Catholic Journal

The Jesus Question Revisited

I find that the Jesus question is as vital as it was the last time, I brought it under my microscope. In fact, it still looms as the most important question any of us can answer. To live in a society that thrives on religious cynicism requires great personal faith. Christ’s birth over 2000 years ago has confronted mankind with an inescapable question: Who was this man and what does He mean to me? The life of Christ has forced people to deal with the meaning of life, the nature of good, evil, and sin in their lives. 

Over the course of its long history, the Catholic Church has provided an unfailing and consistent answer to this question. Jesus was the Son of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who suffered and died for the sins of all humans. His death and Resurrection stand as the central tenet of a faith that has endured centuries of bloody religious wars, acrimonious debates, the Enlightenment, and violent revolutions. As the true Messiah, Jesus was the only religious leader Whose coming had been prophesied centuries before His birth. This is the great mystery that the Catholic Church has vigorously protected, defended, and preserved throughout its 2000 year history.

Jesus often spoke in simple parables, telling His followers what they must do or what they should believe without any lengthy theological discourse. The rest has been left for popes, bishops, councils, theologians, and the faithful to decipher. The Church’s interpretation has been difficult for many to accept. Christ’s Incarnation especially presented some early problems for Church leaders. 

Attempts to explain Jesus’ Divinity and His relationship with the Father ran the risk of devaluating His humanity. The Church feared that Jesus would be relegated to the role of a mere aspect of God. In the early 4th century this fear became a reality as Arius, a priest from Alexandria, Egypt taught that God had created Jesus at the beginning of time. Arianism promoted the idea that Jesus was God’s subordinate. Since only God could redeem, if Jesus were just a man, then there could have been no redemption. Arianism also warned that the Church had returned to the paganism of polytheism.

Alexander, Arius’ Bishop wanted to excommunicate him. Arius was a tall, lean man, with downcast eyes and the disposition of a stoic. Fearing a schism within the Church, the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first world council. The Council confirmed Jesus to be consubstantial with God the Father. Arius was excommunicated and sent into exile. 

Despite its condemnation, Arianism is one of the most widespread and divisive Christian heresies, which still resonates in modern times, in such plays as Jesus Christ, Superstar, where Jesus was a good man but still just a man. In 1804 President Thomas Jefferson sat in the White House and clipped verses out of two Bibles, pasting them in an abbreviated version of the New Testament that eliminated all references to Jesus’ Divinity. The Jefferson Bible, which is available on-line, portrayed Jesus as the rational ethicist that so many moderns have grown to love and accept. Jesus is what the New York Times has called a Mister Rogers Jesus, a Semitic neighborly man who was easy to love and imitate but asked very little in return. 

In the early 20th century, the writings of Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud further negated the need for a Redeemer. Freud laid the basis for a popular school of thought that said that sin and guilt were just inventions of the Catholic Church, which used such ideas to control its millions of faithful members. This Freudian teaching has found a warm reception on many levels of American society, especially its universities and social science organizations.

With ideas of universal salvation and sinless human beings, the historical necessity of a Redeemer has been made moot. A thoroughly human Jesus respected for his unconditional promises of love, forgiveness, and peace is a far more palpable religious figure. The world wants a cross-less Jesus, made in its own New Age image. They want a plastic Jesus who will never disturb their serenity with unpleasant images of sin and guilt. The Jesus who shed his blood for the sins of the world does not fit the City of Man’s spiritual profile. 

There have been many popular movies made about Jesus and the vital questions His life prompted. His story has been grist for Hollywood, which has used everyone from Monty Python to Swedish actor, Max von Sydow to play Him. Film directors have traditionally sanitized or circumvented the violence of Christ’s suffering and death to the extent that the cinematic Jesus appears more abstract than real. Most Jesus movies were high-priced epics that gave lip service to His message without ever dramatizing the meaning of His Incarnation. Jeffrey Hunter and others portrayed Jesus with a robotic presence that substituted distance and aloofness for respect and reverence.

