The Jesus Mel Missed

TheTyee.ca

Before Vancouverite Michael McKinley co-produced and scripted a documentary on the life of Christ he authored a history of hockey, so he writes on religion, it is fair to say. The documentary, The Mystery of Jesus, is airing this week (next on CNN at 5 pm and 8 pm this Saturday) and the timing couldn't be better, as it coincides with the release of Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of Christ.

Well before that film's release came charges that Gibson's version of the brutal crucifixion is anti-Semitic by leaving the impression that powerful Jews, way back then, conspired to kill Christ. Hutton Gibson, Mel's fundamentalist Catholic father most recently denied the Holocaust and waxed on about Jewish conspiracies last week on a New York radio talk show. Mel has yet to repudiate his father's views and, as of today, he stands accused of lousy movie making, too.

Fortunately we have McKinley's deeply researched, dispassionately presented documentary to help us understand who Jesus may have been. The film is full of cogent reminders and more than a few surprises. We learn that Jesus fit into a tradition of exorcists and faith healers roaming the land at the time, and that a mesmerizing astronomical event did brighten the heavens around the estimated time of his birth. We are given good reason to believe in the authenticity of the James Ossuary, a limestone burial box inscribed "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" that made headlines when it arrived at the Royal Ontario Museum cracked in transit.

Using forensic reconstruction of a skull from that era's gene pool, we are given a face that probably resembled Jesus' own. It doesn't look much like the star of Gibson's film Jim Caviezel, nor, as McKinley says, "any of the greatest hits of Western art where he's blonde and blue eyed or beardless or very much a Northern European. Our Jesus looks like any guy you might see selling falafels here or driving your cab in New York City. He's short and he's muscular and he's got very coarse features."

The Mystery of Jesus makes its greatest contribution, however, by supplying what Gibson denies his viewers: The complex political context of Christ's crucifixion and why Christ's powerfully enduring message has proven supremely adaptable not only to Hollywood productions but also to angry warriors and meek pacifists alike.

The Tyee caught up with McKinley in Vancouver last week and in a wide ranging conversation, here's what he had to say....

On what Mel Gibson left out

I haven't seen Mel Gibson's film, but I know that it's about the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus, from the moment of his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane to his death on the cross, with, I believe, a bit of the Resurrection at the end.  What's missing is the most interesting thing about all of this: WHY they killed him. If you're going to do a movie about the last 12 hours, why not do a movie about the last 18? How could this carpenter from the boondocks so scare the Roman Empire that they had to kill him? What was terrifying about him? And I think this is where the charges that Gibson's film is anti-Semitic take their root, because there's not cause, there's just effect.

So you see the angry rabble demanding that he be crucified.  But of course we forget that the angry rabble is like the guy charged with the crime - they're all Jews. I've talked to critics who say The Passion of Christ looks like yet another presentation of the argument that Jews killed Christ, which always conveniently forgets that that was his society - he was a Jew, all his followers were Jews and the Romans killed him.

Gibson's father apparently went on a radio show in the United States, a Jewish radio show, and said some outrageous things, classic holocaust denier rhetoric, which Mel Gibson hasn't repudiated. I'm not suggesting for a minute that Mel Gibson believes what his father seems to believe. But I know that Gibson did take out a bit of dialogue he originally had in the film.

There's a scene where Pontius Pilot agrees to crucify Jesus and there's the line "the blood shall be on us and all of our children" said by somebody in the crowd, which has always been contentious because you can interpret it as this person is suggesting that the Jews will always be plagued for their denial of the Christ. And it was said apparently in Aramaic and it was subtitled in English and they've lost that subtitle now, so there's no suggestion that the centuries of persecution and genocide aimed at the Jews was somehow deserved, which that line certainly did suggest.

But as I say, I think the thing that might surprise a lot of Christians, and it shouldn't, is the fact that Jesus was Jewish. Everything he did and said was within the context of his Jewish faith. He lived as a Jew, he died as a Jew, he practiced his religion as a Jew. He was a good and faithful Jew and he was in Jerusalem for the Passover when he was killed.

He goes to his death as a good Jew and his followers believing that he is yet another persecuted Jew at the hands of an imperial occupying force. The ultimate irony in all of the Christian persecution of the Jews is that they are persecuting their father in that sense. Judaism is the father of Christianity and a continuation. It's all connected. When you try to cut it off and start to attack part of the family you only get grief.

