Scholarly Smackdown: 'The Passion' (continued)

A liberal professor and a conservative professor debate Mel Gibson's movie, the Bible, theology and more.

BY: John Dominic Crossan and Ben Witherington III

Continued from page 2

From: John Dominic Crossan
To: Ben Witherington III
Date: March 23, 2004

Dear Ben,

At least we agree that Pilate1s exculpation was not a product of Christian fear (or evangelical lying), but we clearly disagree on how to explain its gospel presence. You speak of my interpretation as having "an undue amount of pure speculation without historical foundation."

On one hand, my view of Pilate1s character is based on historical foundations in Philo and Josephus. On the other, you continue with something you find "perfectly plausible" by giving three reasons that contain exactly what you alleged about my reconstruction: "an undue amount of pure speculation without historical foundation." I used Philo and Josephus along with an analysis of gospel-sequence, gospel-change, and gospel-purpose to understand Pilate's innocence, but your imaginary reconstruction of Pilate's action is no better or worse that Mel Gibson's.

By the way, you have now mentioned twice that scene between Mary, Claudia, and the wiping up of Jesus blood. Why does that bother you so much? Because it's fictional? About 5 percent of the film is Gospel account (the general outline), 85 percent is Emmerich1s fiction (the specific detail), and 10 percent is Gibson's fiction (the extra brutality). Because it's feminist? The reason the women are so splendidly better than the men in this film is not because Gibson knows what women want but because Anne Catherine Emmerich, his early 19th-century scriptwriter, was, of course, a woman. It is, for example, a Jewish woman in the Jewish crowd on the way to Calvary who cries out, "Somebody stop this!"

I want to think, in this final interchange, about how to reconstruct the Holy Week liturgy of execution and resurrection in order to avoid both the human venom of anti-Judaism and the divine savagery of Mel Gibson1s film. Liturgy in song and rite is dramatization and must surely come under those same criteria suggested for its counterpart in play and film. My suggestion is to restore (not create) the communal aspect of both Jesus' crucifixion and Jesus' resurrection. He was not the first nor the last Jewish martyr, and so he did not die alone but died (for Christian Jews) as the suffering climax of all those who had died from human injustice. And, therefore, he did not and could not rise alone--but rose (for Christian Jews) as the liberating leader of all those who had waited for divine justice.

We can today, therefore, with utter integrity create an interactive dialectic between our New Testament narratives of Jesus1 passion and our Old Testament psalms of the suffering righteous ones. (To create such a liturgical scenario, I suggest as basis the late Ray Brown1s The Death of the Messiah, Appendix VII, pp. 1445-67). But within the limits of here and now, I give but one example.

Mark 15:23-24 has three parts: (1) "And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh; but he did not take it," (2) "And they crucified him," (3) "and divided his clothes among them, casting lots to decide what each should take." Notice that very brief mention of crucifixion (only the first half of a verse in all four gospels!) framed with two longer items. That former one in Mark 23:23 = Matt 27:34-35 is based, as is also Mark 15:36 = Matt 27:48 = Luke 23:36 = John 19:29, on Psalm 69:21, "They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." The latter one in Mark 15:24b = Matt 27:35b = John 19:23-25a is based on Psalm 22:18, "they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots."

You know that, of course, Ben, just as well as I do--but it is the implications I want to emphasize. In Mark and, from him into Matthew and Luke, those foundational psalm texts are not made explicit. Non-Jewish hearers or readers could easily miss them, but Jews who had grown up with the psalms as their prayers would almost certainly recognize those deliberate echoes.

Jesus is described as dying within a tissue of resonances to the suffering past of Israel. I take those psalm-echoes, and all others like them in the passion narratives, as tremendously important. They were, in other words, how the first Christian Jews located Jesus' fate within, and as the climax of, his people's sufferings. They were not originally arguments proving that the scriptures had foretold Jesus's birth, suffering and death centuries before his advent.

I notice, however, that they are on their way to that later position as proof rather than basis by the time you get to John's gospel. There the psalm-echoes are made very explicit, on the drink in 19:28-30 and on the clothes in 19:23-24. But my proposal is that all those "hidden" psalm echoes (of which I have given only two examples) were originally not arguments, but interpretations, and they were not polemical proofs but foundational bases for Christian-Jewish faith in the meaning of the crucifixion. It was the climax of Israel's suffering righteousness.

I have addressed this final interchange not just to you, Ben, but to anyone who wonders how to worship God in Christ this first Holy Week after God in Gibson. My suggestion is to remake the liturgy toward a corporate crucifixion and a corporate resurrection. Here, because of space, I have spoken only of corporate crucifixion. But, in conclusion and farewell I point also to the communal resurrection. Its most beautiful chant is in the Odes of Solomon 42. Its most magnificent image is in the Chora or Kariye Monastery/Mosque/Museum in Istanbul--which I leave with you as an early Easter greeting.

With best wishes,
Dom

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