Jesus Christ - The passion

The traditional version of the Passion of Jesus is coherent and straightforward, even simple. Whether it is preached from the pulpit or read in literature of piety, the story hardly varies. It may even be watched in the cinema: The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson, the international box-office hit of 2004, is still fresh in many peoples minds. This is a story which is meant to be perceived with the eyes of faith. It recounts the sacrifice, the self-immolation of the Son of God who willingly offered his life, we are told, for the redemption of the sins of mankind. Without exception all the children of Adam have to accept their own responsibility for it if they are to reap the fruits of the atonement achieved for them all by Christ dying on the cross.

But the same story has also an historical (or I would say pseudo-historical) dimension. It emanates from a simplistic and selective reading of the Gospels without appropriate interpretation, indeed without any interpretation. According to this version the suffering and death of Jesus were the outcome of the hostility and hatred of his enemies, the Jewish priestly leaders and their council, who browbeat the weak but basically decent Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, forcing him to pronounce Jesus guilty, and successfully harangued the multitude of their compatriots to clamour for his crucifixion. Here the responsibility for deicide, the murder of the divine Christ, is placed squarely on the shoulders of the Jewish people.

This representation of the Passion, which will be shown to be biased and twisted, has influenced the Christian world over most of its history. Even today, when the official spokesmen of churches, chapels and denominations reject what the great French historian Jules Isaac once called the doctrine of contempt, lenseignement du mpris, many Christians, clergy and laity, have instinctively applauded the Passion la Mel Gibson. Even the Pope is reported to have approved the version of the movie seen by him with the Delphic words, It is as it was.

It goes without saying that, like everything else we know about Jesus, the account of his last day derives from the New Testament, and more specifically from the discrete narratives of the four Gospels. Unlike the traditional story produced by the Church, they are neither simple nor coherent. On the contrary, as we shall see, they are filled with discrepancies. Without a deliberate and artificial harmonization, which was already attempted in the centuries when Christendom was young and has continued ever since, they seem disconcerting and confusing. They form a mystery within which real history lurks.

To penetrate this mystery, the reader must come to grips with the literary sources that are closest to the reality of the Passion and subject Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, our four principal witnesses, to a stringent critical scrutiny. I like to compare the historian-interpreter to a detective charged with preparing a report to a law court. Four documents lie on his desk. He must pore over them, seek to clarify obscurities, establish facts and point out contradictions. In reality, the process will be simpler than it first appears since three out of the four narratives of the Passion closely resemble one another. Two of them, Mark and Matthew, are nearly identical. In consequence, they can be surveyed together, grasped in a single glance, synoptically, while separate treatment is reserved for the occasional, but often momentous, divergences between the narratives, especially in the Gospel of Luke. Finally, the comparison of Mark, Matthew and Luke the Synoptics with the Fourth Gospel will make plain that the events of the last day of the life of Jesus have been transmitted in two fundamentally different traditions. To define, evaluate and interpret these differences with the help of expert knowledge peppered with common sense is the momentous task facing this inquiry.