One movie that deviated from the banal Hollywood Jesus was the Catholic director, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese adapted his screenplay from the book of the same name, written by Greek novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis. In his introduction, the author made it perfectly clear that he did not rely on the traditional Synoptic Gospels to write his Jesus fantasy. His subliminal text implies that Gospels carried the virus of Jewish hatred and were to be totally repudiated. 

Scorsese’s infidelity to the Gospels guaranteed his movie would be a hit with the mainstream media. They lauded it as being broad-minded, creative, and visually stupendous. I thought Last Temptation was an absurd film that presented a Jesus who was not only unmistakably human, but also strangely neurotic. Christians who protested his movie were lectured to be more tolerant of Scorsese’s outrageous portrayal. This is in stark contrast to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which was severely condemned, precisely for its fidelity to the Gospel accounts. No critic of The Passion, which is the perfect antidote to Last Temptation, has been told to be more tolerant. 

The Last Temptation is a bold depiction of Jesus as a carpenter who ironically made the crosses that the Roman used for crucifixions. He is literally slapped around in the opening scene by actor Harvey Keitel, a menacing figure in a short toga who plays Judas Iscariot like a Brooklynese zealot. The film manifests a brooding Jesus, wrestling with his inner demons of anger, hatred, and lust for Mary Magdalene, seductively portrayed by Barbara Hershey. When Jesus started to preach in the film, He spoke with an illogical spontaneity that muddled His maudlin message of love and forgiveness. In a way he portends Kamayla Harris and her wandering word salads. 

As portrayed by accomplished actor, Willem Dafoe, Jesus has a giddy smile that betrays more the soul of an adolescent on a roller coaster ride than a divine being on a salvific mission. The Last Temptation begs the question, Why would anyone follow this man? The final nail in Scorsese’s blasphemous Jesus is a dream sequence that has Jesus come down from the cross, marry Magdalene, and beget several children. 

With his The Passion of the Christ, director/actor Mel Gibson entered into the maelstrom of the Jesus question. Gibson is best known for a variety of roles that range from the dystopic Mad Max movies, comedies, to his best movies like The Patriot and Braveheart, which portrayed epic tales of heroic men in defense of personal freedom. 

One of 11 children, Gibson was born into a strict Catholic household, in Peekskill, New York. A traditionalist Catholic, who still favored the Latin Mass, his surfeit of money, awards, and popularity left him noticeably empty and unfulfilled. Suffering his own dark night of the soul, the actor credited his Catholic faith with bringing him back from the brink of despairGibson sank 30 million dollars of his own money in an effort to bring the real Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels to the big screen. The movie was almost a mystical result of his obsessive search for the roots of his nearly lost Catholic faith.

Some movies entertain. Some teach, while others shock. The Passion of the Christ mortifies. The film serves as a penitential act of religious devotion that neatly transcends its graphic horror and visceral queasiness. Befitting its Ash Wednesday national debut in 3,000 theaters in 2004, The Passion is a cinematic stations of the cross that encompasses the sorrowful mysteries in a grueling depiction of the last 12 hours of Christ’s passion and death. It is perfect for meditation and prayer, especially on Good Friday. 

The Passion clearly demarcates the redemptive brutality of Christ’s suffering from the standard Hollywood fare of gratuitous violence. Gibson’s adroit use of flashbacks function as a respite from the continuous gore. Gibson’s scenes of family warmth, Jesus’ affection for his mother and her maternal concerns when He falls as a child, a prelude to His crucifixion, are warm reminders of his earthly life. 

James Caviezel, best known for his haunting performance in the anti-war genre film, The Thin Red Line, plays a thoroughly warm and creditable Jesus. His acrobatic contortions, falls, and bloodletting are a disturbing testament to Jesus’ extraordinary suffering. The opening scene in the Garden of Gethsemane set the tone for the movie with its startling dramatization of the intense mental agony that afflicted Jesus who fully knew what torment awaited Him. The film serves as a vivid reminder that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is more than a communal celebration of the Last Supper but stands as a memorial to Christ’s bloody death on the Cross. 

