Well, yes — if you make it the centre of your religion. On a small scale, it represents the conflict between those who wish to merely wallow in emotions, content to demonize their villains, iconize their heroes, and ignore the complexities of reality, and those who try to live a fully engaged life examining the problematic nature of personal interactions in an unclear world, and want that reflected in art as well: the difference between those who would make intellectual marzipan (sweet, and slightly poison, with no fiber nor trace elements) the whole of a diet, and those who believe that marzipan has its place, and it's not and shouldn't be anywhere near the most part of a balanced diet. But while this is a clash of weltanshauungs, it doesn't affect more than the small handful of us (by comparison to everyone in the world, though it can seem — operative world seem — that everyone is part of the movement, when all the people you hang with are) who are actively involved in on-line fandom and fanfiction particularly. Our battles of canon vs. fanon are on the level of the more obscure heresies and political factions of the ancient world, and will in all odds not be more than an occasional footnote if that 2000 years from now — or 200.

But plus ça change, plus ça meme, and things writ small reflect things writ large. The droplets of a splash of poured milk, as captured in an Edgerton strobe photo, are pretty and harmless — but they are the same dynamic as the droplets of the splash of the asteroid impact that destroyed the dinosaurs and formed a ring of sunken lakes about the impact crater. Patterns are meaningful, and understanding the underlying reasons for them is important.

No, "in the grand scheme of things" it doesn't matter that, say, Legolas or Iolaus turned into a plastic doll with googly eyes who exists only to be the passive recipient of tortures mental, physical and improbable, that noble characters with strong personalities like Hercules are turned into inconsistent abusive manipulators, that characters who in the originals are highly reflective and engage in articulate debate over ideas are reduced to mute sufferers and psychotic aggressors, as is traditional with Faramir and Denethor and Frodo; that ambivalent characters who in canon do both good and evil are transformed into spotless saints or unmitigated demons, as with Boromir and Maedhros and Spike, that the conflicts and complications of the worlds these characters inhabit, the stages and the dramas alike, are reduced to a black blank backdrop against which only the iconic figure of the Tortured Victim and the Cruel Torturer shine forth—
 

—which in the end is reduced again to only One, the lissome, maltreated, pale body of the Passive Hero, alone in His pain, broken but still ineffably beautiful, to which we the witnesses are to subjugate all our reason and our will and our critical thought, in service of sacred emotion.

SIDEBAR IMAGE The Passion's target audience?

The ethos, in short, is the same as that of the Counter-Reformation pietism which suffuses Gibson's film and the subculture from which it comes, though the eroticism is admitted in secular fanfic, denied in the religious. (Both the religious and the secular abuse fic are curiously sanitized for the most part, depicting torture but not the gritty realities, despite the excessive and sentimentalized focus on pain: you will never read of a saint pissing himself in extremis, or a "virgin martyr" being raped first to satisfy the Roman legal requirement that no virgins be executed.) Otherwise, the mood and the techniques of the art, and its purpose, are the same.

—And the zealous fury against us iconoclasts who object that there is no canonical warrant for turning the proud but generous Elf-king Thranduil into a jealous drunken monster who lives but to abuse his helpless son, verbally, violently, or sexually any more than there is for inserting a pathetic pitying female witness/would-be consoler into these scenes of incoherent abuse,¹⁵ or insist that the Sacred Image of the Holy Maedhros on the Rock must be seen in the context of the wider world, in which His sufferings are in no small part the consequence of His own sins, and also of pure earthly stupidity and logistics, without any need for metaphysical explanation, and that even more must it be seen in the context of all the thousands and thousands of people, mostly nameless, who went through tortures even longer and more terrible, as slaves and POWs, many of them in direct consequence of their Hero's actions. Widen the focus, don't narrow it to your rapt sighing; psychological thrills and visceral emotions have their place in the arts, but it is not the whole of the feast.
 

Fanfic battles pose no threat to the word as a whole (despite the occasional threats and ill-wishes voiced by rabid fen, I don't actually know of any cases of inter-fan violence based on canon-fanon disputes, though there probably have been some, and organizing fans into jihad or crusade would be as probable as organizing an army of cats.) But they do serve as a useful mirror, a secular mirror, into the opaque world of religious folk-culture, though one must I think walk or have walked in both realms to be able to make use of it for scrying.

SIDEBAR ARTICLE Deconstructing a fanfic "passion narrative" (mine)

***
 

Don't believe me that Gibson's Passion is just fanfic, and most ironically based on a female-dominated genre of the same, given G's anti-feminism? After all, he and any number of clergy have asserted that it's both historically correct and literally faithful to the Gospels— and since they say so themselves, it must be true!

Wrong. All that is shown by this display is a) how ignorant most Christians are even of Scripture, as I will continue to hammer home, and b) how willing to engage in deception for a good cause most clergy are.

Uncanon — the short list of discrepancies from the Gospel

• Starting in the Garden, the Devil is there in person, played by the Borg Queen doing summer stock, who stands there and hisses at Jesus in Gethsemane, saying over and over again the same things (in a dubbed-in tenor), "Who is your father?" and defeatist remarks like —It's too much, one man cannot save them, and then apparently gives standing birth to a big snake that oozes out from under gtst robes and makes for the Lord, who in appropriately macho fashion stomps on it to fulfill the prophecy line about "you shall strike at his heel" from Genesis. Movie exegetes have defended this in posts by saying, Well, it doesn't say the Devil wasn't there, so how do you know he wasn't there too? Which is a valid point. But it kind of belies the claims of being completely accurate to the Gospels, and supports those of us who argue that this is merely Gibson's own fanfic.

The Devil, snake and all, shows up in Emmerich's version, btw.

(The Devil in the Gospels is way cooler and has much better lines, needless to say.)

• There's a guy named Abenadar in the film, a senior Roman officer. I've never heard this name, ever, in all my classics meanderings, so I got suspicious in the theatre, started trying to rationalize it with maybe they'd heard that there were Syrian auxiliaries and many hold that they were the regular Roman army contingent, not legionaries proper, and perhaps this was a Syro-Phoenician name I was unfamiliar with, or Persian or something. Well, yes and no. It's meant to be Arabian-sounding, because it's the name that Emmerich gives to the officer in her story, who is supposed to be a foreign-born soldier of Rome, and who takes, we are told, the name Ctesiphon as his Christian name after he converts! (I'm not joking, you can check for yourself, since I've posted Dolorous Passion onsite for reference. And yes, I laughed out loud too when I read that.¹⁶)

• The Jewish Temple guards come and take Jesus prisoner, and don't just tie him up, but put chains all over him, and then yank him around by the chains, and then throw him over a bridge and let him hang by the chains before dragging him up. This is not mentioned in any of the Gospels. Movie Purists could argue that it doesn't say they didn't, but you'd think that since they do go on to mention acts of violence and "guards brutality" afterwards, after Jesus and the elders start exchanging words, that they would have said something if there had been any of the same going on before then.

