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	Blueprints - April 2004 Edition
Homepage Back Archives	Blueprints - April 2004 Edition

		Mary C. Boys delivers lecture on “The Passion of The Christ” Caitlin Collins ’05 On March 12, Mary C. Boys, S.N.J.M. author of Educating in Faith: Maps and Visions, Has God Only One Blessing?: Judaism As a Source of Christian Self-Understanding and Jewish-Christian Dialogue: One Woman’s Experience, delivered a lecture titled “Jewish-Christian Relations and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” The lecture was co-sponsored by the Office for Mission Effectiveness, and the Core Humanities, history and theology and religious studies departments. Focusing on Mel Gibson’s newest movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” Boys addressed Jewish-Christian relations. Boys voiced her displeasure with Gibson’s film by sighting seven main problems that she felt existed in and around the production. Delivering her lecture to a fairly large but visibly divided crowd, Boys propounded her points with a strong conviction. The first difficulty that Boys had with the movie was that the problems of Jews are, in her opinion, exacerbated by the association of Jews with the devil. It was her opinion that the scene in the film where the devil appears among Jewish people is extremely anti-Semitic. In addition, Boys sighted the depiction of the high priest Caiaphas, who in the movie is “ever present” and instrumental in Jesus’ death. According to Boys, Pilot, who was not Jewish, was really responsible for the death of Jesus and not the Jewish priest Caiaphas and the Pharisees. Boys’ second point was that the movie was full of gratuitous violence which she believes is in direct contradiction to the Bible. She challenged the audience to ask why there needed to be such extreme violence. Boys herself did not see the point in the violent nature of the film. Mel Gibson was the subject of Boys’ third issue with the film. She took issue with the fact that in her opinion Mel Gibson believes he is a normative arbiter of the Gospel. Boys’ does not believe that Gibson has the knowledge he claims to have, and she resented the fact that he discounts modern-view scholars. Next, Boys addressed the polarization that the icon projects. She believed that the rhetoric of violence that is seen in the film comes back into our lives in the form of the demonization of the critics of the film such as herself. Her criticism of the film has caused her to receive many hateful e-mails and letters, one of which called her “a dark and tortured soul.” Boys used herself to illustrate her belief that “there has been a lot of ugliness exposed by this controversy.” The commercialization of Jesus was another issue that Boys addressed. She noted that the movie was present on T-shirts and even at NASCAR races, and spoke of her opinion that there is something inherently wrong with eating popcorn and candy while watching the crucifixion of Christ. Again, Boys called the audience to question themselves asking, “Why are we focusing on the suffering to make us good Christians?” She believes that the idea that we need to see the suffering and experience it to be true to our religion puts forth the notion of a vengeful God. Agreeing with the violence in “The Passion of the Christ,” to Boys, is like saying that we need a brutal death in order to be good Christians, which she believes is against most Christian teachings. Boys’ seventh and final point began by furthering the question, “why should we meditate on passion and death?” Boys’ believes that this will not cause us to stand with the marginalized as it should. If the movie and its violence call people to do something about the injustice of the world then Boys can see some merit in it. However, she does not believe that Gibson accomplished this goal. An interesting and somewhat heated question and answer period followed her talk. Professors, students and committee members alike took part in a discussion as many questioned what was being said. Audience members spoke of why they believed the violence was needed and asked various questions of Boys and each other. Although audience members both agreed and disagreed with Boys the lasting impression of the lecture was her call to “be careful before we make Mel the 5th gospel.”