Paulos: Gibson's Film Disregards Hazy Historical Fact

April 4 -- By now, more than a month since its release, Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ has elicited countless reactions from Catholics, Jews and fundamentalist Christians. Millions of viewers have so far contributed to the movie's nearly $300 million in gross earnings. Film critics and cultural commentators have weighed in on it in large numbers. Scientifically flavored responses, however, have been relatively sparse. Here's mine.

Even about modern day mega-stories we're often clueless. Forty years ago in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. Only a bit more than 30 years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what nor the identity of Deep Throat. And only two and half years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, and we have yet to learn the complete story.

These (and many, many other) examples of our ignorance of the details of recent events don't seem surprising. We're accustomed to suspending judgment, to estimating probabilities. We realize that people dissemble, spin, exaggerate, and misinterpret. And we know that even more frequently events transpire with no witnesses, and so we've developed an appropriate skepticism about news stories (and personal opinion pieces such as this).

But such skepticism sometimes deserts people when they consider more distant historical happenings. This is very odd since historians are subject to even more severe limitations than those facing contemporary journalists and writers. After all, printing presses and Palm Pilots haven't been around that long, but hearsay and unreliable narrators have.

The occasion for these observations is Gibson's gory movie and an under-reported fact about its basis: There is little, if any, external historical evidence for the details presented in the somewhat inconsistent biblical versions of the Crucifixion.