The Real Jesus
How a Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity
By the early 20th century, the questions had begun to take on racial overtones. Theologians of the 1920s identified the German people with Christ, Heschel says. "Jesus had a message, which was to destroy Judaism. He struggled to accomplish that, but the Jews got the better of him and killed him. [Now] Germans, too, are engaged in a life-or-death struggle, but they are going to be victorious, destroying Judaism and the Jews." Hitler became the Christ figure, says Heschel, "the one sent by God."
In response to the Holocaust, in large part, Vatican II issued its famous Nostra Aetate, in 1965, which fully exonerated Jews of Jesus's death and launched a serious Catholic scholarly reconsideration of Jesus's Jewish context. More specifically, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued guidelines reminding Catholics "that the correct presentation of the Gospel accounts of the Passion and death of Jesus Christ do not support anti-Semitism."
It is a well-publicized fact that Mel Gibson is happy neither with the reforms nor the larger spirit of Vatican II. But it would be too easy--or cynical--to say that Gibson's movie simply reflects a yearning for pre-Vatican II approaches to the relationship between Jews and Christians. It does, however, quite pointedly ignore any of the new understandings brought forth by dedicated Christian and Jewish scholars of the past 50 years.
Gibson, of course, can hardly provide centuries of background in a two-hour movie--or all of the scholarship that deals with it. And yet, says Bard College's Jacob Neusner, "The entire corpus of the work has been completely dismissed by Gibson." Focusing strictly on the Passion, Gibson made no effort to provide much-needed context. Nor does he apologize for that. "I know how it went down," he told Sawyer in the ABC interview. "Not everybody does. Maybe they'll find out. It's not my job, you know. My job is to make a film as well as I can make it." Maybe so. But, at the very least, Gibson has helped to perpetuate some of the same misunderstandings that have plagued Christian-Jewish relations for nearly 2,000 years.
advertisement
