THE WANDERER, OCTOBER 9, 2003
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Hard Sayings
During the uproar over Mel Gibson's film THE
PASSION, another movie based on the Gospels has just been
released, almost unnoticed: THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, financed
by Bible Visual International Inc., a "faith-based media
company" that plans to film all the books of the Bible.
JOHN is being released chiefly in Southern states,
but not in New York and Los Angeles, where a hostile
reception was apparently feared. The producers tactfully
played down the passages that were most likely to have
incurred the charges of anti-Semitism that Gibson's film
has been dogged by.
"It's probably the issue that we spent the greatest
amount of time as an advisory committee discussing," Dr.
Peter Richardson, a consultant to the producers, told THE
NEW YORK TIMES.
Rabbi Eugene Korn of the Anti-Defamation League, a
harsh critic of Gibson who has also seen JOHN, says of
the latter: "It's difficult and some of it is offensive,
but that's the GOSPEL OF JOHN."
Indeed. All the Gospels, ACTS, and the Epistles of
St. Paul have been accused of anti-Semitism; a filmstrip
shown at the taxpayer-funded U.S. Holocaust Museum (and
eventually removed after Christians protested) blamed the
Gospels for the rise of anti-Semitism.
Modern Christians may like the sentimental (and
wholly recent) notion of a "Judaeo-Christian tradition,"
but nothing could be more false to history than the idea
that Judaism and Christianity are kindred religions whose
differences are trivial. To say so trivializes Christ
Himself. He insisted on His own primacy and authority.
His claims shocked the Jews, although -- and because --
He was Himself a Jew.
Both Jews and Christians recognized from the start
that the two religions were, despite their common root,
incompatible. The Gospels and ACTS record the opposition
of the Jews and the Christians' fear of them. The Jews
encouraged the Roman persecution of Christianity; the
Talmud itself contains insults of Christ and the Blessed
Virgin. When Christianity finally became the official
religion of the Roman Empire, Christians continued to
regard the Jews as their adversaries. It's a bitter
history, and there is no use pretending otherwise.
This should be no surprise. The Prince of Peace said
that He brought not peace, but a sword. He predicted His
own death and warned the disciples that they must take up
the cross and prepare to suffer for His name's sake. He
is still a "sign of contradiction." Countless Christians
were martyred in the 20th century, though most American
Christians are barely aware of that fact, or of the
continuing suffering of Christians from Africa to Korea.
Christ taught us to interpret even the Hebrew
Scriptures in an entirely new way, as prefiguring
Himself, from GENESIS onward. So even the holy books Jews
and Christians share have radically different meanings
for the two religions. Compared with these differences,
liberal and conservative differences over, say, the U.S.
Constitution are minor.
Differences long submerged between the two religions
have now come back into the open in popular culture. The
furors over issues like school prayer, the Christian
right, and movies about Christ illustrate how potent the
ancient enmities still remain even in seemingly civilized
countries.
The old Jewish-Christian division is by now only
part of a far more complicated picture. Christians are
being driven out of the Holy Land by both Jewish and
Muslim antagonism; the huge Muslim world didn't even
exist in biblical times. In addition, Christendom has
been split and nearly atomized by heresy and apostasy;
American Protestants (President Bush is rather typical)
are now largely allied with pro-Israel Jews and
indifferent to the plight of Palestinian Christians.
The whole situation would be even grimmer if not for
the genuine goodwill of many people, Christian, Jewish,
and Muslim.
Anti-Protestant?
There is a special irony about this new movie. The
GOSPEL OF JOHN is often called anti-Semitic, but it might
also be called anti-Protestant. Its sixth chapter relates
that many of Christ's disciples fell away when He
proclaimed the essential Catholic doctrine of the
Eucharist: "Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man
and drink His Blood, you have no life in you." Some of
His listeners responded: "This is a hard saying; who can
accept it?"
I wonder if this scene is in the film; somehow I
doubt it. If Christ's words had been figurative, they
would hardly have been a "hard saying." He could easily
have explained that he was only using a metaphor, if that
had been the case; then the doubters could have said,
with relief, "Good! For a moment there we thought you
meant it literally!" And the incident would hardly have
been worth recording. But the passage obviously
underlines the meaning of the climactic words of the Last
Supper: "This is my Body ... This is my Blood."
Editing the Gospels
Catholics are still taunted as cannibals for
believing literally in this hard saying, which is at the
very heart of the Church. Garry Wills, one of the leading
liberal Catholic writers in America today, has done his
eloquent best to reduce the Eucharist to a mere symbol,
and one of his recent books is titled WHY I AM A
CATHOLIC; but given his rejection of papal authority and
the priesthood, one wonders why he even bothers calling
himself a Catholic.
It isn't only the Catholic reader who says this; the
atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, praising Wills's other
recent book on the Church, PAPAL SIN, expressed both his
warm general agreement and his puzzlement that Wills
should continue adhering to a Church whose essential
doctrines he rejects.
To me these doubters appear as unwilling witnesses
for the Church. After two millennia, Christ's words still
have their original power to trouble us. We are still
tempted to explain them away, to make them easy to
accept, to reduce divine mystery to prosaic reason.
One way and another, the world still wants to edit
the Gospels, to purge them of "offensive" material,
whether the supposed offense is anti-Semitism or
supernaturalism.
The Enlightenment rationalist Thomas Jefferson did
actually edit the Gospels, pruning out the miracles and
leaving only what he considered edifying moral wisdom;
today the Jesus Seminar does the same thing, eliminating
the hard sayings it finds uncongenial to modern
liberalism.
But what all these editors wind up producing is
Christianity for the complacent; which is not
Christianity at all. We have to take the Gospels whole.
The hard sayings are of the essence. Those who eliminate
the disturbing words eventually eliminate the supremely
joyous words: "He is risen."
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