Santa Clara University

Mel Gibson’s Troubling Take on Jesus’ Last Hours

By Catherine Murphy, assistant professor, Religious Studies Department, Santa Clara University

As a biblical scholar, a historian of early Christianity, and a practicing Catholic, I find myself both drawn to and troubled by Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Jesus’ last hours. I am drawn to the film as I am to any spiritual reflection. I’m fascinated to see how religious belief is presented in the marketplace of ideas, grateful for the opportunity to enter into sustained discussions about faith and history, interested to see how Jesus’ life is interpreted for a new generation. I was teaching a course on the historical Jesus at the time the film came out, and there’s no doubt that the film made the course somehow more real for the students, as it provided concrete and disturbing images of the end of Jesus’ life.

But the film troubles me as well. Specifically, I’m concerned about the focus on Jesus’ physical punishment, the impact of narrowing the story of Jesus to the passion account, and the way the Jewish and Roman leaders are respectively accused of and exonerated for Jesus’ death. To put it more succinctly, I’m concerned about the maiming, framing, and blaming that goes on in Gibson’s story and how this diverges from the canonical gospels.

First, the maiming

The film emphasizes—even revels in—the physical torture Jesus likely endured. Many Christians who have viewed the film have commented that they’ve never imagined Jesus suffering in such vivid terms, and now for the first time they see the cross as the torture instrument it always was. The early gospel authors and their audiences of course had no such luxury. They were frequently exposed to this uniquely Roman form of political propaganda as they entered various cities, because the Romans would position the crosses outside the city gates along major roads. Since the crucified often took two to three days to die and were then left to be picked at by carrion birds, their crime still posted above their heads, no passer-by would miss the message of Roman power. The evangelists are loathe to dwell on this torture. When they get to that part of Jesus’ story, they summarize it tersely. This suggests that, for them, the significance of Jesus’ death lies not in how much torture he endured, but somewhere else. And it raises the question for modern viewers: why does Gibson choose to portray the quality of Jesus’ love through the amount of physical abuse he could endure? Endurance becomes a vehicle for demonstrating Jesus’ divine nature, but it is not a vehicle that any of the evangelists sought to exploit. A further question is: why does violence sell so well? As of May 10, 2004, the movie had grossed over $368 million in the U.S. and more than $222 million overseas. Violence in the media is denounced by many in our country, but those are precisely the people who thronged to see this movie. And there was much violence here that was gratuitous. Consider only the "bad" criminal taunting Jesus and then having his eyes poked out by a bird; Jesus had just forgiven those who "knew not what they did," but apparently Gibson hadn’t.

Second, the framing

Here, we can look at both the story that Gibson tells and the way he presented that story in the popular press before the film’s release. The story Gibson tells begins in Gethsemane and ends in the tomb on Easter. I counted something like ten flashbacks to other moments in Jesus’ life, five of which derive from the passion narratives. This is very different from the canonical gospels, which choose to tell the significance of Jesus through his birth, teachings, and acts of power, as well as through his last supper, death and resurrection. For the Christian, there is a richer incarnational aspect to the gospels because of the many ways they present God manifest to humanity through Christ. For Gibson, God is present in Jesus’ miraculous stamina and seemingly endless supply of blood. Gibson’s view of incarnation is a body beaten to a pulp that crawls onto its own cross. It was always and only about body broken and blood poured out. As for the framing of the story in the popular press, Icon Productions leaked screenplays to academics and Church leaders and arranged private screenings, and when some of the response came back negative, Icon screamed "culture wars" and spoke of pirated scripts. Some academics whose views had been actively solicited were now tarred as secular humanists opposed to Christian faith. This created more buzz and interest in the movie in general, and galvanized the target audience in particular. The "innocent victim" plays well in our society, and here the correspondence of the story told and the telling of it are not unrelated.

Third and last, the blaming

The movie absolutely blames the Jews for Jesus’ death. Granted, bestial Roman underlings carry out the torture, and granted, there are sympathetic Jews in the piece (notably Jesus and the ubiquitous Christian trio of earthly companions, Mary, Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple). Granted, too, that Satan is an adversarial figure in the film; however, in Satan’s case, the visual correspondence to Jesus’ mother suggests that he/she/it is a dramatic foil to Mary rather than to Jesus. What I look to is not the peripheral characters, but the central characters, those in the plot who have the power to kill Jesus. That means the Jewish leaders and the Romans. It is the chief priest Caiaphas and his cohort who try Jesus unfairly, while Pilate’s trial is conducted in public in broad daylight. The Jewish leaders consistently demand Jesus’ execution, whereas Pilate keeps trying to release him. Much of this is found in the canonical gospels, and there is a legacy of anti-Jewish rhetoric there that Christians must confront. But the same gospel accounts that blame the Jewish leaders the most—Matthew and John—are also the most Jewish gospels. It is one thing to represent conflict with other members of your faith by blaming your/their leaders; it is quite another to blame Jews as a Christian living in a predominantly Christian society after at least a millennium of anti-Jewish pogroms and the Holocaust. There is a Christian legacy of hatred, not love, manifest in historical acts done to Jews, and this movie proceeds as if oblivious to it. Some might say that it does so because it is following the gospels. But Gibson goes far beyond the gospels in exonerating Pilate and blaming the Jews. I could cite multiple examples, like the way the role of Pilate’s wife is augmented from the one partial verse in Matthew 27:19 so that she, and Pilate by proxy, appear sympathetic to Jesus (she is even given a name in the film!). One could also mention the way the roles of Caiaphas and his cohort are expanded: they not only hand Jesus over to Pilate, but sadistically attend the scourging as well, as Satan walks unseen among them. Perhaps the most obvious example of the blame game is the adaptation of the earthquake in Matthew 27:51-53. In the gospel, the earthquake serves as a kind of apocalyptic birth-pang at the moment of Jesus’ death; it releases many of the saints from their tombs so that they can join the living saints in Jerusalem. It is a kind of first hope of the resurrection. But Gibson presents it as a judgment. He cuts to Pilate’s palace, which shakes a bit, then cuts to the court of the Sanhedrin, which is ripped in half. Only then does the high priest show any remorse. Gibson reportedly added this in response to criticism that he had over-emphasized the culpability of the Jewish leaders, but of course it only reinforces that notion. This is the only moment where we see the high priest Caiaphas express any doubt, whereas throughout the account Pilate has been introspective, concerned, and troubled. This is the same Pilate who, according to Roman historical records, was recalled to Rome twice for excessive brutality in Judea, the same Pilate who crucified and humiliated people at the drop of a hat.

By focusing on physical punishment and framing the story around the abuse and death of Jesus, Gibson presents torture as a locus of revelation. By removing the political context of Jesus’ execution and blaming his death on the theological blindness of Jewish leaders, Gibson presents an apolitical Jesus who does not stand against empire and a Jewish faith invalidated as long as it fails to believe in Jesus.

There is no doubt that this film has had a powerful impact on many people, particularly those who were already familiar with the story of Jesus. If you are one of those people, you brought a perspective to the film shaped by family, church, education, and your moral and intellectual commitments. My own perspective, most recently influenced by the rise of a new American empire and the recent images of American-sponsored torture of Iraqi prisoners, leads me to be very uncomfortable with an apolitical passion that inscribes grace in physical abuse.