This in the movie is all almost word for word from Dolorous Passion, oddly enough.

• Pontius Pilate has several intimate sequences with "Claudia" (an old Christian fanon name for his wife, who is unnamed in the Gospels, and never appears on stage, but only sends a "beware the Ides of March" sort of message via an assistant) which again come almost straight from Emmerich.

• Later, "Claudia" brings towels to the Marys so that they can use them to wipe up Jesus' blood after the flogging. This, too, is from Emmerich (and it's so over the top, to show the sympathy of the women, the nobility of the Roman lady, the tear-jerking depiction of maternal pain combined with a gesture that serves as a fetishizing of the Sacred Blood that really makes no sense at all, though it could be argued that it isn't supposed to, but still as a human response to helplessness and tragedy it is lacking to me.)

• The Devil wanders around through the crowds, visibly, standing in among the Chief Priests, who are quite improbably (given ritual purity rules) shown as being there in the Roman barracks looking on as Jesus is flogged, repelled but avid, where even a young Roman officer cries a little in sympathy for the prisoner. Emmerich speaks of seeing devils going around inciting the hard-hearted Jews still further to new lows of cruelty.

(The "ugly baby" however seems to come solely from Gibson's imagination, serving as an inverted Madonna figure to show that evil is bad because it is a distortion of good.)

• Along the Via Dolorosa, the procession is interrupted by one of the many Falls, which come not from the Gospels, but from the Stations of the Cross — they might have happened, but they're fanon — and a woman with a young daughter comes out and offers Jesus a cup of water which is spilled by the soldiers, but before that she wipes his face with her veil. She is, of course, Veronica of Stations fame, and also fanon so far as history knows. But in the credits she is called Seraphia. This is Emmerich's name for the famous OFC, not even traditional as with [Pontia] Claudia.¹⁷We didn't get in the film the bit from Dolorous Passion about Seraphia's family being the holders of the Holy Grail, and that mystical vessel being made of kryptonite, and the same one used by Melchisedek, but the part with her little daughter and the spilled drink is there.

• In Emmerich, there is a bit where the Jewish crowds are throwing rocks and spitting on Jesus and the soldiers abusing him so much along the way, when he falls, that Simon of Cyrene, who previously had evinced extreme reluctance to help when drafted, indignantly faces them all down and denounces them. There's a scene like this in the film, too — but nothing like it in the Gospels.

• The bit where the Roman soldiers dislocate Jesus' arm to make it reach the pre-drilled hole in the cross comes right from Dolorous Passion. So does the emphatic jolt as they raise the prefab cross and drop it into the hole, however unistorical this might be. (I don't know where the muppet raven that pecks out the bad thief's eye comes from, though — I couldn't find it in Emmerich, and I don't remember it from any artwork or Mystery Play, though admittedly my knowledge is scant.)

• After Jesus dies, the earthquake hits, and instead of merely tearing the curtain of the Holy of Holies in two (which to Christians is a symbol of the Covenant being opened now to Gentiles as well as Jews), Gibson interprets it as the Temple being torn in two, with a big H'wood B-adventure movie gap opening up in the middle of the floor of the B-adventure movie Temple, and pillars falling, and people getting knocked down by falling masonry, and the braziers tipping flames, all very theatrical — which coincidentally just happens to be the way it goes in Dolorous Passion!

Update: that wierd bit with the dead donkey, that I had said in a post, might be a subtle thing comparing the Palm Sunday procession with the failed hopes of the disciples? Not at all. Apparently it comes from the problematic traditional Catholic translations of the Bible, and Gibson's ploddingly-literal, historically-uninformed reading of the same. The Douay-Rheims version, which was made from Jerome's Vulgate Latin, a few decades before the KJV, has this for Matthew 27:3-5:
 

Now, anyone who reads, say, Shakespeare or Stevenson knows that "halter," in this sense, means merely a rope's end, a hempen necktie, that one wears to dance upon air, etc etc. But Gibson is apparently unfamiliar with this usage, abd can't imagine it any other way than the way it is used now to mean a horse halter. So instead of having Judas make himself a noose and hang himself, he (according to an interview) had to think of some way for there to be a halter on the scene.

The problem is, there isn't even mention of a noose in the original Greek. That it seems was a gloss added by the translators (whether Jerome or the Brits I do not know) because the verb which ends the sentence in the original is apagcomai, which only means to strangle, or if of one's self, to hang. So Protestants who are only familiar with the KJV or with more accurate modern translations than either of the Elizabethan-era versions, are (as one viewer I read) going to be completely baffled as to where Gibson came up with this, and assume he simply misremembered or didn't read Scripture at all. However, being from the Catholic "Traditionalist" background myself, I had an instinct that it was probably in the DR, and lo! so it was.

Now, these instances alone should suffice to prove that the Gospels have far less to do with the film than does later Christian fanon — but consider this last example. In all four Gospels we have one strikingly-dramatic sequence that dominates the whole Passion narrative. (Granted, two of the Gospels are drawn from the same original source material, but the fact that both Matthew and Luke use it is meaningful.) It is in many ways our window into events: how would we react, if we were there? What does it mean to be part of something, to belong to a cause, to support another person? What happens when the chips are down, when the night falls, when we're called to take a stand? I refer, of course, to the Betrayal of Peter. The whole thing reads like a Greek Tragedy or a modern black comedy; I've always thought so. But I didn't realize just how much like a Greek Tragedy it was, until I started this investigation, and struggled to parse out the koine for myself.

The words used for Peter's swearing and denial do not refer to simple profanity, but to the taking of Oaths, as in Hippocratic, or of the Horatii — they mean calling down the witness of Heaven, in terms that would be understood by everyone living in Magna Graeca, Jewish or pagan of whatever faith, the way that Oedipus doomed himself by swearing to deliver to justice and blinding the man who had killed the late king. And this is all foreshadowed in the Gospels, just as in a play, beforehand — and this foreshadowing is very clear in the way that my church at least handles the presentation of the Passion, by reading everything starting from the Triumphal Entry (which is a deliberate invocation of a royal entrance) of the palms and cloaks into Jerusalem, through the Last Supper, and only then reaching the Garden of Gethsemane and all that follows. "I'll never abandon you!" Peter cries fervently, and repeatedly, and is warned that before dawn he will have done so not once, but thrice.