On Jesus as political rebel

I think Jesus saw himself as a reformer within Judaism. What he says, for instance, in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Blessed are the meek', suggests that his mission is counter to the imperial mission which the Jewish high priests, the Pharisees, had clearly subscribed to as collaborators with the Roman state.

Recall, Pilot has been sent out as a governor to the hinterland. I mean, it wasn't a choice posting. He was Roman. He was a career politician. He'd had a crappy posting in Syria and had already built a reputation for not being the most sensitive soul when it came to dealing with the local population, so he gets sent to Jerusalem, which would be a step up for sure. But he's dealing with a people, the Jews, who have a long history of being attacked and moving around and they've developed a pretty tough hide for resisting this type of thing. So there are fractures and he had to make allies with the Pharisees, the Jewish high priests of the temple, because he needed some help in governing.

The thing that might have scared Pilot or the Pharisees is that Jesus told his followers that there was a kingdom that was coming and he would be king. You could take that as a revolutionary statement: We're going to overthrow the government. Some of his followers may have felt that's what he meant, that finally we have a liberator from this Roman yoke.

But if he meant 'the kingdom of heaven is what is coming and I will be the king there' - in other words, 'I will free you from your earthly bonds by belief in me' - that should not be threatening to Pilot, because there were all kinds of would-be messiahs roaming around in those days, exorcists and magicians and healers. In fact, it was often a family business - the Romans would bang you up on a cross, but your brother Dave would then take over as messiah.

On whether science can ever 'solve' Jesus

Why the greatest story ever told is the greatest mystery never solved - that's one of the catch phrases of our documentary. Because for a story that has so changed the face of the planet, where do we find evidence? The only real evidence we have is in the Gospels and they disagree.

Most scholars believe that the gospels were written back to front. Here's why that makes sense. The most vivid element in Jesus' story, the thing in fact that it would have been possible for Mark, Mathew and maybe even Luke to have seen, was an eye witness to the crucifixion. That would have been most important to the story, the crucifixion and the resurrection, because he had to die to be reborn. And so his followers would have told that story.

That was about all you needed to know for a time, because Jesus' followers were like a lot of Jewish sects of the time. They were apocalyptic. They were apocalyptic in the sense that they believed that he would die and would rise again and the kingdom would come and the world would end.

But when that didn't happen and the people who knew him, the disciples, were dying off, they had to get more of the story down.

Also now that Christianity was spreading, when they talked about the Son of God, they had to come up with a beginning of the life, which is why in Mathew and Luke you get the manger story and the star in the east and all the rest of it. They're writing the 'back story'.

And that served its purpose well enough for a couple millennia because, you know, the whole so-called "historical Jesus movement" is only about 150 years old. It was something that came out of Victorian imperialist sensibility. It was only in the age of Darwin, when people were searching out archaeological evidence of all kinds and bringing it back to museums in Britain, that they started expecting to find historical proof of Jesus.

Up until then, you either believed as a matter of pure faith, like Martin Luther. Or else, even if you were a pope, you considered Christ an elaborate but useful myth you wouldn't dare risk puncturing. Look at the behaviours especially of the popes who built Saint Peter's Basilica. They were sybarites who enjoyed power and indulgence.

On whether Jesus worked miracles

Our documentary includes a Jewish scholar at Vanderbilt University who thinks Jesus was a very good exorcist and healer, which plugs into phenomena in the Middle East. There were exorcists and healers going around doing this kind of stuff. The miracles themselves though, some scholars interpret as metaphor.

Tom Wright, who is now bishop of Durham in England and is a very highly esteemed Biblical scholar, told us that the belief in the resurrection was nowhere to be found in that world then except among the Jews - as the old testament prophecy of one who would rise from the dead and say "you are the chosen people". So it was then set up to be a self-fulfilling prophesy in that sense.

Wright believes that the resurrection actually happened. Of course he has to as a matter of faith. And that's the ultimate out in the argument, because you can always say in the end it is just a matter of faith, besides in the end you can't prove miracles. Ironically the Vatican's got a department that tries to do that very thing. But I have to say, that's where we wind up too. It's a matter of faith because you can't prove miracles.

