Word: jesus
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...wrenching tableau. A brutalized Jesus is displayed by Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, who announces derisively, "Ecce Homo," behold the man. A mob, ostensibly made up of Jesus' fellow Jews, responds with a bloodthirsty roar. They fill a massive courtyard; there must be a thousand of them...
...dramatizers of Christ's last hours. The advisory warns, among other things, against "changing the small 'crowd' at the Governor's palace into a teeming mob." Why? Such an exaggeration, the bishops claim, would misleadingly suggest that the Jews as a body, indeed as a race, wanted Jesus dead...
Gibson is a traditionalist Catholic who may care little what the more liberal Bishops' Conference thinks. But the guidelines' very existence and concerned tone suggest the sensitivity of the issue facing anyone translating the Passion for stage and screen: Is it possible to do a biblically accurate drama about Jesus' trial and death without feeding anti-Semitism...
...Jews in Christ's execution. But they differ on details, such as the community's unanimity and its influence with Pilate, Jerusalem's Roman ruler. Matthew, Mark and Luke accuse individuals and Jewish subgroups but leave room for the (likely) possibility that many rank-and-file Jews sympathized with Jesus or were indifferent. John, however, repeatedly refers to "the Jews" as a whole, implying collective guilt. Matthew provides the only report of a seemingly damning oath by the spectators at Jesus' trial: "His blood be on us and on our children...
Modern theologians find such passages highly subject to interpretation. They point out that Jesus and the Apostles saw themselves as Jews; John's wholesale condemnation of the faith, they speculate, may reflect Christian-Jewish rancor in A.D. 95, when that Gospel was written, more than the politics of Jesus' era. The great Catholic scholar Raymond Brown concluded upon meticulous examination that the "blood on our children" line was a specific group's oath of responsibility rather than an assumption of eternal, racial guilt...