The Jesus movie continues to be bandied about as a political football. Now, I’ve said that I think the movie is terrible. I envy those who found it compelling and meaningful. Going in, I hoped that it would be both moving and poignant. That I was bored and annoyed was terribly disappointing to me; and a waste of $9. While I have perfectly legitimate gripes with the artistry of the film, it was the spiritual aspects of it that where the most glaring problematic. The anti-Semitism implicit in the longstanding fetishistic attachment to the crucifixion is undeniable. James Carroll’s Constantine's Sword, while somewhat patronizing, does a credible job in establishing the historical precedence of this anti-Semitism. Consider Carroll’s description of the origins of the centrality of the cross in Christian thinking:

Before Constantine, the cross lacked religious and symbolic significance. Paul had made the crucifixion essential to the salvation earned by Christ’s death; being ‘crucified with Christ’ was an implication of accepting faith. But even in Paul, the cross as such did not compete, for instance, with the waters of baptism as the Christian community’s metaphoric representation of dying with Christ. As he put it, ‘All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death’. The Gospel of John has water flow from the side of Jesus after he has been pierced, a clear symbol of baptism. Water had a vivid hold on the Christian imagination; wood did not. The fathers of the Church followed Paul in developing the idea of salvation through the death of Christ, but Justin, for example, even in discussing the cross, keeps it at a metaphoric remove by seeing it more as the shape of Passover blood in the lintel than as the literal execution device. The blood of Christ, yes. The cross, not so much. Thus on the walls of the catacombs in Rome prior to the fourth century were to be seen representations of palm branches, the dove, the peacock, the bird of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus. The sacred fish was a favorite symbol because of Gospel scenes, but also because the Greek word for fish, ‘ichthys’, renders an acrostic of ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.’ Such symbols were ubiquitous in early Christianity, but the cross is simply not to be found among them. Some early Christians signed themselves, touching the forehead, shoulders, and breast, but even that is ambiguous, since…Jews were known to make a similar sign.

The place of the cross in Christian imagination changed with Constantine. ‘He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline’ – this is Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s own report of what he saw in the sky on the eve of battle above the Milvian Bridge – ‘he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, bearing the inscription CONQUER BY THIS’. The story goes on to say that Constantine then assembled his army – ‘He sat in the midst of them, and described to them the figure of the sign he had seen’ – and gave them the new standard to carry into battle. ‘Now it was made in the following manner. A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it.’ …the army behind this standard did conquer, and Constantine, so Eusebius heard him say, was thus convinced of the truth of Christianity. ‘The emperor constantly made use of this sign of salvation as a safeguard against every adverse and hostile power, and commanded that others similar to it should be carried at the head of all his armies.’

Thus the crucifixion was born, via the talisman of the cross, as the central image and shorthand symbol of Christianity; along with the implicit acknowledgement of Jewish responsibility for Christ’s execution. That Christ was Jew, an initially irrelevant distinction among a wildly sectarian Jewish culture, became lost in the combative assertions of later generations of Christians. In fact, the “separateness” of Judaism from Christianity was a deliberate consequence of the centrality of the crucifixion story. Modern Christianity is, as a result, anti-Semitic. The Passion of the Christ does nothing to contradict this paradigm. I don’t fault Mel Gibson for this, he is, after all, the product of centuries of brutally antagonistic and sectarian theology. But the film is, nonetheless, anti-Semitic.

If you have thoughts, please e-mail me. Be forewarned that I may post responses.