Caviezel is uncanny as he instantaneously transforms from a frightened human Jesus to a fully incarnated Christ who obediently complies with His Father’s will. Making the film was also physically taxing for him, as he hung on a cross, barely clothed in frigid temperatures, was struck by lightning and dislocated his shoulder during one of his many falls. While some temperamental actors demand larger dressing rooms or limousine service, Caviezel begged Gibson to have daily Mass because if he were going to play Jesus, he needed to receive His Body and Blood. 

The film did not resonate well with a secular public that denies original sin and the necessity of God’s death and Resurrection. The media pilloried it with its constant attacks of religious cynicism. Newsweek called it the Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade. The dyspeptic Maureen Dowd of the New York Times alluded to one of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns by calling Gibson’s movie A Fistful of Nails. Al Neuharth of USA Today called The Passion, an exercise in bloody sadomasochism

Gibson’s critics have had no complaint with candor being portrayed on the screen as long as it was feminine flesh or blasphemous language. It is ironic that many filmmakers can depict every conceivable vice and degradation known to man yet are upset by a movie that attempts to transcend violence and brutality into something holy and redemptive. It is also strangely revealing that the graphic violence of Jesus’ bloody crucifixion could trigger their artistic sensibilities, since these are the same folks who have thrived on bloody gore and human mutilation in films, such as Natural Born Killersand the Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Many of these critics are also the same people who applaud films that promote abortion, sodomy, pornography, and the elimination of religious influences from the public marketplace. No one ever charged John Irving with promoting his own enlightened agenda for his critically-acclaimed, Cider House Rules, which was little more than an agitprop piece for Planned Parenthood. 

Some secular groups tried to link The Passion with charges of anti-Semitism. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) shrouded The Passion with the insolent assertion that the movie had the potential for exploiting the ubiquitous forces of anti-Semitism. Others predicted that the film would undermine the already tenuous relationship that John Paul II, has labored to establish between Catholics and Jews. Of Gibson’s film, St. John Paul II succinctly said it is as it was.

Much of the ADL’s criticism centered on the movie’s reference in Matthew 27:25, the so-called blood libel, which states His blood, be on our children and us. As a concession to Foxman, Gibson deleted that subtitle from the movie, though it is still intelligible to those who understand Aramaic. 

The Passion is not about the Jews or the Romans. As Jewish film critic Michael Medved said, some of the bad guys are JewsSome of the bad guys are Romans. All of the good guys are Jews. It is about Jesus and his heroic acts of redemptive suffering. The real focal point of the controversy is not with Gibson or his movie but with the Gospels, as reflective of Jesus’ salvific mission of redemptive suffering. 

Even the mention of the term blacklist evokes a Pavlovian response of fear and loathing in Hollywood. This has not stopped the rumor mills from repeating threats of putting Gibson on its Cancel list. Hollywood wants its directors to stick to the blasphemous, anti-God motif that has dominated their productions the last 30 years. Gibson now understands what Jesus meant when he said The world will hate you the way it hated Me. Gibson has suffered his own public scourging at the hands of his critics.

It was refreshing to see a prominent Catholic* stand up for his faith and willingly take the blame which its truth generates. Gibson has brought to the big screen a lasting work of art and faith that has engendered serious thought in audiences of all religious faiths. The movie is a spiritual encounter, which has affected everyone who has seen it. Gibson has given the world his answer to the Jesus Question

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*Subsequent to his success with ‘Passion,’ Gibson fell from his Catholic path with the divorce of Robyne, his wife of 31 years followed by a pair of affairs with paramours since then. It appears that his alcoholism and his tendency toward dark nights of the soul caused his fall from grace. Many of his subsequent roles appear to show how this has affected his appearance, yet he is still in front of and behind the camera. I urge everyone to pray for Mel Gibson.

William Borst

WILLIAM A. BORST has taught at virtually all levels of education from elementary school through university, published commentaries in many local and national publications, and hosted a weekly talk show on WGNU radio for 22 years. Having recently served as editor of the Mindszenty Report, Dr. Borst is the author of two prominent books: Liberalism: Fatal Consequences (1999) and The Scorpion and the Frog: A Natural Conspiracy (2005). He holds a PhD in American History from St. Louis University.