Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to As soon as it comes out here I will. . .

I agree with you about violence in films
Mary Anne — (archived)

I agree that you don't understand about the anti-Semitism problem. Perhaps this response to an editorial, written in June 2001 (and so not colored by any post-911 fallout) will close that gap in your understanding.

I think it's fair to say that a religious group that has had 6 million of its coreligionists killed within living memory has the right to be jumpy. To say they should just be very still and hope it will pass by -- the Rabbit Strategy -- ignores the lesson that history taught them about silence. This is especially true when one considers that this film is not released to a limited market. If it were limited strictly to the United States, whose closest brush to a pogrom was the exile and execution of non-Puritans in colonial Massachusetts, there would be much less cause for alarm. Nevertheless, the Klan is still around, and Jews still number among its targets.

I can tell you, as I am a pre- and post-Vatican II person, that Catholic education before Vatican II was much more critical of the Jews as a contemporary people, not just of certain Jews as historical figures. We were told that Protestants were merely clueless, but Jews were cursed by their own ancestors, the mob before Pilate. It took action from the Vatican to serve notice that the attitudes held by some Catholics regarding the Jews were no longer given explicit or tacit approval. The proclamation by the mob, "May his blood be upon us and upon our children" had finally reached its statute of limitations. Some people think it's significant that Mr. Gibson's father rejects that teaching along with the historical fact of the Holocaust generally, and that Mr. Gibson regards his dad as an inspiration and a teacher.

I tend to think that Mr. Gibson doesn't want to reject his father in public because the man is his father.

That still doesn't explain Caiaphas's presence at the scouraging, which is nowhere in the Gospels at all. Mr. Gibson purports to derive the authority for the film from history, as gleaned from the Gospels. I wonder how he justifies the presence of extra-Gospel material. Maybe he hoped no one would notice.

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