San Jose Bishop McGrath on *The Passion*

This is a thought-provoking column on the discussion surrounding Mel Gibson's Passion by San Jose Bishop Patrick McGrath: Whatever 'The Passion' Message, the Church Renounces Anti-Semitism San Jose Mercury News 02/18/04. This is a mainstream Catholic perspective he expresses in this article.

While the primary source material of the film is attributed to the four gospels, these sacred books are not historical accounts of the historical events that they narrate. They are theological reflections upon the events that form the core of Christian faith and belief.

The reader can easily misunderstand the gospels when they are viewed through the lens of contemporary conceptions, attitudes and prejudices, as well as those of intervening millennia. The attribution of anti-Semitism to the gospel narratives is one such misunderstanding.

I wouldn't express the idea in that last sentence in that form, though I sympathize with the theological intent he expresses. Some of the mode of expression in the Gospels was meant to distance the Christians from the Jews and reflected conflicts with particular Jewish groups in the communities that produced the Gospel narratives.

It is a distortion by Christians who forget these facts: Jesus was a Jew, the apostles were Jews, the writers of the New Testament (as well as the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Scriptures) were Jews, and the audience for which the Old and New Testaments were written was primarily Jewish. It was not until several generations after the writing of the gospels before Jewish Christians (the first believers in Jesus) began to consider themselves not to be Jews. It is an inescapable fact that first-century Jewish writers would depict the drama of the passion of Jesus in light of their own perceptions. We, however, have a responsibility to history as well as to the present to bring a different understanding to our relations with one another.

He includes a brief story about an ecumenical Catholic-Jewish service in 2000. "An elderly man approached me and related how, when he was a young boy some 70 or 80 years earlier, he had been attacked by other boys who called him 'Christ-killer.' Even after all of the years, this man broke down in tears at recounting the story."