Donald Harman Akenson writes an interesting, frank, and provocative essay for the Globe and Mail on Mel Gibson's The Passion and Garth Drabinsky's The Gospel of John. Excerpts:
Christianity and Judaism have managed their uneasy mutual survival because the pastoral leaders of these religions have mostly been realistic. In day-to-day teaching, they have quietly rewritten each of their sets of sacred texts to highlight the generous and to downplay the more vicious aspects of their exclusivisms.
Thus, for example, Christian pastors spend a lot of time on the noble and generous Beatitudes and rarely mention that Jesus of Nazareth not only never intentionally preached to Gentiles (non-Jews), but actually compared them to dogs (see Mark 7:24-28.) And in study groups, modern rabbis spend their time on the benign teachings of Hillel and Akiba, but rarely parse the Eighteen Benedictions (the 18 curses against heretics, especially Christians) that originated in the late first century and continued to be said in some Sephardic rites well into the 20th century.
Of course, in none of these cases do the religious leaders admit what they are actually doing: gentling the sacred texts by being unfaithful to them. In seminars, sermons, homilies, they buff the hard and hateful parts off their sacred writings under the guise of reinterpreting them. We all tolerate each other a bit more as a result.
Of the Four Gospels, the Gospel of John is the closest to being hate literature. Granted, it contains some lovely writing, but its basic narrative -- and a very strong narrative it is -- shows the mainline Pharisees and "the Jews" (or, as Mr. Drabinsky often has it, the "Jewish authorities") as being responsible for the death of Jesus. The Romans get off lightly and the Jews take almost all the blame.
[...]
Why would anyone want to be faithful to such a text? It can be redeemed by informed, discriminating and gentle scholarship. But, to film a literal version of the Gospel of John is like filming a faithful version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Garth, Mel, you're missing the point. To claim faithfulness to the text of the fourth Gospel is not a defence of your films.
Ouch! The comparison is over the top, although he has a legitimate point to make about the ideology and reception history of the Gospel of John. Read it all.
Mark Goodacre comments on the essay here and makes some good points.
UPDATE: Rebecca Lesses points out to me in an e-mail that Akenson grossly misstates the nature of the Eighteen Benedictions or Amida, which are not curses but prayers to God and the heart of the Jewish prayer service. One additional one, the Birkat Haminim, does mention (and curse) the heretics and that must be what he was thinking of. Sorry, I read the essay in a rush, saw some interesting ideas in it, and slapped down a quote without parsing everything in it. It had been tugging at my mind that there was something wrong with the essay which I'd missed, but I hadn't had time to come back to it yet.
I see now (and believe it or not, I hadn't noticed this) that one of his books was reviewed by RBL a few days ago and that he said the same thing in almost the same words in a book published by the University of Chicago Press, for which the reviewer rightly takes him to task. I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that the U of C editors also let the comment slip by, but I still shouldn't have.
Akenson has some interesting ideas and points in this article (and overall the review of his book is quite positive) but it's a pity he weakens them with this sort of error and hyperbole.