In classical Greece, in popular culture, cockerels held a supernatural significance: sacrificial birds, offered up for vows to Asclepius or Mars, in thanks for deliverance from illness or battle; prophetic birds whose behaviour patterns could be interpreted for signs of cosmic imbalance by the augurs — and whose cries untimely in the middle of the night, were a warning sign of Doom.

Would the intended original audience of the Gospels have "gotten" this foreshadowing and dramatic buildup, sensing the mystical nature of the exchanges? You bet. Even to us, ignorant of these nuances, the overtones are still there, which is why it is such a powerful piece of mythology, for which all interpretations by well-meaning Sunday School teachers are but trivializing, trying to tell us what we already sense, that we are Peter, meaning well, devoted in the abstract but found wanting when the time comes, not measuring up to the standards we have set for ourselves — we don't need pedestrian re-emphasis of all that! Nor to have Peter turned, as was the tradition at least in my schooling, to a mere figure of fun, the emphasis on his supposed ignorance and buffoonery, like a hick (aka "clown") in a Shakespearean comedy.

But this is gone from Gibson's Passion. The story all leading up to Gethsemane is told in flashbacks and out of order, so the dramatic buildup is all gone anyway. But even that need not have been fatal, if, assuming that the majority of the audience will be familiar with Peter's vow to defend his leader to the last, Gibson had simply gone on in media res with the rest of the scene. It is, after all, intensely cinematographic, even when merely read out by a series of speakers at a podium: it is easy to imagine a closed compound, full of security personnel and governmental staff and media representatives and interested bystanders/relations with an "in," all trying to find out what's going on, into which the still-bold disciple with a leadership role has managed to insinuate himself, the darkness and shifting shadows of the lights and the fire in the barrel around which the watchers are warming their hands.

It would be an immensely taut and suspensful scene, if filmed with an ounce of skill, as the canonical female security guard notices a suspicious interloper and challenges him, less hostile than curious, —Hey, aren't you one of that guy's followers? And when denied, gets some of her friends and coworkers to back up her sense of familiarity — Yeah, we've seen you hanging out with that crowd. Even your accent gives you away, come on, man, tell the truth — and Peter's blasphemous, panicked denials, increasing with forcefullness and apparent sincerity at every challenge…until the fatal sound, and the omen fulfilled, and his efforts to distance himself from someone out of official favor all come crashing down in a heartbreak.

Instead we get a hasty muddle, visually as well as dynamically, with no definition of set between inside and out, court and courtyard, none of the sense of risktaking that Peter engages in (or potential risktaking, since he's never offered violence, only fears it, in the Gospels) as he goes into a closed area, enemy territory, to at least offer solidarity even if he fails when tested. There is a whirling, almost dervish-dance sequence of accusation and denial, a blur of shouting and pointing, and then it's all over. No tension, no chance to stand up and proclaim loyalty, forfeited again and again, no sense of invocation of "God as my witness," of the proud brought low, that Aristotle would have recognized at once. Peter is simply weak, from beginning to end, and swept away in a rush that concludes with him falling at Mary's feet (and remember, in the Gospels, Mary isn't there at the trial, that's more fanon) and — this is the kicker — asking her for absolution as he kneels before her and confesses his sin. I'm Catholic, and raised to be at ease with the idea of statues and Marian devotions and mediation, and that was way shocking for me. It really seemed to go into "Mariolatry" there. Particularly since it had replaced the canon four times repeated, of Peter's testing and failure and going off on his own to mourn.

It does, however, reflect the way it goes in Emmerich, even to the begging forgiveness from Mary…

Unhistory — the short list of mistakes

Now, much of this knowledge of history is simply due to not having slept through my undergraduate (freshman) Biblical History course, which was not a particularly in-depth treatment. The rest of it comes from being a fan of archeology and the arts of antiquity, and the remainder from having been a conscientious CCD teacher, believing, as Dr. Paula Fredriksen puts it, that "bad history makes for bad theology." That is to say, I make no pretense of great erudition, I have no degree in history — merely a passion for the truth, a curiosity for the past, and a willingness to do my homework when it comes to research. I could spend all day detailing the errors in mere visual matters concerning the milieu of Augustan Jerusalem as portrayed in Gibson's Passion, and still not get to the theological and moral questions, nor even the merely dramatic and aesthetic ones.

So, let us say in brief that there is some expert discussion over whether it would have been Roman Legionaries, or local Auxiliaries, who would have been the occupying forces in Judea at this time, but in either event they would not have been wearing armour or tunics anything like that which was depicted in the film; that the civilian population would have been dressed for the most part in the garments the Gospels describe Jesus wearing, the himation and chiton like any Greek philosopher, or if female, chiton and palla like any respectable Roman lady, and in bright colors of red and rose pink and lime green and blue, or white (whiter than any fuller could make them!) with the embroidered, colored stripes known as clavii which cover the shoulder seams of tunics in Roman paintings (unless they hailed from other parts of the Known World where the barbaric fashions of trousers and funny hats dominated, as in the earliest pictures of the Three Magi, thus coding to viewers that these were Travelers From The East;

—that glass lamps were not in use at this date nor until centuries later, but glass drinking vessels (as opposed to medieval style goblets) most definitely were; that as per the Gospels' original Greek wording, those gathered at the Last Supper would not have sat on low stools but reclined (anapiptô, anakeimai) about the table like any civilized classical gathering (the comparisons between John 13 — 17 and The Death of Socrates are striking); that Pilate's buzz cut is as unhistorical as his fear of the High Priest, who served at Roman appointment in a foreshadowing of later Caesaropapacy — as impossible as his niceness to a possible native holy-man terrorist, as improbable as an officer of the Raj being so nice to a rabble-rousing guru; that a human being can only lose 2 pints of blood before going into shock and falling unconscious—

—That condemned criminals only carried the upper bar of the cross,¹⁸ called the patibulum ("yoke") in Latin and stauros ("beam") in Greek, not the upright or stipes in Latin, which was fixed in its location as a gibbet by the gates where people went in and out, not off on a distant height, however dramatic that might look; that nails when used did not go through the palms of the hands (palamê or metakarpion) but through the wrists of the arms (cheira, an all-inclusive word for the lower arm unit) because the human hand will not support such a weight as the body in that fashion; as forensic archeology demonstrated over a generation ago, regardless of what pious depictions made well after anyone was last crucified show; that people were not crucified with such a loincloth (which was not in fact the form of classical Near Eastern underwear anyway) but stripped completely naked, so as to better effect the shaming and humiliation of the punishment, as St. Melito of Sardis lamented.¹⁹

