An Epistle to the Christians
from J. Neil SchulmanI'm Jewish. Here's my Bar Mitzvah certificate to prove it.
Now, my grandfather told me, when I was a child, that Jews don't believe in Jesus Christ. He didn't just mean that we disagreed with the Christians about Jesus being the son of God. He meant that Jesus was just a story, that he wasn't a real person, that he never existed.
But I've read the Gospels and I just saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I have to say that I can easily understand why a Jew reading the Gospels, or seeing this movie, might feel that the Gospels and The Passion of the Christ come across as antiSemitic. The Jews of those days are portrayed like modern day Islamic fundamentalists -- willing to kill blasphemers against their religion. Even if you don't believe that Jesus existed, I don't think anyone is contesting the historical fact that Jews of that era stoned blasphemers to death. So if Jesus was a real person, and declared that he was the Son of God, there's no controversy on two facts. The first is that he was a blasphemer to the Jews of that era. The second is that the punishment for blasphemy at the time was a barbaric and painful execution. I'm certainly not one who would want to have to choose between crucifixion and getting stoned to death.
And while we're at it, what's with the Christian obsession with harping on Jesus' death? You say that Jesus came back to life after his death, that's the whole point. And that Jesus is the Son of God, which means he's immortal and still alive today. Ask yourself how Jesus feels when he sees a graphic reminder of his agony in church. No wonder the man's taking so long to come back. I wouldn't want to spend my vacation time on the planet where even all my supposed followers keep reminding me of the worst day of my life.
I happen, personally, to have had an experience I consider to be a personal conversation with God. Actually, it was more like a Vulcan mindmeld on Star Trek. On February 18, 1997, starting around noon, God's mind took over my body for about eight or so hours, and if you asked me who I was while this was going on, my honest answer would have been, "God." It's lucky for me that I didn't live in Jerusalem around CE 30 when this happened and told any of my fellow Jews what was going on inside my body. The Jews of that era would have considered my statement blasphemy and taken some efforts to put me to death.
I know some of my liberal Jewish relatives who probably wouldn't mind having me crucified because of my life membership in the NRA.
But let's take the Gospels at face value for a moment and say, yes, Jesus existed, he's the Son of God, he came to earth, we killed him (and by "we" I don't just mean Jews, but all the descendants of Adam and Eve -- that is, the entire human race), and Jesus came back to life as our Savior.
You can't expect me to believe that God didn't know what was going to happen if he incarnated on planet earth as a man and started taking on the Sanhedrin -- the Taliban of their day. God knew he could count on the Sanhedrin to defend their faith according to their customs and God knew the Roman bureaucracy would act predictably according to theirs. God knew what he was letting himself in for before he set one baby toe on earth and God chose to do it -- in fact God made sure of it. You don't go up to religious freaks like that and say, "Guess what? I'm God's son and I'm here to rewrite the rule book. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!" You think Jesus didn't have a clue what sort of character Judas had when he picked him as a disciple? He knew, and he knew he could count on him to act according to his character. Because God had a plan and God played us all like a violin. And that's just fine, because God is God and he gets to do things like that when he wants things to turn out a certain way. Things had gone way wrong back in Eden, and God needed to set things on the right path again. You can argue the details but you can't argue that if anyone is primarily responsible for the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, it's not the Jews, it's not the Romans, it's not the human race -- it's not even Satan.
If Jesus Christ was really the Son of God, then Jesus Christ died on the cross so God could live as a man, die, and then be resurrected, and that was God's plan all along. The guilt for the death of Jesus Christ stops on God's desk.
In any event, in case anyone hasn't noticed, Jews don't put anybody to death for blasphemy anymore. Trust me. You can say pretty much any damned thing you want around Jews and the only way you're going to get stoned is if you light up a joint after you do it. I've told a bunch of my Jewish friends about my experience and nobody stoned me. Not even one pebble.
Jews these days also don't ritually sacrifice goats in synagogue. You know what you get if you go into a Jewish temple nowadays? You don't get any animal sacrifices. You get a rabbi with a Gibson acoustic guitar singing Kumbaya. And the rabbi might even be a girl.
Jews today aren't the same religion as Jews at the time of Jesus. Jews today have far more in common with Christians than we do with the Jews who used to go around killing goats in the Temple and executing blasphemers.
I think we should call the religion of those who sacrificed goats at the second Temple of Solomon "Hebrews," to distinguish them from the Jews today. Jews these days have two important things in common with Christians: both Jews and Christians worship the same God as the Hebrews, and neither Jews nor Christians today go around stoning blasphemers to death.
So you know what? I don't identify myself with a bunch of goat-killing, blasphemer-executing lunatics, any more than Christians do, even though both Judaism and Christianity have their roots in the Hebrew religion.
That's not the Jewish religion I was bar mitzvahed into.
