BIBLICAL VERACITY? OR HOLLYWOOD BONANZA?
But I must turn now to the mentioned and regrettable secondary effect of this otherwise brilliant stroke of linguistic illusion. Nowhere in the world is there a city of a million people who could hear the Aramaic that constitutes the bulk of the dialogue of this film as if it were their native language. There is, however, one city that comes surprisingly close; and that city happens to be Tel Aviv. Aramaic and Hebrew belong to the same northwest branch of the Semitic language family. A native speaker of Israeli Hebrew will hear the Aramaic of this film rather as a native speaker of Italian might hear Spanish. Nothing in this film will sound quite right in Tel Aviv, but much will sound vaguely familiar. And now and then there will come a sentence of crystal clarity, coincidentally identical in the two languages.
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So it happens at a critical moment in “The Passion of the Christ.” Reproducing the scene called in Western art “Ecce Homo” (“Behold the Man”), Pilate has just led Jesus—scourged, bloody, and crowned with thorns—before the Jewish high priests and a crowd of their followers, offering to release him with no further punishment. Rejecting the offer, a priest shouts a phrase in Aramaic that might or might not be intelligible in Tel Aviv. But then the Jewish crowd takes up the same cry in a slightly different grammatical form. They scream in unison a single, terrible word that happens to be identical in Israeli Hebrew and in Aramaic, and they scream it again and again as if it were a football cheer: Yitstalev! Yitstalev! Yitstalev! “Let him be crucified!”
No one can know from reading the Gospels how large a crowd of Jews gathered before Pilate or just how often or how loud they shouted, “Let him be crucified” (Matthew 27:22-23). In saying this, I speak not of what really happened but only of what the writers intend their readers to imagine. In this scene, they cannot intend us to imagine a crowd larger than could be accommodated in a throne room or a courtyard. Earlier in the Gospel story, when Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, acclaimed as Messiah by the population, the Gospel writers transparently intend us to imagine a crowd large enough to fill the streets of the city. Unfortunately, the larger crowd, cheering so differently, appears in the Gibson-Benedict script only as a few cryptic seconds of flashback. The result approaches a revision of the “Apostles’ Creed” that every traditional Catholic like Mel Gibson learns by heart as a child. The Creed summarizes the earthly life of Christ as follows: “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” Against the Creed and beyond any of the Gospels, “The Passion of the Christ” seems determined to replace Pilate with Caiaphas (chief priest of the Jews). I find this substitution regrettable not only on religious or interreligious grounds, but also on artistic grounds, for this original and, in many ways, heartfelt film does not need the Jews as villains. It has another, cinematically stunning villain on hand in the person of Satan, and she (yes, she) is more than enough.
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It is true that Matthew 27:25, “His blood be upon us
and upon our children,” the biblical line most notoriously used by
Christian anti-Semites against Jews, is not spoken in this film. Yet given
the agony of the 20th century for world Jewry, given the complicity of
Christianity in that agony, how can a Tel Aviv audience witness with
anything less than utter horror this scene of a Jewish mob chanting for
Christ’s blood in what sounds like Hebrew? American Jews who know enough
Israeli Hebrew will hear the same words in the same deeply disturbing way.
Moreover, though few Americans know this, most Palestinians born under
Israeli occupation speak Hebrew as well as Arabic. They, too, will
understand yitstalev, and they won't think only of Jesus. 