Jews and Christians plan lectures to mute film impact of Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ’

JEWS and Christians who fear Mel Gibson’s epic on the crucifixion of Jesus will fuel anti-Semitism are planning lecture series and other programmes to try to mute the film’s impact.

Gibson has insisted that The Passion of the Christ, set to be released Ash Wednesday, February 25, does not malign Jews.

But the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, whose representatives saw a version the movie last week, said it contained destructive stereotypes about the Jewish role in Christ’s death.

Critics of the film hope to explain how dramatisations of the crucifixion, called Passion plays, were used in the Middle Ages to incite anti-Jewish violence, and emphasise many Christian denominations now reject the idea of collective Jewish responsibility in the slaying of Jesus.

“Do I think there will be pogroms (massacres) as a result of this movie? No,” said Rabbi David Elcott, the American Jewish Committee’s interfaith director. “It’s part of something larger, which is a hardening of religious conversation. It is an absolutist movie. It undermines the progress that we’ve made in this country toward mutual respect and religious pluralism.”

Opponents do not plan boycotts outside theatres. “Artists have every right to create any kind of movie they want, but an audience has the absolute right to pass judgement on that,” said Rabbi James Rudin, a longtime interfaith adviser for the committee, a public policy organisation based in New York. The campaign is being undertaken in the face of a massive evangelistic effort by many US churches in conjunction with the movie’s release. Several prominent conservative Christians, including the Reverend Billy Graham, said the film was one of the strongest depictions they’d seen of Christ’s last hours.

Evangelical supporters of the film agree with Gibson that it does not blame Jews for Christ’s death but instead follows biblical teaching that Jesus died because of the sins of each and every individual ever born. They plan lectures related to the movie, and have produced special Bibles that contain images from the film.

In response, the American Jewish Committee is sending a 40-page guide to its chapters nationwide on how to explain Jewish concerns about the film. Rudin also is urging Christian colleagues not to use the movie as an education tool.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has not commented on the movie, plans to reissue its criteria for dramatising the crucifixion along with papal and church statements on Catholic-Jewish relations.