—that the Temple, which was a huge, shining-white-marble and gold-adorned structure in classical style, was not riven apart like a street in a disaster movie, nor its columns smashed by merely another of the many earthquakes which periodically hit that area, in antiquity and since; that the Chief Priests and Elders would not have been wandering around in secular society in their vestments any more than a Roman Catholic priest wears his dalmatic about on the street; that the city of Jerusalem would have been a crowded ancient metropolis of bright colors and busy streets, not a mere provincial outpost; that the two Marys would not have been dressed like Benedictine nuns; that combs were well known in the ancient world, as were mirrors, both of these classes (along with such things as safety-pins and scissors) among the most common artifacts to be unearthed; that jungle-dwelling pythons are not naturally found in Israel—

—that the inscription on the cross read "IESOUS NAZORAIOS O BASILEUS O TON IOUDAION" [John 19:19] with Hebrew and Latin translations, not Hebrew and Latin only—

—all of these being things you'd never guess from watching the movie alone and all too many more besides. Gibson's claims that this is the most historically accurate Crucifixion ever are at best a falsehood born of gross ignorance and arrogance, and some of his supporters (Fr. Fulco the translator, for one) have to be simply lying outright.²⁰ (Then again, the recent and long-standing situations in Boston and elsewhere prove that traditional devout Catholic clergy have no problems breaking that commandment.)

So where is the Greek?

I have mentioned earlier already the curious omission of Greek from the film, and the disingenousness about it when it is brought up by scholars. I realize that most people, Christian or otherwise, are largely ignorant of the role of Greek in history. "Latin was the language of the Church," end of story, right? —Wrong. Latin was not the popular language of the ancient world, Greek was. After all, what language were the Gospels written in? Not Latin, but ordinary Greek, a mainstream dialect called koine, which I am informed is mostly readable to modern native speakers of Greek to this day, despite its archaicism. This is not something rarefied and dubious, a "scholarly conjecture" that may be dismissed by the faithful as just another one of those pointy-headed intellectual liberal things, trying to shake the faith of believers. I have heard people wondering why people in Roman Judea would be speaking Greek — when the proper question is, why wouldn't they? Why is the Times of India published in an English-language edition? Why is English spoken in the Philippines, in Singapore, in South Africa, in North America?

Before Rome ever appeared on the scene, the Middle-east was conquered and colonized by Alexander of Macedon and his successors: for three-hundred years Jerusalem had been a part of Magna Graeca, and Jews dispersed throughout all of what would become the Roman Empire, from Egypt to Turkey to the city of Rome itself. Greek culture was thoroughly rooted throughout the Mediterranean, and had been adopted as well by the Romans: "captive Greece etc."²¹ — inscriptions and left-over memos can be found in Greek not only in Rome proper, but as far upon the borders of the Imperium as Britain. The warning-sign for the Temple in Jerusalem, notifying foreigners of the death-penalty for sacrilege if they trespassed beyond the Court of the Gentiles, has been uncovered by archeologists, and it is written, not in Latin, but (you guessed it) in Greek.²² Jewish ossuaries (stone coffins) have been found in Jerusalem inscribed with Jewish names written in Greek letters.

So prevalent, in fact, had Greek culture become generations before the time of Christ, that it was a serious scandal and problem for faithful Jews. Circumcision — a non-issue in the West today, given that it is standard now for medical reasons — was a serious problem for men trying to mix in a culture where sports were performed in the nude, and circumcision regarded by everyone else in the world as a disgusting instance of male genital mutilation.²³ So few Jews in Magna Graeca were able to read or understand Hebrew by the time of Philadelphus II that a translation of the TANAKH into Greek was commissioned in Alexandria; this translation, known as the Septuagint, was the basis for all the Latin and later versions of the Old Testament Scriptures used by Christians up until about a hundred years ago. (The Latin edition, known as the Vulgate, of the Bible was only made during the late 300s — early 400's, by Jerome; and is full of a lot of mistakes and suspect editorial decisions.)

The problem of assimilation into the mainstream of culturally-Greek, ethnically-whatever ancient world pagan society boiled over with the rebellion of House Maccabeus against the Macedonian royal house of Antiochus, and all the religious/political/social/economical foundations of the conflict that would result in the destruction of the Temple about eight generations later were set in place. The Romans, as defenders of liberty and justice and world peace, were invited in to help in this and subsequent civil wars (a fact that has never been mentioned by any religion teacher in my experience) and an international peace-keeping force drafted from neighboring Syria and from Libya installed to keep the descendants of an old ally in power.

Herod, you see, wasn't Jewish. He was no more Jewish than Cleopatra was Egyptian.²⁴ He was a culturally-Greek, ethnically-Edomite/Arab Roman client king — and in fact, there wasn't one Herod, there were several, because Herod is the family name not the first name (not that most Christian religion teachers or preachers are aware of this in my experience either. All the Herods mentioned in the Gospels are different people. One Herod at the Nativity, another Herod (sibling) at the Crucifixion, yet another Herod brother in Acts…) The founder of the family, Antipater (not the same as the Macedonian general who had been Alexander the Great's mentor), was the last warlord standing at the end of the civil war that destroyed House Maccabeus, where the two rival brothers both sought outside foreign help, and John Hyrcanus was the winner, and his trusted aide Antipater, whose family had been forcibly converted to Judaism a while back in the annexation of Idumea, intended to stay on the winning side. (I originally typed "sinning side" which is also true.) He happily manipulated and betrayed his way to the top and stayed there, backing alternately Mark Anthony and getting help from Cleopatra, then backing Augustus when the tides turned, offering huge amounts of money and bases and so forth in return for support from the greatest military-industrial power in the world.

And he got it, but since he ended up getting assassinated the prize went to his son, Herod known as the Great, who rebuilt all of Jerusalem into a Graeco-Roman city complete with a hippodrome, a theatre, baths — and pagan temples. He also rebuilt the Jewish Temple into something spectacular, huge and semi-classical in style. And he built other cities and palaces like Masada and Caesarea, classical and pagan — and very expensive. All this cost money, and he got it from taxes, and this didn't help the political situation any. Herod's attempts to treat classical paganism and Judaism equally served to alienate devout Jews, and the more hot-headed went in for acts of civil disobedience, regardless of the likelihood of getting killed — or getting other people killed — for it. Herod the Great made Henry VIII look like a piker — he had ten wives one of whom he killed, (Mariamne I) and he executed lots of relatives besides, and he left a kingdom that was a barrel of naphtha²⁵ ready to ignite.

