I was eating at my local pizzeria last week, and one of those DVD pirate guys came in, offering a pirated copy of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Now, I had heard that the film was anti-Semitic, so I figured I this was my chance to find out without giving a potentially anti-Semitic movie a ticket sale.

I get the DVD home, and immediately I’m struck by the subtitles. It seems they were translated from Latin and Aramaic to English to Chinese to English again. This makes for some rather amusing subtitles, for example:

Mary (in Aramaic): “Flesh of my flesh!”
Mary (subtitled): “Meat of my meat!”

Elsewhere, elephants and Dutch people are mentioned. It’s pretty funny. So, I saw the film as Mel intended for me to, which is to say without subtitles. Fortunately, I do have a rudimentary understanding of Aramaic (from Talmud class in junior high) and Latin (I speak Italian, too).

The first thing I have to say about The Passion of the Christ is that Jim Caviezel’s Aramaic is awful! He’s like the William Shatner of Aramaic-speaking actors, which is ironic because William Shatner himself appeared in an Esperanto movie, and Shatner couldn’t speak that language either.

Anyway, the movie is ultra-violent and ultra-boring (I fell asleep during the flogging scene). Someone brought up the point that no one could have survived all that beating; at the end of the cat-o’-nine-tails scene, you hear the Romans finish couting the lashes at 300. I wasn’t keeping tally, but basically Jesus gets whipped, beaten or kicked about 700 times. He’d have been dead before they nailed him to the cross.

So, I know the big question is, is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? The answer is, yes. It’s classically anti-Semitic. It’s as much the script as the portrayals of the Jews themselves. We’re talking the visuals, not just the Aramaic. Someone pointed out to me that the evil Jews seem to have bigger noses (and darker circles under their eyes).

There was also some controversy over the line “his blood be on us and on our children.” From what I had read in various articles about the movie, Gibson had removed the line from the film, then it came out that he had merely removed the subtitle. He definitely left it in–the interesting thing is that the line is said off-camera (the camera is close in on Barabas’ face at that point), which means he included it deliberately. Any film student understands what’s going on in the film as a whole–it’s a concerted effort to portray the Pharisees and the Jews in the courtyard as evil and bloodthirsty.

What did I get out of the movie? I think I understand Christianity a little better. Jesus’ death, while amazingly embellished in the movie (based on what I read in the gospels), definitely entailed lots of suffering. The human instinct is to want to believe that all this suffering had a larger purpose. The thing is, the Romans had much worse ways of killing people, and they tortured millions of people to death over the course of the empire.

And as for Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, I’m going to make it very simple: Jesus claimed he was the King of the Jews and the Messiah, and he clearly did not qualify as either under Jewish law. Now, if you flip back a few hundred pages in your New International Version, you’ll find the penalty for blasphemy is pretty much death by stoning. Don’t feel bad, that’s the penalty for playing a musical instrument on Saturdays, too. They didn’t really have a lot of options back then.