None of the Christian and Jewish educators who met at Woodbrook Baptist Church on February 5th had seen Mel Gibson's new movie, but we were all aware of the storm of controversy raging around the film's anticipated release on February 25th, Ash Wednesday. There was a frenzy of media reporting fed by Gibson's publicity machine and a rash of "private viewings" for carefully screened audiences. We were energized on our own by the controversy and by Rosann Catalano's invitation to bring along colleagues who had not been part of our study group before. It was clear that there was something important at stake for Christian and Jewish educators.

The Christians in our group already knew a great deal about the gospel texts, but I was struck again and again by the ex-tent of the knowledge held by my Jewish colleagues. I suspect that they have studied these texts carefully because Christian interpretations of the New Testament have so deeply affected their lives for centuries.

Before I attended the educators study day, I knew that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written for dif-ferent audiences and that they contain very different portraits of Jesus. Mark, in a spare narrative, introduces a busy and very human Jesus -- a man of action. Matthew's Jesus is a new Moses -- a rabbi, a teacher. The compassionate Jesus of Luke is drawn in much more detail as he ministers to people on the very margins of society. In John's poetic and rather mystical account, Jesus is majestic and divine. By choosing a canon with four distinct portraits of Jesus, rather than just one interpretation, the Roman Catholic Church embraces the critical notion that there are many ways of understanding Jesus and the events of his life and death.

What I did not fully realize was that blending (or harmonizing) the gospels creates an entirely new gospel that blurs the sig-nificance of the other four.

The ICJS study asked us to compare each gospel's text, keep-ing four specific questions in mind:

• What were the charges brought against Jesus?
• Who was responsible for his death?
• What did Jesus say at the moment of his death?
• What happens immediately following his death?

For example, in the examination of the four texts, we discov-ered that in Matthew and Mark Jesus cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:45 and Mark 15:34). In Luke, Jesus' last words are "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). In John, Jesus says simply, "It is finished" (John 19:30). Now that I have seen Gibson's The Passion, I know that the movie makes no distinction among the gospels, but uses all three of the "last words."

Harmonizing the gospels is one way the movie opens the door to misunderstanding. The depiction of the death of Jesus in increasingly graphic and brutal terms is another source of great concern.

The Passion plays of the 12th century were intended to evoke strong emotions in their audiences. They had the power to incite riots, to feed prejudices, and to victimize the powerless. Most medieval Christians couldn't read the gospels, so their interpretations of the stories were influenced by these over-simplified and graphic interpretations that condemned the Jews as Christ's murderers.

Similarly, today's audiences may skip the book and see the movie. Even though the gospels themselves give very little de-tail of Jesus' suffering, audiences who see The Passion of the Christ, with its incredible technology and overwhelming vio-lence, may mistakenly accept the movie as a faithful interpretation of the text. What Gibson has done is to inter-pret and add details through the lens of his own piety. This can be problematic if people indeed think of the movie as "documentary."

There are also larger theological questions at the core of the gospel that may influence our impressions of the movie. Classic Christian atonement theology teaches that Jesus died for our sins and opened the gates of heaven that had been closed after the sin of Adam and Eve. But there can be other ways of interpreting the meaning of Jesus' death.

A theology drawn from social justice would point out that Jesus, a faithful Jew, maintained an unwavering stance toward justice, a radical position that earned him few friends among the Jewish and Roman authorities. Might not Jesus have died because of the way he lived? The theology centered on resurrection says that the central event of the Jesus story is not the Passion and death, but God's raising up of Jesus, the holy one who remained faithful to God in the face of death. Seeing his faithfulness, we who are the Body of Christ are asked to look out from on the cross and hear the cries of humanity. Jesus was ready to suffer and die for social justice. Can we Christians, as the Body of Christ, look out at the world and see something not only for which we would die, but more importantly, something for which we would live?

The ICJS educators study day sparked my own very intense study of the Passion narratives and of the movie. Even though I know the story in my bones, I realized that I would be asked to address the movie's issues. I had to do my own study and, as far as possible, view the film objectively as a professional educator whose responsibility it is to present what Catholicism has taught about the Passion of Jesus and about the ways that the Passion is portrayed in art.

I identified the following issues at the core of the controversy:

• Does the Gibson movie harmonize the gospels?
• How does the use of source material from outside the gospels (such as the writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich) influence the movie's depiction of the Passion events?
• Does The Passion of the Christ reflect the Church's concern and criteria for depicting Passion events in art and drama?
• Does the movie somehow advance the legacy of anti-Judaism evident in earlier Passion plays?

These questions continue to resonate in my teaching, although the constant drumbeat of media hype has diminshed. Gibson's movie was, for me, an eight-day flash point that prompted several opportunities to work with church groups in a limited amount of time. As a person of faith and an educator, I saw The Passion as a movie and not as a gospel account. Its rapid rise and gradual fall caused a firestorm of controversy. Yet it got many of us thinking about issues we hadn't thought about for a long time. Catholics went back to asking questions and reading the source documents. That's a good thing.

I note that other movies have now replaced The Passion of the Christ at the top of the box office charts. I'm relieved, but still very concerned. This is a movie that may not go away so easily. We must be prepared to revisit what we've learned with all the heat and intensity generated by the movie's release, and to work through the questions together. There is still so much at stake for Christians and Jews.

Margie Sullivan spent over twenty years as a Roman Catholic educator of adults. She is currently a consultant for formation, leadership, and community development for parishes and churches in the Catholic Diocese of Richmond and around the country. Margie has been a member of the ICJS Christian and Jewish Educators Study Group since 1998 and recently partici-pated in the group's focused study of the gospels' Passion texts.