There were many conflicting religious movements within Judaism itself (not just Samaritanism, that ethno-religious division familiar to us from the Gospels, nor Pharisaism and Saducceesm, concerning neither of which have most Christians any real comprehension, taking their knowledge from the New Testament alone, but also the Essenes, the Nazarites, and doubtless others even less mainstream), many rival political groups, more than one messianic claimant who added a further religious dimension to a civil struggle that was filled with nationalistic and religious overtones already, and there was political-economic intrigue galore even apart from that, with the rivalries dating back to the death of Alexander and the subsequent contesting for bits of his empire that alternately enriched and devastated the cities and districts of the Near and Middle East over the course of the next few centuries.

Elsewhere, outside the Holy City, there was a less conflicted and puritanical approach, it seems, one that was more accommodating to mainstream popular classical culture. At least, we know that in Dura-Europa, a Syrian city which lasted until some centuries after the Apostles, when it was sacked and abandoned, the Synagogue of the Jewish community there was spectacularly beautiful, painted on every square foot of wall space with murals depicting scenes from the Scriptures and allegorical figures in a typical Roman folk-art style, — the same style adopted by Christianity for its own iconography in fact — showing King David draped in purple like a Caesar, just as Jesus is in Byzantine manuscripts, or Elijah and the Priests of Baal in the same chiton and himation combination mentioned in the Gospels, or heroic warriors looking like Roman Auxiliaries on horseback, just as St. George would be painted later on.

Obviously, just as later would happen in the Mughal empire and in Christian societies, not all were as strict in their interpretation of what "graven images" involved and did not consider every depiction of the human form — even in a place of worship — to be either blasphemous or idolatrous, as did the religious students who at the urging of their teachers, defiantly went and pitched the gold eagle statues that Herod the Great had had placed on the Temple roof smashing into the courtyard below. It wasn't the polarizing issue that it was in Jerusalem — where everything was becoming a polarizing issue. And that wasn't all of it, by a long shot.

There were foreign powers outside Rome, the empires of the Parthians and the Kushites, and there were rivalries and rebellions all throughout the Imperium quite unconnected to the Province of Syria and its subdivision Judea. Rome had gone through, and would continue to go through, its own political convulsions, civil wars, abortive attempts at reform, and slides into chaos as it pursued irresponsible fiscal and military policy, all sides blaming each other, and the powerful and would-be powerful continually sabotaging any effective correction while distracting public opinion into finding scapegoats, either foreign powers to invade or internal minorities to blame, as Nero would do with the Christians in a few decades. And regardless, the massive and unwieldy bureaucracy necessary to keep an empire running that stretched from southern Scotland to Kuwait, from Algeria to Romania, and everything in between, made itself a natural breeding-ground and hospitable environment for every manner of graft, corruption, and malaise. Egypt with its grain fields was crucial to Roman survival, as Rome had developed itself; so was the ocean gateway of Hellespont. Canaan unluckily lay in the middle.

There was a lot of money, and a lot of history, combining to make the Levant both an attractive possession and a deadly one, long before the Empire rotated as in its local representative a chap known for being a mean hand with a pilum (javelin) from House Pontii, someone who had no sympathy for any native elements, was quite willing to send in an airstrike — sorry, a cavalry strike — to deal with a rebellious district like Galilee, regardless of how much collateral damage was caused, and who preferred to live in luxury in the coastal resort of Caesarea except when it was necessary to make a show of force on the ground, as at times of international pilgrimage, when the volatile mix of Zealots and Assassins and various Liberation Fronts would be complicated by foreign visitors of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and who knows what political alignments, coming from recently "pacified" provinces about the Mediterranean.

This was the situation, in brief, and it's far more likely that Jesus spoke fluent Greek than that Pontius Pilate spoke conversational Aramaic, or that either of them would have conversed in Latin rather than the koine that the Gospels are written in; though I did once read an article whose author (which I unfortunately cannot recall) argued that the word translated as "carpenter" does not mean a humble cabinetmaker but in koine would have referred to an architect or general contractor, that St. Joseph would have in fact been a solid businessman who might have worked on building some of those classical theatres and forums that were spread all over the Levant, and thus could well have been (with his heir) conversant in Latin as well, the better to deal with getting permits from officials and negotiating contracts and so forth. I do not know if this is true, though I see no reason why it is not possible.²⁶ But at any rate, Greek was and had been for many lifetimes the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, and the citizens of Jerusalem, Jewish, Edomite, Canaanite, Arab, Macedonian, as well as the Imperial auxiliaries from Syria and Libya garrisoned there, and the visiting pilgrims from Pontus, Cappadocia, Ephesus, etc. would all have used it as the one thing they had in common with the representatives of the central government to which they all, nominally at least, belonged. There would have been no point in posting the warning signs around the restricted areas of the Temple in Greek, after all, if it had not been expected that those Gentiles it was meant to warn would be able to read it. (Three of these signs have been excavated so far, one complete one and two fragmentary.)

Still don't think that the poor, downtrodden, backwater Apostles would have had a lot of exposure to the mainstream culture? Of course, you realize we only "know" that Jesus and his followers were poor hicks from the backwater because that's what the fanon says — not what the archeological record, what you find when you do the hard research of things like maps and material objects. Try this on for size: Galilee itself had a big classical city, complete with a theatre where Jesus could have seen the originals of those hypocrites whose name became a modern household word due to its use in the Gospels — because the word hypocrite only means play-actor, it refers to those masked characters of the classical Greek stage. The regional capital, in fact, on a major highway intersection, and a mere five miles from Nazareth. A doable walking distance for work, shopping, entertainment, etc., in other words, let alone if you have a domesticated transport animal of some sort. It takes me about an hour and three quarters to walk five miles. Sephhoris is right between Nazareth and Cana, in fact.

I have, obviously, given a mere synopsis and a cursory one (and flippant) at that, of the mess that was the Known World between the time of Alexander and of Christ, for reasons of space on the one hand, and my own amateur qualifications on the other; anyone who wishes can easily do research, by picking up a book of archeology, ancient art, or reputable non-sectarian history, and verify this broad outline, and find much fascinating and grimly-amusing detail along the way.

So why the omission of Greek? Very simply, it's a deliberate propaganda step in the "Traditionalist" campaign to restore the Tridentine Mass as it was done in the 1950's. After all, if people start realizing that Greek was the common language of the disciples and the Apostles and those they went out to convert, they might realize that Gibson's reported claim that the Tridentine Mass is the way the Creator gave it to us simply cannot be true. Even if they don't go on to study any Early Church History, which would establish definitively that the original liturgies were in Greek (that's why there are still a few snippets of Greek even in the old Roman Rite — you didn't think Kyrie eleison" was Latin, did you? Kyrios is still used as an honorific in Greece today.) Moreover, determining that the Early Christians celebrated agape (another Greek word) in Greek might start — as it did for me, when I learned this in college studying some of the earliest Christian texts — a chain of critical thought, beginning with the realization that they changed the service to Latin so that ordinary people could understand it, and ending with the question, if it was dulce et decorum to do so back then, why not since? And result in a disregard of (and even contempt for) those who argue that the liturgy should self-evidently be ossified into one set form, as it was done in 1535, and there can be no discussion of it.

