The Passion Q&A

Trevor Peterson 2004

Believers

Question: Should non-Christians see the movie? Should Jews see the movie? Should Muslims see the movie? Answer: The answer to all three questions is both yes and no. They probably wont get much out of the movie without someone to talk to. For Christians, the background of already knowing the gist of how and why Jesus died, of already attaching signicance to that event, can make watching the movie a powerful experience. For someone without this background, the violence can seem bewildering. If someone asks you whether they should see the movie, the best response is probably to oer to go with them. Prepare them a bit for what they can expect to see, so theyre not caught o guard. Try to build in time to talk about it afterward. They will probably have questions. Question: What unique issues will Jews have with the movie?

Answer: There has been a lot of talk about anti-Semitism in the movie, and they will likely have heard at least some of it. Chances are pretty good that they will at least be curious about this aspect. More specically, they may want to talk about who was responsible for Jesuss death and negative aspects of the portrayal of Jews in the movie. They may also want to talk about whether Jesus was God and whether he was the Messiah. In the Jewish understanding, the Messiah cannot die without fullling prophecy. Everyone who has been thought to be the Messiah in life has been rejected after death. The radical dierence with Christianity is that we teach the Messiah could die before fullling his complete mission, rise from the dead,

and come back later to nish the rest. Jews also consider it idolatry to worship a man as God. Question: What unique issues will Muslims have with the movie?

Answer: The Quran teaches that Jesus was not really beaten or crucied. Needless to say, Muslims will generally view the movie as basically untrue. They may ask about why Christianity teaches that Jesus was crucied or that he is God. Question: When did it become OK for Christians to go see R-rated movies?

Answer: There is some potential for hypocrisy in the way Christians have approached this movie. I think the notice I saw posted at the theater box oce is a good one, that parents ought to think seriously before bringing their children to see it. To whatever extent it is a bad idea for some people to be watching that much violence, this applies as much to Gibsons current movie as to any others he has made. On the other hand, some of it depends on your principles. If the point of shielding children and other sensitive people from violence in most movies is that such depictions are unnecessary, one could argue that contemplating Christs suering and death is a completely dierent matter, where the violence is important to see. I think the bottom line on the matter is that we need to take a more nuanced approach to standards for viewing. Simply saying, Christians shouldnt watch R-rated movies, is probably not the best approach to things. If a person honestly has convictions about watching any violence or sexuality to that degree, then presumably it would extend to not watching this movie either, in which case a blanket ban is probably OK. But in general, I think most peoples reasons for avoiding R-rated movies are more specic, which is why they do not object in this case. Personally, I think thats the better way to go. Question: How should I respond to the movie as a believer?

Answer: I think the way the movie is set up, it will speak most directly and profoundly to those who are already believers. This is not to say that it cannot produce desirable results in others, but it presumes quite a bit of background that most believers will have, but most others will not. The

question is, why should we contemplate the death of Jesus in such excruciating detail? Some general answers are that it helps us appreciate the depth of his suering on our behalf and the love he displayed by submitting to it; that it causes us to focus on the consequence of our sin, and renews our appreciation that we did not have to bear that consequence ourselves; that it shows us his perfection as our high priest, since he himself has endured all suering that can be endured; that it reminds us of Gods sovereignty by which he overturned the cycle of sin and death.

Both
How did the movie make you feel?

Question:

Answer: Obviously, this is something we cannot answer for anyone else. It will be a good opportunity for seekers to get some general insight into the minds of believers, and vice versa. Question: Who killed Jesus?

Answer: This is a question thats particularly poignant for Jews, since they have long been labeled Christ-killers as a prelude to anti-Semitic activity. A person who sees the movie without any awareness of these historical issues will probably come away assuming that the Romans performed the crucixion, but at the request of the Jews and may not feel like anything more needs to be said about the issue. But it is a question that can be dicult to answer. To answer matter-of-factly that the Jews did it is to distort the picture. A fairly common response is that we all killed him, or sinners killed him. These answers are true in a very real sense, but they are also somewhat supercial. In the most direct sense of the term, Jesus was killed as penalty for a criminal act. In this respect, he was like any other executed criminal. Who kills a person sentenced to death today? Well, someone has to throw the switch or push the plunger. That person kills the individual, but only as an agent of some other entity. A judge hands down the sentence, but even the judge is a representative of the governing authority. In a democracy, we can make the argument that the judge sentences on behalf of the people. On the other hand, a criminal charge is stated in terms of the people vs. the accused; so there is some benet to thinking of the judge and jury as distinct from the accuser. In Jewish law, witnesses are key to the conviction process, and it is generally the case that the witnesses 3