Mel Gibson's movie wasn't about modern Jews. It doesn't have anything to do with me.
The Passion of the Christ wasn't anti-Jewish because the word "Jew" has drastically changed meaning in the last two millennia. This controversy isn't about antiSemitism. It's about sloppy use of language and the resulting semantic confusion.
Let me also take this opportunity to express my personal opinion that the critical hits on Mel Gibson disgust me, charging him with everything from enabling Islamic antiSemitism to cynically serving up movie violence with no spiritual purpose simply to make money. Mel Gibson risked his own money to make this film -- just about unheard of in risk-aversive Hollywood -- and it would have taken a prophet to know in advance that his gamble would pay off. Mel Gibson could easily have ended up broke and blacklisted in Hollywood. Instead, he's proved that an independent quality film can make a ton of money and sent a message to the studios that you can make money without making (and usually remaking) crap. This is good news for a screenwriter like me who's trying to find a studio to produce my comic screenplay, adapted from my novel, Escape from Heaven.
And listen. If it's fair game for movies to portray the violence on the silver screen of Nazis torturing and murdering 20th century Jews, it's just as fair game for Mel Gibson to put the Gospels account of the ancient torture and murder of their Lord on screen. I have some news for my fellow Jews. It takes a lot of chutzpah for Jews to try telling Christians how they can or can't preach their religion. Again, as I've said, whatever the Hebrews under Roman occupation did to blasphemers, the guilt doesn't get laid at the doorstep of Jews two millennia later.
But if it makes the Christians happy, let me say the following.
Old-time Hebrews who executed blasphemers were homicidal maniacs -- even if they were goaded into it by God deciding to blaspheme in front of them. If Jesus of Nazareth really existed and was one of those so-called blasphemers caught up in this homicidal madness then executing him was a horrific, unspeakable crime, whether or not he was the Son of God or just a slob like one of us.
But we Jews don't do that sort of thing. We're not the ancient Hebrews. We've learned our lesson. We're all very sorry if the Hebrews conspired with the Romans to have Jesus tortured and executed but all those dudes are long dead and it won't happen again.
Whew! I feel so much better now that I got all that guilt off my chest.
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Author's Note: I posted this page over two years ago. Yesterday, an L.A. County deputy sheriff's report was posted on the Internet which stated that during his arrest for DUI, Mel Gibson engaged in a drunken anti-Semitic tirade. Anticipating that such news will bring up this page on Google using the search terms "Gibson" and "anti-Semitic," let me state my position for the record.
First, If I judged works of art by the lives of their creators, I'd never be able to listen to Beethoven's Ninth again.
Second, a man's character should also not be judged by what he says when he's drunk but what he does when he's cold sober. All of us are monsters below the surface and our better selves spend our entire lives struggling to chain the monster within. See Forbidden Planet. Alcohol is a disinhibitor that sometimes unleashes the monster. Liberals like to use this fact to make conservatives -- who uphold public standards of propriety -- appear like hypocrites when they fail to uphold the standards they proclaim. But a thousand years of Western Civilization convinces me that it's better to fail to live up to one's standards than not to have any in the first place.
Finally, I'll start criticizing Mel Gibson for what he says when he's drunk the day that Alec Baldwin is no longer respectable enough to be interviewed by mainstream media after the outrageous death threats against conservative officeholders -- Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich, President Bush, and Vice President Cheney -- that Baldwin has made on TV when he was stone cold sober. (And somehow I think that Mel Gibson's co-star in Paparazzi, Alec Baldwin's younger brother Daniel, will not be first in line to criticize Mel Gibson for his DUI arrest.)
I'll stand by what I wrote about Mel Gibson in 2004.
J. Neil Schulman, July 29, 2006
In 2006, J. Neil Schulman directed his first feature film, Lady Magdalene's, based on his original screenplay. He also executive-produced it with Nichelle Nichols (Star Trek's Uhura), who played the title role. As well, Schulman played Ali, an American Al Qaeda terrorist, and even composed two songs for the soundtrack, including an original gospel song Nichols sang titled "Rahab the Harlot."Neil is also the author of nine books currently in print, including his latest novel Escape from Heaven, as well as being a screenwriter who wrote for The Twilight Zone. His latest book, I MET GOD, is available as an audiobook from Podspell.Com. His personal website is at http://jneil.tv.
In Two Excerpts from Escape from Heaven Neil explains how God decided to "trade his omnipotence, his omniscience, and his omnipresence for the possibility of finding love," and why only Adam could redeem his own original sin in "The History of Creation" and "The Gospel According to Jesus.
Read J. Neil Schulman's short story, "Day of Atonement," in which the ancient Hebrews take over modern Israel ... and kick out the Jews!
Soon to be a
Major Motion Picture!Read the Studio Briefing news story on IMDB about this "Jews For Gibson" website!
Read the FreeRepublic.com discussion of Jews for Gibson!