Ocean Guy tipped me off to this amazing interview with James Carroll — Boston Globe columnist, National Book Award-winning author, and former chaplain to Boston University's Catholic community. It's got me rethinking a number of things that have been percolating through my mind for the past weeks, throughout the Holocaust uniqueness discussion and the intensifying 'Passion' controversy. It's also got me rethinking the first part of this post, because Carroll seems to be making many of the same points as Patterson, albeit in a more thoughtful way and without the PETA baggage. And he made them all long before 'The Passion' was much more than a twinkle in Mel's eye.
Among the many essays and articles out there on the net purporting to defend Mel Gibson, his movie and Christianity in general against claims of inherent antisemitism, there are some that have gone a long way toward convincing me that "interfaith dialogue" between Jews and Christians is a hopeless cause. Why? Because they bring to the fore some fundamental and basically irreconcilable contradictions between these two faiths that are too often deliberately ignored. Whereas Judaism sees Christianity as flowing from an errant interpretation of Judaism's own Scripture, Christianity sees Judaism as a willful refusal to accept the one and only true culmination of that same Scripture. How can there be any kind of honest reconciliation between such views? And is it possible to even discuss it without getting into this kind of stuff again?
But here's a little of what Jim Carroll had to say:
In western Christianity we have a sense of Jesus' intimacy with God, which completely blocks our capacity to imagine him as a religious Jew. We're taught that Jesus doesn't need religion. Jesus has instant access to the divine. What that does is efficiently remove him from the Jewish culture that he was entirely a part of. He was a phylactery-wearing davening Jew, an image that was unthinkable to us. Why would he pray? If he read the scriptures it was only to elucidate them for other people. It wasn't that he needed to encounter the God of the Bible, because he was instantly in communion with God. Well, that theology is one of the pillars of Christian anti-Judaism, because if our starting point is that Jesus was not religiously a Jew, then it's easy quickly to go to the next step, which is that Jesus was opposed to Jews.
That's the beginning of this long narrative. If the enemies of Jesus are the Jewish people, then in 1941, '42, and '43, don't ask me as a Christian to be concerned about the Jewish people. Even if I'm not a conspirator in the genocide, I don't have to be concerned about it because we know that Jesus is the enemy of these people.
Yes, we're back to this again. Carroll has nailed yet another of those odious and politically incorrect distinctions between Hitler's attempted annihilation of the Jews and his rabid and despicable attacks on other groups. But Carroll goes still further.
That's when I began to think about Jesus at Auschwitz and recognize that had he been there bodily, he would have been killed just as one of the anonymous mass of Jews— for being a Jew. And what was his offense? Well, the cross, the symbol of the accusation of deicide, was his offense. As a Jew, he killed Jesus. That's what he would have been put to death for. That's when I saw that the cross is central to this problem. It is shocking how for generation after generation after generation, the cross, which I began by revering, has been the emblem of this evil. The inquisitor holding up the cross, Captain Dreyfus being condemned in a courtroom and having to stand and stare at the cross.
That's some pretty heavy stuff. I keep reading this interview and trying to absorb what's going on there and realizing I'm hearing something quite different here. Carroll has a lot to say that begins to suggest an approach to interfaith dialogue that doesn't feel quite so much like a meeting between matter and anti-matter. I want to hear more.
Now, in the two days I've been mulling over this post, I see (via Robert's comment over at Kesher Talk) that Jim Carroll has come out with a review of Mel's movie. And it isn't complementary. Why doesn't that surprise me?
"THE PASSION of The Christ" by Mel Gibson is an obscene movie. It will incite contempt for Jews. It is a blasphemous insult to the memory of Jesus Christ. It is an icon of religious violence. Like many others, I anticipated the Gibson film warily, especially because an uncritical rendition of problematic Gospel texts which unfairly blame "the Jews" for the death of Jesus threatened to resuscitate the old "Christ-killer" myth.
Do read the rest. And Judith has posted excerpts from a number of other reviews here.
Update: Blogger Moe Freedman has a first-hand review of his own, here.