initiate the execution. Even though Jesus had to be sentenced in a Roman court, because the Jews could not hand down their own death sentence, it is still important to recognize the role of the witnesses as responsible for the death of the accused. All of this complexity makes it hard enough to establish precisely who killed Jesus from a legal standpoint. To complicate matters further, Christian theology attaches to his death a special signicance. He was not merely a victim of conspiracy or a corrupt judicial process. He was handed over to death by God himself, as a sacrice for human sin. In this sense, God is also responsible for his death, and so is every sinner for whom his death paid. If it werent for our sin, he would never have been in this situation to begin with. So we created the scenario in which he would die, even though we did not consciously choose his death as the means of payment. That was Gods decision, and that makes him responsible as well for the death of Jesus. All of this is important to consider when the question is raised. And the other matter to contemplate is that, regardless of who is held responsible, if we benet from his death, then to that extent, it was a good thing for us. What right, then, do we have to retaliate against anyone as his killers? Question: Whats up with the languages?

Answer: Needless to say, the Romans and Jews of the rst century would not have spoken Modern English. The language issue is actually a sticky one, since we never have any actual evidence of spoken languages from the distant past. What we have are written texts, sporadically preserved and generally uncooperative for providing a coherent picture. Several languages are attested textually from the region and period of the movie, but only two were selected for use in the movie: Latin and Aramaic. Aramaic was the language of the Arameansneighbors to the north of Palestine, where the movie is set. Centuries before the time of Jesus, the Persian Empire borrowed Aramaic as its ocial language, and the inuence was strong enough that writings emulating that standard persist until well after his time. After the Persians were overthrown by the Greeks, however, Aramaic suered some decline in favor of Greek as the language of international communication. Aramaic continued in wide use, both in written and spoken forms, the latter of which fragmented into regional dialects, which eventually supplanted the written standard in literature. Of these regional dialects, the Syriac dialect in particular gained wide usage east of the Mediterannean, and penetrated as far east as China, dominating much of the Middle East

until Arabic became the new standard with the Islamic conquest. It is widely accepted that Aramaic was spoken by many Palestinian Jews at the time of Jesus and particularly was probably the dominant spoken language in Galilee, where Jesus was said to have grown up. There is more heated debate surrounding the question of whether Hebrew functioned as a living language at this time, particularly in Judea, if anywhere. (Judea is the province in which we nd Jerusalem, where the movie takes place.) Also debatable is the use of Latin in this part of the world. When the Roman empire conquered the Greek, it adopted much of Greek language and culture as its own. Since Greek was already widely understood throughout the empire, it could be put to use for international communication rather than implementing a new standard. Latin would probably have been used for ocial documents, and it may have been spoken between Roman soldiers (those who knew it, anyway), but scholars generally favor Greek as the language of communication in these eastern provinces. Gibsons choice of Latin was likely inuenced by its importance to the Catholic Church and has been widely criticized by those concerned with this sort of thing. (Indeed, the Latin in the movie is pronounced more like Church Latin than it is likely to have been pronounced at this time.) Because Greek is absent from the movie, he has the Romans speaking Aramaic whenever they need to communicate with the Jews. The exception is when Pilate begins speaking with Jesus, and Jesus responds in Latin. From that point on, every exchange between the two is in Latin. Presumably the idea here is that Jesus, as God himself, could speak any language he chose. Question: Why is the movie so violent?

Answer: The obvious part of the answer is, because Mel Gibson made it. Most people expected a certain amount of violence because of what they knew of him as a lmmaker. Both Braveheart and The Patriot were groundbreakers in thier use of graphic violence to tell a story. Gibson has always been drawn to tell stories that help us to understand the sacrices that have been made in the generations who have gone before us which allow us today to enjoy certain freedoms. He has intentionally used realistic violence to help todays audiences better understand the tremendous sacrifces those who have gone before have made. Doing the Passion is a natural progression in his moviemaking. Perhaps more importantly, Gibsons Catholic background predisposes him to contemplate the suering of Jesus at his trial and execution. It is a noteworthy distinction that, whereas Catholics regularly use the

symbol of the crucix, with Jesus hanging on the cross, Protestant crosses are often empty. Generally speaking, the Protestant focus is more on the resurrection; the death is something of a prelude to this important event. Where Protestants think about the death of Jesus, it is with a view toward what that death accomplished as payment for our sin. That the death involved suering is understood, but not regularly dwelt upon. Gibson was heavily inspired by the written accounts of visions seen by an 18th-c. nun, Anne-Catherine Emmerich. According to Catholic sources, she was aicted with stigmatamarks of the crucixion, including wounds in the hands and feetand many of her visions were of Jesuss suerings. Contemplation of his suering can help us identify with the depth of the price he paid for our sin. Question: Specically, why is there so much whipping? The Gospels dont seem to indicate that it was so severe? Answer: Some of this may be artistic license or based on other conceptions of what happened. Some of it may also come from what we do know about Roman beatings. It was possible to beat a person to death, and the Romans had no restriction (as did the Jews) on the number of blows involved. We often think of Jesus as having received 39 lashes, which was the Jewish standard. But since the Romans administered the beating, we really dont know. If Pilate was hoping to satisfy the crowds desire for blood by beating Jesus instead of crucifying him, it was probably pretty bad. The use of two dierent methods in the movie provides an opportunity to see what instruments were at the Romans disposal. Because we dont know what method was used on Jesus, Gibson seems to have oered both likely optionsrods and the spiked whip. The severity of the beating in the movie is also clearly an expression of the emotion of the guards. They went beyond what Pilate commanded, so here we get some insight into their own feelings toward Jesus. Question: Why did Jesus have to die for our sins?