Do I have absolute proof of this theory? Not in the Zimmerman Telegraph, smoking gun, wiretapped transmission sense. But it is the only theory that makes sense of why educated Catholic clergy and linguists, who have to know better if only because Church history is studied in the seminary — in fact, the 1908-1912 Catholic Encyclopedia freely acknowledges that the original liturgy celebrated in Rome was in Greek — would be supporting the film's linguistic choices and not being honest about it. It's ideology corrupting the truth, and all that can do is "convince" the ignorant, and destroy any hope of winning the confidence or approval of the educated. And when the ignorant become more knowledgeable, their trust in turn will be destroyed. You can take my word on that.
***
 

Why is this relevant? If it were merely an action-adventure movie, it would be annoying, frustrating, particularly to those with any knowledge of history, but no more. Historical fiction doesn't pretend to be anything more than fiction. So people who could never have met are represented as having love affairs, costumes that didn't exist in the era depicted are the norm, and if anything's gotten remotely right it's a bonus, not a given — no truth claims are made, so it isn't such a big deal. (Actually, I do think it's important, because people do internalize errors based on what is presented consistently in fiction, and this does creep into their decision-making processes, since people always appeal to the past as a model for what should or shouldn't be done in the present. And this is true of physics errors as well.) But a Zorro movie — people go to that to see an archetypal story of dashing heroes and villains, with lots of action and spectacular effects, and the history is irrelevant, as are the physics — it's a semi-rationalized version of the same fantasy landscape that the Hong Kong action movies inhabit, a set of Secondary Worlds which vaguely resemble our own, past and present, but which are really a mythic reenactment of traditional archetypal struggles. The particulars don't really matter, they're just decoration.

It gets more iffy when you get into the question of things which are claimed to be "true stories." On one level, yes, 'everyone knows' that movies are fiction, even those "based on a true story." But no, actually, every one does not know, and a surprising lot of people trust that someone somewhere is enforcing accuracy in print as well as in drama, and so are shocked, shocked to find deceit going on there. And even those who will argue that "it's just fiction, everyone knows this, so it doesn't matter," will reverse course when a film comes out that insults or contradicts their own time-honoured convictions. People do base their understanding of the world on secondary experience, and more on fiction than on nonfiction. People internalize artistic depictions — that's why people are pointing to the Stations of the Cross as being proof that Passion is accurate, after all — and never bother for the most part to see if those fictions are actually representative of reality on any level. It's gotten a little easier for those of us who get frustrated by such things to communicate the fact/fiction differences, given the interment, but then this gives rise to those who simply admit they don't care. Which is all well and good, when they admit that something is not true, and that they like it anyway — because the goodness of a work of art is not limited to its truth value though it may be impaired by spectacular stupidity and error, (q.v. Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter XXV) — but then people still want to keep pointing to it as an instructional tool, which doesn't work if the premises on which it is based are false.

And this is where Passion fails utterly, and why it matters that it fails, from a historical point of view. There are two levels of truth claims going on here. (At least.) One is metaphysical: Jesus of Nazareth was the God Incarnate, who died and came back to life here on this earth and then returned to Heaven, leaving behind instructions to preach His message until He should return again. This is, ultimately, unprovable by forensic methods. "Faith is the certainty of things unseen," said one of those preachers, and that is where we are stuck, us believers, even those who try so hard to overturn the old declaration by hunting for scientific proofs. Credo — I believe, not cognosco, I know.

The other is merely physical: there was once a man named Jesus, born in the Roman province of Syria, in the subdivision called Judea, during the reign of Augustus, who taught unconventional variants of the conventional local religion, and was involved in some way with the confluence of politics and religion and culture clash that had been ongoing in that region for centuries, going back datably to the time of Alexander the Great, and as a result was executed by the secular state, which took a dim view of people claiming to be divinely-appointed liberators, or who allowed others to make such claims for them and act upon them. In all outward respects he was an ordinary human being who lived a life in contact with the world around him and its people, cultures, material objects, memes, and biological realities.

There is a gray area in the intersection of the two — the documents which make the metaphysical assertions are the same as make the physical and there is no meaningful independent historical testimony from the era which can be used to evaluate this set of texts, as one can take two polemical works written in the last hundred-fifty years, and do some fact checking by recourse to newspapers, journals, and other eyewitness accounts, simply by spending some hours in a library. Some of the physical statements regarding actions are suspect, because of the metaphysical ideology of the authors, and anyone being honest and dispassionate must acknowledge that there is at least a legitimate place for challenges, even while declaring that one's own side is ultimately correct. Questions of bias cannot simply be dismissed with "Well, the Gospels are the Word of God, we know they are because they say so."

But of the latter part, the merely physical aspects, can be recreated with some certainty, some level of accuracy, though subject to debate and correction, thanks to archeology and literary history, aside from the debated ideological areas concerning what happened. Materials technology, everyday objects, clothing, cityscapes, landscapes, linguistic composition, ethnic composition, much evidence concerning this is available today, which was not available 100 or even 50 years ago. And much was even before, but has been ignored by the faithful as irrelevant, since the point of the texts was the metaphysical claim, not the physical aspects, for the most part, for most of Christian history.

Gibson has availed himself of none of this hard evidence, dismissing it all on the silly assertion that all the historians contradicted each other, so he had to pick what he thought made sense — which just coincidentally happened to be identical with the traditional Western Catholic fanart particularly of the last 400 years.

Now, if this were merely presented as a devotional work, an aid to meditation, as the Stations of the Cross have historically been presented along with similar writings and images, this wouldn't be very important. But he has made exaggerated truth claims, asserting that it is completely historically correct, so his film thereby must be judged on them. He has presented it as a documentary — as canon, not as fanon. And as I have shown, it is not canon at all, and it is not even a plausible fanfic, since he has ignored all the Primary World givens of extant contemporary objects, depictions, accounts, and even the timeless areas of medicine and physics.

