Unavoidable Gore, Controversy in 'Passion?'

Feb. 14 -- Editor's Note: New Testament scholar Bruce N. Fisk saw a rough cut of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in November 2003, and wondered: Can a Jesus film be too bloody? Can a work of history make room for legend? Can any telling of this story avoid anti-Semitism?

Emmanuel's Veins

The Passion of the Christ is messy. From Jesus' violent arrest to his flogging and crucifixion, almost every scene is marked by callous cruelty and bloodshed. Jesus' bruised right eye swells shut. Deep lacerations criss-cross his flesh. It's very visceral and very difficult to watch. We've come a long way from the sanitized, dispassionate Jesus of so many Byzantine altar pieces (and we couldn't be further removed from the crucifixion scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian). Imagine, rather, a moving, breathing version of the Issenheim altarpiece [Matthias Grünewald's painted 1515 rendering of the crucifixion], in all its graphic, grisly detail.

How much blood and violence are necessary, I found myself wondering, for the crucifixion story to be authentic? Does Gibson's R-rated account rank among the most faithful Jesus films ever? Or is it simply riding the current wave of "reality" programming? Is it brutally honest, or just brutal? Scroll meets screenplay, or Stigmata meets Kill Bill?

At the church of my childhood, we talked a lot about Christ's blood. Rarely did a week go by without someone asking to sing, "Nothing but the Blood," or "There's Power in the Blood," or "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood (drawn from Emmanuel's veins)."

When we weren't singing hymns, I would struggle to fill the silence with mental images of Jesus in pain, Jesus bleeding, Jesus pierced for my transgressions. It was almost as if the more pain Jesus felt, the more God's wrath was turned away. The more blood Christ shed, the more deeply I could "plunge beneath the flood." To me, it wasn't enough for his death to be vicarious; it also had to be slow, agonizing and messy.