Answer: There is a lot to consider in answer to this issue, but for our purposes it is probably best to restrict ourselves to a few key passages. Heb 9 sets up an analogy between Jesus as our high priest and the high priest under the old system. Whereas the latter would bring the blood of animals into the earthly temple each year on the Day of Atonement, Jesus brought 6

his own blood once for all into the heavenly sanctuary. The idea is that God required bloody sacrices before the death of Jesus as a temporary and imperfect measure to cleanse things physically, but something more permanent was eventually necessary to cleanse us spiritually. The key idea in this passage is v. 22forgiveness comes only with the shedding of blood. Why? If we go back to look at the Torah, we see in Lev 17:1014 that eating blood is a capital oense; blood is to be reserved for use in atonement on the altar, because it contains the life-force. This is the signicance of blood. Shedding blood produces death; its only payment is to shed the blood of the oender. This is probably part of the reason that Abels sacrice from the ock was accepted, while Cains from the eld was rejected. So going all the way back to the beginning (and probably also in the need to slay animals to provide Adam and Eve with skins to wear), shedding of blood was a way to pay for sin with the life-force. When it is animals slain for humans, this can only be a partial x. To undo the damage inicted on all humanity and the whole world by Adams sin, one human had to die as a sinless oering. Jesuss blood was the only thing that could ever cleanse us spiritually and make us acceptable before God. Question: What does the death of Jesus mean for me?

Answer: To a certain extent, this question must be answered by each person as an individual. In Christian teaching, his death stands in place of our own suering and death to pay for our sins. He himself was sinless and had done nothing to deserve death for his own sake, which enabled him to die on behalf of others. By dying the lowest possible death, as a condemned criminal sentenced to execution by a means declared in Scripture to be a curse (hanging on a tree), it was assured that he bore the supreme physical penaltyenough to cover any level of sin. In addition, his cry of forsakenness on the cross suggests that he also experienced spiritual abandonment by God the Father. So when he became accursed for our sake, he not only died physically, but he experienced the same separation from God that is the primary cause of torment in the afterlife for those who pay for their own sins. Because his death was for us, his resurrection is also for us; just as it shows that death could not hold him, it also shows that we will ultimately have victory over death with him. The good news of Jesus is primarily about this death and resurrection, because it is the message of our deliverance. All that is required of us is to trust in the price he paid and accept the gift he oers of freedom from the penalty of our own sin.

Seekers
Did everything thats in the movie really happen?

Question:

Answer: Its important to realize that anything like a movie will blend fact with ction (assuming it has some fact). Its impossible to come up with a complete portrayal without some sort of interpretation on what happened. Additionally, as already mentioned, Gibson followed Emmerich in lling in some of the gaps. Even devout Catholics will admit that her visions are not factthey are impressions and reections on Jesuss death. To the extent that Gibson follows her writings, he is following one persons vision of what happened. Gibson also draws on traditional elements like the stations of the cross and classic artistic portrayals of the passion. There may be some truth to these elements, but their development is shadowy and often much later than the events involved. Finally, there are elements of the movie that follow Gibsons own vision as a lmmaker. We must therefore be careful in our perception of the movie as it relates to the actual events. These extra elements that appear in the movie may have varying degrees of authenticity, but in general we should take them for what they are someones impression of what happened or might have happened. They may be helpful for visualizing the events, but we are free to disagree with or abandon them. Question: How do we know what happened?

Answer: We know what happened the same way that we know anything else happens. If we werent present ourselves to see it, we rely on other forms of evidence. We appeal to the accounts of those who were there and to material remains that provide some information about the event. In the case of Jesuss death and resurrection, there is very little in the way of material remains to help us out. We can conrm that crucixions were a common means of execution under Roman rule and learn something about how they worked. But since the fundamental point of the Christian message is that Jesus rose from the dead, we cannot expect to nd his body. Some attention has been given to locating his tomb, but in all likelihood it was so much like other tombs that it is lost to us. This leaves us primarily with written accounts of what happened. Our most informative sources are the writings of the New Testament. A few other statements by historians of the period make brief mention of Jesus. They establish little more for our

purposes than that he was put to death and believed by many to have been raised. Question: How do we know we can trust the Gospels account?