On crucifixion as state sponsored terror

There's a medical examiner in Rockford County, New York who replicates the physiological effects of being crucified. He puts volunteers up on a cross he's got in his lab and attaches them with Velcro. He's examined hundreds of homicides but for 50 years his passion, to quote a phrase, has been the crucifixion. And so he's put these volunteers up on a cross and put electrodes on their bodies to find out what happens to your body being up there.

As a doctor he could tell us what happens if somebody puts a nail into your intermediate nerve. He was saying that in wartime when soldiers would get hit with shrapnel and it would cut through that nerve morphine wouldn't do the trick and they'd have to cut the nerve in your lower spine to stop the pain, it was so excruciating. But his theory is that it wasn't crucifixion that killed Jesus it was the scourging or beating with the metal-tipped whip beforehand which would create blood loss, the body goes into shock -- and being nailed to a tree doesn't help.

The whole idea of crucifixion was, as one of our subjects says, state sponsored terror. They wanted to create pain and cause suffering. They didn't want you to die quickly. The Romans were known to crucify a couple thousand people in a day and line them up on the roadway into town, so if you as any kind of potential troublemaker were riding into town you would see what fate would befall you.

On Jesus as global icon

No matter where we went, whether we were in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, or we were in the Jewish state of Israel or in a multi-faith state of the United States or Canada, no matter who you talked to we got interest in the subject of Jesus. Everyone had an opinion.

We were filming outside the garden of Gethsemane on a rainy Saturday in Jerusalem and the Intifada was in full swing and there were curfews everywhere. There was this Palestinian guy who was standing outside the garden. We'd finished shooting and the crew was just packing up and I and the field producer that day, who was a Kuwaiti woman who was raised in the United States, were sitting in her car and this guy comes up to us and says, 'You're American'.

So we think, 'Here it comes'. And he says "What are you filming?"  We answer, 'The life of Jesus'. He goes, 'Really. Well actually you know Jesus has come back to Earth.' We go 'yeah?' He says, 'Yeah. He's in the Gaza Strip. The Israelis won't give him an exit visa.'

So even he had got the message of Jesus as this persecuted saviour of an oppressed people. Those who are in that position identify with him for those reasons. Then there's the fundamentalist personal saviour aspect to Jesus' story and message. Then there's the sceptical, secularist, atheistic interest: 'Well. Convince me.' And then there's the pure spirit of historical inquiry into: What more can we know? What can we add to this debate?

I think that we do Jesus justice in the sense that we give voice to a variety of scholarly opinion that will let intelligent viewers draw their own conclusions. You know, Albert Schweitzer was a true pioneer of the question of Jesus before he threw up his hands and went to Africa to be a missionary. To paraphrase him: Ultimately in the end we all find the Jesus that we want to find.

On whether Jesus believed he was God

A tantalizing question. 'It's you who say I am', Jesus supposedly replied when the question was put straight to him just before his death. In the crude vernacular, he was leaving them wanting more. Which of course is the nature of any spiritual exercise, and the art of any spiritual leader.

Of course the great joke is: How does one know Jesus was Jewish? Well, he lived at home unti he was 30, he took up his father's profession and his mother thought he was God.

On what Jesus would do if he visited Earth today

I think I'd make a slight alteration to one of the most famous sentences and the shortest in the Bible and say, "Jesus would weep." So much that has been done in his name that, even if you believe he's divine and knows already knows all, this world would not make any sense whatsoever to the man who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. 'Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the righteous.' Everywhere Jesus would look, from the paedophile scandals rocking the church, to today's wars being fought between Islam and Christianity and Judaism to the ethnic cleansing we've seen against Muslims and Catholics and Orthodox in the former Yugoslavia, the genocide between people of faith, the holocaust. You can just look back on all of it and its ineffable, you can't even give voice to it. So I think he would weep.

But he would not despair. He appealed to a very diverse crowd. A lot of poor people. He had a lot of female followers at a time where women who were widows who had money would hook up with him and go around because the message he preached was very inclusive. He would be going into places like the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and saying 'You guys all matter and you're my army'.

That's probably why I still am a Catholic in that best sense of Catholicism; in that you engage with your society and you try to change it for what you think is the better. And so by telling this story I'm putting out there that we might have to look at our interpretation of Jesus in the sense that I think he meant it. He wasn't urging people to go out and kill their neighbours in the name of anything.

David Beers is editor of The Tyee.