like this is a subjective experience. There are people I like and respect on both sides of the debate, pro and con.
92 posted on 03/01/2004 5:34:13 AM PST by veronica ("America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." GW Bush 1-20-04)
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To: freebilly
Also in the movie, which Safire conveniently ignored: When Jesus was taken by the Romans in the Garden of Gesthemane and some of the apsotles struggled, He said, "Stop. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword."
93 posted on 03/01/2004 5:52:38 AM PST by Rennes Templar
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To: churchillbuff
Movie mayhem, long resisted by parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.

One sentence, four major errors.
1) Since when have many parents cared about the violence their children see in movies, on TV, in the computer games they play, or depicted in the music they listen to? A lot of parents have no idea about what their children are fed by the entertainment industry.
2) Mel Gibson is not exploiting any "loophole;" violence, and very graphically portrayed, is a major ingredient in a lot of entertainment these days.
3) Audiences are not flocking to The Passion for the violence; its for the message, the story, the passion of the Christ.
4. Graphic violence has a place in certain movies (e.g. Saving Private Ryan), but The Passion is not going to make mainstream producers push the envelope of violence. Its already been pushed and will continue to be pushed until there is no longer a prurient market for it.

94 posted on 03/01/2004 5:59:29 AM PST by HenryLeeII (John Kerry's votes have killed more people than my guns!)
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To: wirestripper
Another interesting point from another area altogether:

I was reading Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, which for its day was pretty shocking reading. Rather than heap praise and eulogize the Caesars, he wrote a tell-all.

The bargain of power in that day was that civil obedience, high taxes, military conscription, etc. would be exchanged for the circus of the arena: bloodsport.

One caesar after another would top themselves in the bloodshed of it all until no amount of blood could compensate the people for the situation they were in.

Pilot reigned in the era of Claudius, the emperor who succeeded Caligula, and to a large extent spent the fourteen years of his rule righting a badly tottering empire left behind to him by that butchering sadist.

To hand a single man over to be murdered to placate the a populace was so small in that era as to be less than a footnote. During Caligula's reign, even Romans were made to battle like gladiators for their lives in the end. Nobody was safe. This incident with Jesus garnered attention only for the fact that never before had a people called for the blood of one man with such unified strength.

To test this lust, Pilot offered a choice between a convicted murderer of Jews, and Jesus, and it wasn't even close.

I think it was charitable that Mel personified Satan in this movie. Ultimately, 'the devil made us do it' might be the dodge.

Ultimately, Christ was killed by the very people he sought to save, including me. The whole 'Jews killed Jesus' question may just be an angle Satan has been using over the millenia to salvage what turned out to be a bad situation for him.
95 posted on 03/01/2004 6:02:11 AM PST by RinaseaofDs (Only those who dare truly live - CGA 88 Class Motto)
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To: churchillbuff
So another Manhattan salonite speaks.

Do elites have term limits? They have overstayed their welcome by about 30 yrs.
96 posted on 03/01/2004 6:07:25 AM PST by roses of sharon
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To: RinaseaofDs
I think that Dennis Prager said it exactly right when he said that Christians and non-Christians watched two very different messages. I saw the movie on Saturday morning at 12:00 in the afternoon. It was packed 1/2 hour before it even started. It was a very powerful movie. I almost wanted to jump through the screen and just put an end to the torture. As it ended, we walked out stunned, silent, reflective, and peacefull. No one left the movie blaming the Jews or anyone else. I think Mel Gibson used the Pilate charachter as an indictment of our present politicians who knowingly sacrifice our rights, liberty, and freedoms in order to stay loyal to their corporate and special interest masters. I think that Jewish people who criticise this movie as being anti-semetic are giving the same baloney as Italian Americans who criticise the Sopranos. Just pure and utter garbage. The worst part is that most Christians I know are strongly in favor of Israel and fellow Jews, myself included.
97 posted on 03/01/2004 6:08:25 AM PST by chris1
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To: TheMole
Edom is another name for Esau, the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, who was bargained out of his birthright by the wily Jacob. I think Ruth may also have been an Edomite, but I'll have to look further.

So Herod is not without *some* claim.

98 posted on 03/01/2004 6:15:34 AM PST by Mamzelle
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To: 7thson
Your response displays more thought than Safire's entire column.
99 posted on 03/01/2004 6:19:34 AM PST by okie01 (www.ArmorforCongress.com...because Congress isn't for the morally halt and the mentally lame.)
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To: wirestripper
It really seemed to me that it was the Romans who conducted (and enjoyed) most of the brutality. I don't doubt that they were as brutal as they were told to be - part of the Roman ideology was to be strong, unmovable, stern, and vicious when necessary. But I thought that the Romans were nothing if not disciplined, and the movie showed them almost as out of control as the mob.
100 posted on 03/01/2004 6:19:40 AM PST by johnb838 (Boycott all Hollywood movies besides the Passion during Lent.)
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