Since it is also being presented as the proof of the metaphysical, in keeping with that recent development in Christianity of needing physical, scientific, forensic reasons to believe, rather than physical mementos to inspire (i.e. relics) and claimed to be a tool for "evangelization" — this is an even bigger problem. If falsehood — demonstrable falsehood — is shown as truth to those who know better, and claimed to be the proof of those unseeable aspects, then it is on the contrary a barrier to belief, a mockery of the Gospels it is intended to promote. No reasonable skeptic, or believer, as I have said and will continue to say, expects a Mystery or Miracle play to be historically accurate, and they are not presented as such; no one thinks that the hand-sewn sheets from the local Walmart are an accurate depiction of clothing in Roman Judea, or the Toys-R-Us swords accurate depictions of the centurion's gladius, supplied by moms and dads and teachers for a Sunday-school pageant — they are approximations of traditional iconography, which itself is a ritual thing intended to make clear, like heraldry, who is who, and like heraldry — or bathroom signs — not intended to look very much like the real thing. Art is secondary to instruction, necessarily, here, and production values irrelevant. Just as the Mass may be celebrated on a stump in a forest not a carved stone altar with relic and required cloths, the trappings are not crucial for the validity of ritual, or its value to participants.

But both the film's makers and its defenders are setting themselves up for terrible falls, because they claiming it should command submission of intellect and will to the metaphysical claims of the Gospels, based on the physical accuracy of the movie. And it is not physically accurate on any level, and the natural result of this illogic is to question, rather than to accept, the truth claims on the metaphysical side, even more than one had done before, since they are being put forth by those who manifestly have no regard for the facts, or for anything but winning.

—Remember what I said earlier about "meaningless gestures" being passed off as the real thing in re evangelization?
***
 

All right, so it is neither historically accurate nor the Gospel truth — but is it nonetheless a great work of art? For so it might well be. The answer to this is also no, by any objective artistic standards.

Gibson criticized past biblical films as being full of "bad hair" and "bad music" — a most inadvertent irony, as his movie has both to the utmost degree. The score consists of an eerie blend of a knock-off of the warbling vocals used in Gladiator to indicate supernatural overtones and a knock-off of the amplified synthesized percussion that James Horner uses to good effect in his scoring style, alternated with some generic, watered down modern "Middle-Easterny" music using shawms and tabla drums. It ranges from nondescript to really annoying to occasionally ear-bleedingly awful, just like the cinematography.

It's hard to believe this is by the director of Braveheart, whose sumptuous photography of landscapes evoked a North Sea vision of Bellini in their blues and greens, and interiors a Magdalen by De La Tour in their rich umbers and golds. The color ranges from muddy to grotesquely bleached in an extreme overuse of digital grading (if you thought that it was heavily overused in The Two Towers, you ain't seen nothing yet) in the flashbacks. The framing of scenes is nondescript, and the staging — ugh!

I found his use of slow motion in Braveheart both irritating and verging into the pornographic — but here it is overused so much, and so poorly, that it becomes laughable. The first use of slo-mo in the Gethsemane scene, I thought there had been a break in the film, badly repaired, as sometimes happens: but when the film stuttered again in the middle of a gesture, and when the Apostle Pick-Up Basketball Game started, I realized that this was deliberate. I'm still not sure why — though it was clear what he was trying to accomplish by slowing down the torture sequences. I just think it was bathetic excess. But the action scenes are so bad they're actually funny.

Unfortunately, they're the only thing that is: the macabre humour of the disciple running off starkers²⁸ in Gethsemane has been revised for our tender sensibilities by the replacement of his historical sindon with a multi-layered bathrobe; the even darker ironies of Peter's protests of faith, and his subsequent denial, which spring out so clearly in the Paschal Triduum as celebrated in mainstream Catholic churches, where they are reenacted in the vernacular, are destroyed by Gibson's choices — to juxtapose them out of order, so closely, so that no proper momentum of foreboding can be built up, and to replace the story as told in all four of the Gospels nearly identically with Emmerich's muddled melodrama. There is none of the sense of a Greek tragedy unfolding which would have been even clearer to contemporary hearers of the Gospels, but is still present, if diluted, in translation.
***
 

Okay, so it's bad art, and bad apologetics. But isn't it still valuable as a private devotional tool, like the historically-inaccurate crucifixes and statues and books of private visions? After al, the Church has always said that such things can be okay — that's what the seals of approval on religious books in the old days meant, that they were allowed, if not endorsed, and that there was nothing harmful in them.

Actually, personally I've come to question the old stamp of Nihil Obstat — I think that a lot of the old books of piety were harmful and should have been obstructed. The most of them, filled with bizarre truth claims, unsubstantiated miracles and wonders, used always as "proofs" of faith and argument, and the morbid, decadent, eroticized spirituality of so many of them, all the gothic wallowing in emotion and pain, aesthetically depicted — I don't think they really do aid piety, and I don't think they ever did, either. They might have made people feel better, but a religion based solely on feelings²⁹ is hardly worthy of much respect.

Gibson's film is no different in that regard than the gooey pietism of Divine Intimacy (Fr. Gabriel of St Mary Magdalen, OCD, 1952) or St. Louis de Montfort's writings and the endorsement of such mirantist anti-intellectualism is not a good trend in Christianity. Yes, a work may be "harmless" in that it contains nothing explicitly contrary to accepted doctrine, as are so many approved devotional texts — and yet be toxic from so many other standpoints. And beyond that — Twinkies are "harmless" in that they are not poison, but a diet entirely of junk food will kill eventually, and a diet of mental junkfood has equally corrosive effects on the thoughts and attitudes of those who consume nothing else. In this latter category, displacing all real nutrition, I put Emmerich, and most of what TAN publishes, and the Chicken Soup books automatically, and I say also that many of them contain to a greater or lesser degree, toxic elements that do worse than leave starved spirits.

Yet so many people's lives have been changed, people have been moved to deeper faith, to greater piety, to go to church, to confess to a murder! Obviously this movie must be From Above!

To this I have only two things to say: First of all, I commend you to read the parable concerning grain and shallow soil, and declare that only over the long haul will it be known whether or not this is as transient an effect as most revival-meeting, peer pressure, emotionally-motivated "conversions" are, with no intellectual food and moral reinforcement of an isolated, sound-bite "message," after the high has worn off.

Secondly — is it not a tenet of Christianity that God has the power to draw good out of even the most flawed and evil things? Moreover, the scribes and elders had a very good point, worrying if Jesus' miracles were simply from the Enemy to lead people astray — after all, isn't that what Revelations says that the Anti-Christ will also do? Consistency, people, consistency! Nothing is proven by any immediate good results, if that is the case, concerning the goodness of the occasioning entity. It falls upon the long-term fruits to prove whether or not the tree is poison. And what kind of fruits will an inarticulate Gospel, which has no message other than Jesus Suffered, Jews Are Power-Mad, Romans Are Stupid And Cruel, God Wept And Broke The Jewish Temple, (oh, and celebrate the Eucharist and love one another, btw) and deliberately refuses to engage the ethical and rational aspects of the viewer, what kind of fruits will it bear?

