Honest to Jesus

JUST OVER A CENTURY ago, in the winter of 1898, the first American film about Jesus, "The Passion Play of Ober-Ammergau," transported audiences to the Bavarian Alps to witness Jesus's death as it had been dramatized by the townsfolk of the village of Oberammergau since 1634.

Well, not exactly. Because that drama is staged only once a decade, and the filmmakers were good to go in December of 1897, the movie was shot on a snowy rooftop in Manhattan. When it comes to Jesus movies, things are seldom what they seem.

America's national conversation about Jesus did not begin with Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," which hits theaters on Wednesday. In fact, it was already well underway in 1898. As Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders stormed up San Juan Hill that year, Americans were backslapping a macho Jesus. "In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?", a bestseller by the Congregationalist minister Charles M. Sheldon, portrayed its hero as a chivalrous warrior for social justice. And an exhibition of 365 gouaches on the life of Christ by French painter James Tissot dazzled audiences in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha with its representations of Jesus as a sturdy outdoorsman.

Still, the arrival of the passion play in theaters brought Americans for the first time into close-up contact with Jesus, or at least his cinematic ghost. Not that America's Protestant majority immediately embraced this centuries-old Catholic tradition. Some objected to Bible-based entertainment as an untoward mixing of the sacred and the secular, and San Francisco (of all places) banned for-profit passion plays after an Episcopalian called a proposal for one "fearful impiety." Regarding the Oberammergau production itself, one American minister sniffed that "the sacred character of the Bible should not be personated before the public by any people, least of all by peasants."

But Protestants eventually embraced the genre as both wholesome family entertainment and effective evangelism. Today the sacred and the secular dance dizzyingly close, with nary a protest, in dozens of elaborate passion plays staged every year across the United States. Over 7 million people have witnessed "The Great Passion Play"/ held every summer in the shadow of a seven-story-high resurrected Jesus in Eureka Springs, Ark. Some paying customers walk away from these extravaganzas believing that they have encountered their Lord. Few seem troubled that the passion play genre may be irredeemably anti-Semitic -- or that they have witnessed only a tiny portion of what Christians have long understood as the gospel.

Passion plays first emerged in medieval Europe, inspired by popular anti-Semitism and the Catholic tradition of Jesus as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). Their avowed aim was spreading the faith, but they were also mass spectacles whose producers were not above genuflecting to Dionysus, the god of tragic drama. Passion plays graphically depicted the lashing, bleeding, puncturing, and asphyxiation of Jesus, in keeping with the conviction that God suffered with (and for) humanity. Jews were found guilty of deicide -- not only because Catholic theology had long claimed as much, but because ratcheting up the violence and degrading the Jews filled the seats.

At least one 19th-century rabbi objected to a passion play proposed in New York City in 1880 on the grounds that it would fuel the fires of anti-Semitism. But the first full-length Jewish critique was written by Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, a Reform Jew from Philadelphia, who travelled to Bavaria in 1900. As he wrote the following year in "A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play," the performance was "dramatically thrilling" but "historically false" -- particularly in its depiction of Jesus as a Teuton and the Jews as "blood thirsty hyenas." The Jewish people, the rabbi concluded, are a people of Christs, themselves scourged and crucified, not least by passion plays themselves.

Today's American passion plays, like the granddaddy of them all at Oberammergau, offer paying customers titillation and brutality, good guys and bad guys, and casts of biblical proportions. But unlike Oberammergau (and Gibson's "Passion"), they tend to be rather upbeat. Some refuse to restrict themselves to the last days of Jesus's life, setting his trial and execution against his teachings and miracles. Others, like the popular "Glory of Easter" play staged annually at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., emphasize the resurrection over the crucifixion.

Like most drama, these performances traffic in the illusion of reality. When it comes to passion plays, however, this illusion is particularly dangerous -- and theologically distorting. If we were to travel back to Oberammergau in 1900 we would probably find it difficult to suspend disbelief. But audiences at the time were transfixed, transported from modern Bavaria to ancient Jerusalem. The actors played their parts "with absolute realism," one American pilgrim reported, and even Krauskopf called the play "realistically rendered."

Authenticity is also a key trope in our latest Jesus war. Mel Gibson has said that his decision to marry the genres of the passion play with the savagery of the action film was itself directed by the Holy Spirit. The National Association of Evangelicals has described Mad Max Goes to Golgotha as "an accurate depiction," and after screening a rough cut of the R-rated film, Billy Graham said, "I feel as if I have actually been there." After his own private viewing, Pope John Paul II reportedly said, "It is as it was" -- though the Vatican later denied he'd made such a statement.

But what other than blind faith informs such endorsements? Even if we take the Gospels as gospel, we simply do not have enough information to squeeze out anything close to a two-hour movie. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not screenplays, or even treatments of them. To make a Jesus film based on the Bible you have to go outside it (as Gibson reportedly did, consulting the visions of a female mystic recorded in "The Dolorous Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ"). You have to make millions of idiosyncratic choices about dialogue, sequence, action. You have to choose this line from John rather than that line from Luke. And you have to make things up.

Among the most monumental choices Gibson made was to restrict himself to Jesus's final 12 hours -- in other words, to make a passion play. Having made that choice, Gibson inherited an unholy host of genre-specific conventions not only from medieval European anti-Semitism, but also from the ancient thirst of drama for conflict. There is conflict in the Gospels themselves, but they are not dramas intended to entertain. So while the temptation to crank up the violence against Jesus and turn the Jews into bad guys can be justified by the Bible (for example, the "blood curse" in Matthew where the crowd cries out, "His blood be on us, and on our children"), it is really inspired by Dionysus.

Scholars tell us that the passion narrative circulated long before the Gospels were written. And while large chunks of the story made their way into each Gospel, it was never canonized separately as its own New Testament book. That's because early Christians decided the good news concerned Jesus's entire life, not merely his death. To emphasize Jesus's death is to highlight the fact that some Jews were set against him. To emphasize his life, on the other hand, is to embed Jesus in Jewish culture -- to see him traveling to Jerusalem for the Passover, arguing the Law with rabbis in the Temple, interpreting the Hebrew Bible in parables.

So what should we make of the rhetoric of reality surrounding Gibson's film? As Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have long understood, humans are always tempted to mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized, to bow down before the idol rather than the divinity it represents. Unlike Jews and Muslims, Christians have no hard-and-fast rule against depicting God in art. But they, too, have traditionally recognized that one of the challenges of the spiritual life is to pierce the veil of illusion -- to discern the difference between the fire and the flickering shadow on the wall of the cave.

Those who see "The Passion of the Christ" should remember not only Rabbi Krauskopf's complaints about the "mass of falsehoods" presented by the producers of the Oberammergau passion play, but also his astonishment at the audience's utter credulity in the face of them. They should remember that Gibson's Christ is not Jesus, and that the death of Jesus is not the whole of the gospel. No doubt many moviegoers will sense Jesus's presence as they watch the film. More power to them. But the movie is not "as it was," and to suggest otherwise is to flirt with false gods. Even in Jesus films -- especially in Jesus films -- things are seldom what they seem.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of Boston University's department of religion, is the author of "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" (Farrar Straus & Giroux).