PROFESSOR GARY LEUPP has published a piece on Mel Gibson's The Passion in Counterpunch. He is a specialist in Japanese history, but his essay, entitled "Gibson's Christ on Trial: Dispassionate Notes on the 'Passion' Controversy," is overall well informed and informative and you should take the time to read it in full. He has his own agenda, which is fair enough, but he does make a real effort to treat the matter dispassionately and the piece is a contribution to the debate. That said, I also think he gets it seriously wrong just in terms of fairness in one place, and in at least two others he gets some facts wrong. There are other places where I think the emphasis goes too far in a particular direction or where I want to quibble about details or where my opinions differ, but let those go.

The section I have serious problems with is the following:

8. Mel Gibson is a devout, if dissident, Catholic. Anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance.

Actually, I thought that "tolerance" meant tolerating the views of people who disagree with you. Unfortunately, the politically correct meaning of tolerance is adhering to a particular political agenda and a particular set of political views and no others. It sounds suspiciously as though that is the operating definition here. Professor Leupp evidently is pro-choice and anti-death penalty. Fine. But are people who disagree with him by definition intolerant? Let's make it personal with a single example. I disagree with him on capital punishment. Am I intolerant as a result? I respect his view. Does he respect mine? I recognize that the issue is heavily debated and problematical and I regard my view as coming to terms with necessary evils. I have had many discussions with people who disagree with me and almost always I find them to have thoughtful and respectable reasons for their view. That sort of mutual respect and agreement to disagree is what I think of as tolerance. If Professor Leupp is labeling people who disagree with him on the issue of capital punishment as "no models of tolerance," well, he has the right to say and think whatever he likes, and I don't care if he approves of me or not, but I think that is an Orwellian and provincial opinion. If that's not what he was saying, I think he needs to speak more clearly. And if Gibson has said something outrageous about these subjects, let's hear it. Let's have links to the quotations in full context so we can judge it for ourselves.

But that is a minor point. It's the rest of the sentence that really crosses the line: "and accused of hostility to feminists and gays, Gibson is no model of tolerance." Being accused of something makes someone "no model of tolerance"? Since when? I challenge Professor Leupp either to show (again, links to quotes in full context, please) that Mel Gibson has actually said or done something disrespectful to feminists or gays or else to retract this statement. As it stands now, this just won't do.

The other two points are the following.

11. Objective historians consider the "real" history underlying the Passion storyline unclear. Most concede (although some scholars contest this) that there was a Jewish man living in the Roman province of Judea in the early first century CE who, killed ca. 30, became an object of worship of the Christian faith.

I know of no living, serious scholar in historical Jesus studies (and by "serious" I mean people who publish in the major peer-review journals and present papers at the major conferences) who holds the view that Jesus never existed. I'm not a historical Jesus specialist myself, but I do publish on Jesus sometimes, and I can tell you that the scholarly debate is on how much we can tell about the historical Jesus from our problematical sources, not whether he existed at all. If Professor Leupp has specific people in mind, I'd be interested in hearing names and references.

32. This concept of a god undergoing a horrible death, descending to the netherworld, the rising from the dead, offering salvation to humankind (or to select believers), is not unique to Christianity but occurs in other religions once popular in the Middle East. The Babylonian god Tammuz (earlier, the Sumerian god Dimmuzi) rises from the dead, due to the actions of the goddess Ishtar, on the third day.

It's been awhile since I've tried to keep up with Sumerology (although, again, I have published in the area in the past). But it's common knowledge that the idea that Dumuzi (not Dimmizi) was a dying and rising god has been refuted by better Sumerian sources. Samuel Noah Kramer talked about this long ago in The Sumerians, 153-60, and Thorkild Jacobsen reinforced it in The Treasures of Darkness, chapter 2. More recently, Jacobsen has an article on "Dumuzi" in the Encyclopedia of Religion. The whole category of "Dying and Rising Gods" is dubious. See the article with that title in the Encyclopedia of Religion by Jonathan Z. Smith. This point bears on #49 as well.

I hope at this point I don't really need to repeat that I am not defending The Passion; that I haven't seen it yet and won't have an opinion until I do; that the trailer gives me causes for concern; that I just think that the debate should proceed as accurately and fairly as possible; that my criticisms of what others say about it are intended to be constructive to those ends; and blah, blah, blah. I don't need to repeat all that, do I?