Answer: Since this leaves the Gospels as our primary source of information about Jesuss death and resurrection, we have to address the question of how reliable they are. Question: What was Jesuss crime?

Answer: There are two somewhat vague charges involved. That most decisive for the Jews is blasphemy, that most signicant to the Romans is sedition. Both relate to Jesuss claims about himself. The Jews perceived that he claimed to be equal with God, which for them was a crime punishable by death (assuming that the person making the claim was not in fact God, which they seem to assume by virtue of the fact that he is a man). His messianic claim could easily be construed as rebellious against Rome, since the messiah was supposed to be a political deliverer, who would restore national sovereignty to Israel. There were several messianic movements at and around the same time, some of which ended in militant uprising and crushing response by the Romans. Regardless of the specic teachings involved, a messianic movement would have been perceived by the Romans as a political threat. What the movie generally lacks is a clear presentation of these threats. Jesus never advocated militant revolt. (His reference to taking swords seems to have been for a very brief period of time, for a very specic purpose, since a few hours later he rebukes Peter for using his.) But as has often been the case throughout history, his relatively nonviolent statements could have been perceived by others as cause for uprising. Although he never used physical violence against another person, his actions of clearing the temple would have appeared as a huge threat to the priests. The Pharisees probably didnt think much of him either for his vocal opposition to their halakha (ethical teachings) and his frequent use of them as examples of hypocrisy. It is important to realize that there was a careful calculation in the Jewish leaders actions to get rid of Jesus. John indicates that their concern was with the ramications if too many followed him and the Romans retaliated (11:48). In the same discussion, Caiaphas is said to have pronounced the need for one man to die so that the whole nation could be saved (vv. 4952). 9

Their genuine disagreement with his teaching and dislike for his ministry should not be downplayed, but in seeking to have him killed, they were weighing the consequences of inaction for the whole nation. We can fault their disbelief (cautiously, for how much better are we?), but their actions were motivated at least in part by genuine concern for their people. Question: Why did Jesus refer to God forsaking him?

Answer: This utterance seems to be taken from Ps 22:1 (v. 2 in Hebrew) . The psalm sets its speaker in a dangerous place, where he feels abandoned and hopeless, like God is not paying any attention to his plight. As the song progresses, however, he recognizes that God always does deliver, and he looks forward to the time when he can tell others how God has been there for him. It is an honest song, about the feelings we experience when we are in the midst of trouble, and God does not seem concerned with our fate. It is also a hopeful song, grounded in the past track record that shows God to be faithful. There are times when the a speaker or writer in the NT cites a brief excerpt from an OT passage on the understanding that the audience will recognize the context from which it is taken and remember what else is said there. In this respect, it may be that Jesus is expressing his present anguish and implying that God will come through in the end. On the other hand, we should not downplay his very real feeling at this moment of abandonment by God. Elsewhere, Scripture tells us that in his death Jesus bore the sins of the world. Theologians have speculated that at this moment on the cross, our sins have come upon him, and he is spiritually estranged from the Father. For the rst and only time in history, a division has come between these two persons of the Trinity, and he feels this separation more deeply than any words can express. To take the matter a bit further, it has been said that at the cross God himself died in the person of Jesus. Spiritually speaking, it is the most hopeless moment the world has ever known. It represents the death of all religion, all faith, all hope, in which the only suitable words are heard from Jesus himself. This was not the death of a martyr, for a martyr dies for a cause that will go on without him, with hope in the ultimate triumph of right and his own reward in heaven. His death is a testimony to the message he proclaimed in life. But Jesus dies forsaken by God, which for someone who proclaimed himself as the Son of God and taught people the way to obey God means a total failure. And by any standard that we know how to measure, in that moment, it was a failure. What makes Christianity

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so profound is that he was raised from the dead, with a message of new hopehope not founded on anything known before, but on the triumph of God himself over death. (Incidentally, this is also what makes Jesus as the Messiah completely unacceptable to Judaism. It could be no other way, because even the religion started by God himself at Sinai must fail to grasp the answer.) In this hope, the darkest despair, the worst torment, the end of most nality is rendered utterly powerless. The world has been turned on its head because end has become beginning and despair turned to hope. If Jesus had not experienced this god-forsakenness on the cross, the solution would have been incomplete. Question: Can I really believe the message of Jesuss death? If so, what do I need to do about it? Answer: This is the sort of question that well need to prompt from seekers. They might be thinking it internally, but they probably wont come out and ask it. From our standpoint, the answer to the rst part is provisionally armative. They can believe it in the sense that such a thing is generally possible, but whether they as individuals are in a place to receive it at this time is a question only they can answer. The second part is where we can provide more help. I assume none of us needs the answer spelled out in advance.

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