Phil Brennan
Wednesday, March 26, 2003

The New York Times magazine fired the first shot – a shoddy, thoroughly dishonest – and largely disjointed – story that concentrated on Gibson's father’s rather bizarre views as a way of attacking Gibson, who avoided the writer, from the rear.

The author, some guy named Noxon, appears to have taken up the cudgels on behalf of his own father, who is unhappy that the tranquility of his California neighborhood has been disturbed by a Roman Catholic chapel Gibson has built on an 11-acre tract near Noxon's father's home.

In other words, the attack seems to have been sparked by a case of NIMBY (Not in my Backyard).

In his Washington Post column, Lloyd Grove got to the point: Gibson is making a movie about the last 12 hours of Christ. For reasons I fail to understand, this upsets the left, a largely atheistic bunch who are fixating on spreading the rumor that the movie blames the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ. Ergo, Mel Gibson is an anti-Semite.

Gibson of course denies this, as well he should. The man is a very devout traditional Catholic, steeped in Roman Catholic doctrine, and he says quite correctly that to blame the Jews of Christ's time for crucifying Jesus is to misunderstand and distort the meaning of the crucifixion.

To begin with, Jesus was scourged, crowned with thorns and nailed to the cross by Roman soldiers, most probably Syrian auxiliaries. He was condemned to crucifixion by Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator. There wasn't a Jew in the bunch.

Now, Jesus was brought to Pilate by the Temple authorities, who wanted him crucified because they believed he threatened their tight grip on the people of Israel but were forbidden by Roman law to do the job themselves. They were of course, Jews, but they were not ordinary Jews. They ran the place and, as Christ charged, misused their authority and, allied with the Roman occupiers, ground their own people under their heels.

But they did not crucify Christ. Nor did the Romans.

Says Gibson, "I crucified Christ." And in that he is absolutely correct. He did, I did, you did. Christ died in expiation for sin – your sins, my sins, everybody's sins going back to the dawn of creation.

We're all sinners and we all crucified Christ, and continue to do so, day in and day out, by our sins. And among those sins is to proclaim that the Jews crucified Christ.

To blame Christ's death on the Jewish people would be like blaming the Iraqi people for the excesses of Saddam Hussein. They are Saddam's victims, just as the people of Israel were the victims of the Temple bureaucracy.

Christ's mother was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. All of the first Christians were Jews. None of them crucified Christ.

Mel Gibson is making a movie that portrays, in all its horror, Christ's agony in his final hours. Gibson himself has been shocked by what he has learned about Christ's terrible sufferings, just as I was when I researched our Lord's passion and death for my little book on the Shroud of Turin. The extent of that suffering is almost beyond human comprehension.

Gibson believes, as I do, that it is important to understand the extent of Christ's sufferings because by so doing we get a very slight idea of the extent of Christ's love for all of us miserable sinners. Mel is willing to back his belief with his own money and time, $25 million and several years of effort, so that we can understand what he has learned.

He deserves better than the New York Times and its liberal allies are throwing at him.

Hang in there, Mel.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute. He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com.

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