Looking at past results, the answer is decadent, poisonous ones. The track record of Christendom after the Counter-Reformation is even uglier than before, difficult though that is to achieve.

Will The Passion bring viewers "closer to God"—?

—Maybe, if you understand God to be someone who enjoys unsafe, insane BDSM.

What kind of spirituality will it awaken?

Isolated, introverted, utterly-subjective, substituting an unreal eroticism for engagement with God's Creation — morbid and self-harming at worst, inane and inactive at best. Pietism and quietism — and I use them in the broad sense of recognizable trends, not the narrow chronological sense of the appearance of movements embodying them, which gave them their names — are strands which are integral to the mesh of Neo-Traditional spirituality, pietism being the combination of individual purification through pain and privation with rigorist emphasis on personal devotions and an anti-intellectual slant, and quietism being equally anti-intellectual, but emphasizing spiritual passivity and "receptiveness" to Divine Grace, often with an equation of the "infusion" of divine favour not simply to sexual intercourse, but to outright rape and marital violence.³⁰ Both of these trends take elements which are not out-and-out wrong, but which are dangerous if not handled properly, and elevate them to the center of religion, often displacing all those things which traditionally (!) have made up the core of a faith, like theology, ethics, good works, and so on. Fanon becomes canon and is placed upon the altar. And it happens in all religions, not just Catholicism.

But Catholicism seems to be particularly vulnerable to getting unbalanced, for whatever reasons, and Catholics to being blackmailed into thinking that this is the only way to go — the non-rational, self-mortifying "false asceticism" with no brakes, no access or encounter with the outside, impure world, and especially no critical thinking or friendships with unbelievers. (This is seen in the defection of Botticelli to Savonarola and Pascal to Jansenism way back when, no less than in the present attraction of Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ — it isn't caused no matter what the Remnant thinks, by the tepid "water of liberalism," it's a chronic reactionary strain that is always going on over the past 2000 years.)

Consider this: a hermetically-sealed container is not going to support life for very long. And an organism which is kept isolated from all impurities is the weakest of all, having developed no immune system. And living creatures must eat, not simply the pure elements necessary for nutrition, but all kinds of other matter, much of it not at all digestible, filled with poisons and contaminants, or else the body will wither and sicken. We are not angels, nor are we meant to live as though we had no earthly contact.
***

One thing which is really interesting is the implication — which I don't see that any of the Passionistas making the claim has yet recognized, for all their claims to be the only true heirs to the great traditions of Western Civ and Christian Art — that all the Early Christian, Byzantine, and Early Medieval religious art is wishy-washy, shallow, "Hallmark Jesus" stuff with no real strength or spiritual dimensionality to it.

After all, if you're going to claim that Passion is good because it differs from other films for its graphic violence, and put down all the other films in the aforegoing terms, then it must necessarily follow that the same principle applies elsewhere, to all other depictions of the crucifixion. Which includes, as it happens, all of them up until around the middle of the 1300s.

The art of the first Christians didn't even have crosses — Christianity not being legal and all — but consisted of scenes from the TANAKH combined with pagan symbolism that fit well with the Gospel themes: things that could easily be commissioned from local mainstream dealers and only those "in the know" would know what the symbols meant — that the godly fellow with the grapes and the donkey wasn't Bacchus, or the dreamy shepherd boy wasn't a harking back to Ye Goode Olde Dayes as celebrated by Virgil, or that the the peacocks on either side of the tree weren't just about Juno, or that those Winged Victories with the laurel wreath were really supposed to be angels (though the victory idea persists), or that the River God was actually Jonah being a Foreshadowing, and so on.

Then you get a few abstract art crosses, plain or beautiful geometric, like those of the Armenian tombs and then much later, in Ireland and Britain, carved onto slabs; or ornamented in jewels for book covers or church decoration, and then for wearing. But only late (about 600 is the earliest I've found so far) and much less, by comparison, to other scenes from the Gospels, do you start seeing Passion narratives, always set in the matrix of a complete course of illustrations beginning with the Annunciation and Christmas, covering various sundry Miracles, and concluding with often Road to Emmaus or Mary in the Garden, and always closing with Ascension. (Sometimes rendered by a pair of feet vanishing into a cloud.) And the early Crucifixes don't even pretend to be realistic, as Christ is even shown wearing a royal robe³¹ of purple and gold while standing straight on the Cross. It's all about symbolism and what is appropriate.

Thus the artistic license of the loincloth, the serenity of the entire scene, the placement of a skull at the foot of the cross to remind viewers that Golgotha means The Place of the Skull, and as a reminder as well of the triumph of Christ over Death, the same theme that would inspire John Donne almost a thousand years after; the Angels of the Sun and Moon on either side, the figures of John and Mary, the Centurion with the Lance and the Soldier with the Reed and Sponge, the stylized city walls representing Jerusalem, the single spurt of blood not interfering with the calm and relaxed body of the dead Christ, all of which are found in every Byzantine crucifix—
 

—and in those of western Europe as well, even the more manneristic, stylized Early Gothic images, all the way up to the 1300s, when plague and warfare became an almost continuous background to material prosperity and political advances in everyday life. Before that, there is no sign of the Jewish adversaries of Jesus' movement: the only enemies present are, in all the pictures I have yet found, both Romans, and they in turn are both traditionally hailed as saints (Longinus and Stephaton) so only good guys are shown in the oldest Crucifixion scenes, despite the real and active anti-Semitism of the day. Showing "evil Jewish priests" is no more integral to the visual depiction of the Passion than is painting Christ's body with gore. The first processional crosses were, indeed, often without a corpus altogether, with the symbolic Lamb That Was Slain from Revelations standing at the center. Emblems of Christ living and engaging in the mission of teaching, or of Christ symbolized as the Good Shepherd, the Last Prophet (this is where and when the image of the long-haired, bearded Jesus comes from, not from the oldest images), and the Lamb, predominate in devotional art from the beginnings of the faith.

Examples of unbloody Passion images: Entombment scenes Goya crucifixion ivory carved crucifixion panel early modern Greek ikon Italian medieval crucifixion narrative sequence mosaic narrative sequence Gibson's Passion imagery: Still from the film

Were these helpful to Christians of the first millennium? Indeed.³² Were they, in turn, merely softies, "effeminate" wusses devoted to a saccharine, sentimental, easy, no-pain, no rules, no work Christianity, the likes of the Gospel of Thomas Kinkade? Hardly. This is bad rhetoric and bad history on the part of those who hail Gibson's Late Gothic/Post-Reformation vision as the only authentic and worthy imaging of Christian theology.