"Don't Blame Mel Gibson," Says New York Author.

Dr. Charles Patterson, author of the highly acclaimed book ETERNAL TREBLINKA, says that the problem with "The Passion" is not the film itself, but the gospel story on which it is based. The writers of the four New Testament Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--gave the Jesus story an anti-Jewish slant, and Gibson is only following the story that the Gospels tell.

     Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of the controversial "ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust," which has now been translated into four European languages, maintains that the four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--give the story of the life and death of Jesus an anti-Jewish twist.
     The Gospels have an anti-Semitic bias because they were written more than a generation after the death of Jesus, not in Galilee or Jerusalem where Jesus lived and died, but much later in the Greco-Roman cities of Antioch, Ephesus, and Rome itself when the rivalry between Christians and Jews was especially intense.
     By the time the Gospels were composed in their final form near the end of the first century, Jews and Christians were fierce competitors arguing over whether or not Jesus was the Messiah/Christ promised in the Hebrew Bible and over which group--Jews or Christians--represented the "true Israel."
     This intense competition colored the way the Gospels told the story of the passion (suffering) of Jesus--and it is this slanted story on which Mel Gibson based his film. When he says he is only telling the Jesus story that's in the New Testament, he cannot be faulted
     Jesus (whose Aramaic name was Jeshua) was a Jew faithful to the law of Moses and spirit of the prophets. Like other nationalistic Jews before and after him, he upset the Romans with his apocalyptic preaching. On what turned out to be his final Passover trip to Jerusalem, he was arrested and, upon the order of the Roman procurator, executed.
     After his death, his followers--called "Nazarenes"--lived on in Galilee and Jerusalem, where they continued to observe Jewish law and wait for the coming of "the Kingdom of God," which Jesus had promised.
     However, the future of Christianity did not remain with these Aramaic-speaking Nazarenes. Instead, it passed on to an energetic, Greek-speaking Jew named Paul from Tarsus in Asia Minor. He had never met Jesus and wasn't greatly impressed by the Nazarenes he did meet when he visited Jerusalem. After a vision that convinced him that Jesus was the Christos (the Greek word for Messiah), Paul preached his own understanding of Christianity, which was quite different from the Nazarene version. He insisted that the gentile converts he recruited did not need to submit themselves to circumcision and the other demands of Jewish law and even claimed that the law of Moses was no longer necessary, even for Jews.
     The Jewish insurrection against Rome, which ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 C.E., dealt a devastating blow to the Nazarenes, from which they never recovered. After the revolt Pauline Christians did all they could to separate themselves from their Jewish roots. It was in this atmosphere that the writers of the gospels told the story of Jesus in such a way that it looked as if his enemies were not the Romans who put him to death, but Jews--Pharisees, priests, and the Jewish people generally.
     The first gospel, Mark, written in Rome shortly after the Jewish uprising was crushed, reflected the strong anti-Jewish feelings then current in the capital. Mark's gospel describes how Jesus was persecuted at every turn by the Pharisees and priests of the temple. In fact, the very first person in the gospel to recognize Jesus' worth was not a Jew at all, but a Roman centurion present at his crucifixion, who proclaimed, "Truly this man was a son of God" (Mark 15:39). Furthermore, Mark wrote that Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator who ordered Jesus's execution, tried to have Jesus released, but he was prevented from doing so by a bloodthirsty Jewish mob.
     Matthew's gospel went even further. When the Jewish mob shouts for the death of Jesus, Pilate washes his hands and tells them, "I am innocent of this man's blood." The gospel then puts into the mouths of the crowd words that were to condemn later generations of Jews: "And the people answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25). (It has been reported that Gibson agreed to cut this scene from the film.)
     To their credit many post-Holocaust Christians have been making sincere efforts to take responsibility for the church's anti-Semitic past. In the early 1960s the Catholic Church's Vatican II Council denounced anti-Semitism and stated that Jews of the past, as well as the Jews of today, bear no responsibility for the death of Jesus.
     Let's hope that the Mel Gibson film does not turn back the clock and incite a new wave of anti-Semitism. There's much too much of it in the world already. One Holocaust is enough.

NOTE: Dr. Patterson's article--"A Whiff of Auschwitz: Mel Gibson and the Gospel of Anti-Semitism"--has appeared in several newspapers. You can read it on the website of The Jewish Press (NY) at www.jewishpress.com
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