01-29-2004, 12:12 AM
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#1
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Contributor
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Los Angeles area
Posts: 40,549
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Passion Plays
In an op ed in the LA Times on Mel Gibson's Passion, There's Never Been a Passion for the Truth, James Shapiro states:
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In reality, this image of Jesus on the cross comes from the detailed Passion treatises of the 12th through 15th centuries, written to help the pious visualize the events at Calvary. It's hard to underestimate the effect these books had on the paintings, sculpture and dramatic renderings of the Passion in the centuries that followed. What their writers imagined, we now imagine. These stories were compiled at a time when Jews were regularly accused of poisoning wells and committing ritual murder, so it's no surprise they demonized Jews. But the Passion plays that the stories inspired didn't at first make Jews Jesus' main antagonist. Through the late medieval and Renaissance periods, and as late as the 18th century, Satan was the enemy. But by the 19th century, with the rise of realism (and the Catholic Church's growing displeasure with seeing ribald devils onstage), bloodthirsty and money-grubbing Jews took over in the role, with Pontius Pilate, in this streamlined version, becoming something of a hero.
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But even when edited selectively, the Gospels didn't go quite far enough in providing a relentless and incriminating story of Jewish perfidy. So 19th century directors turned to ideas offered by the likes of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), whose ecstatic visions offered damning and dramatically satisfying details nowhere mentioned in Scripture, such as the notion that the Jewish high priests passed out bribes and that the cross was built in the Temple. (Emmerich's influence on Gibson was at first acknowledged, then hastily denied.)
The new story line dominated stage and screen Passions (one of the earliest films ever made was of this Passion) right up to, and even after, the Holocaust. It was an interpretation that Adolf Hitler singled out for praise when he attended a performance in Oberammergau, Germany, where Passion plays have been performed continuously since the 1600s. He applauded the way the Oberammergau Pilate stood out "like a firm, clean rock in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry."
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Shapiro is the author of Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play, summarized here and here:
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Three hundred years ago, the Oberammergau play was already something of doctrinal compromise, synthesizing a late-15th-century Catholic play with a mid-16th-century Protestant tragedy, yet remaining an essentially medieval mix -- Satan and his minions sharing the stage with Christ and the angels. Mr. Shapiro calls it "rough-and-tumble theater," adding that the actor who played Jesus "apparently took his life in his hands." This early version did not have the crucifixion as its climax but rather Jesus' harrowing of hell, "making it as much revenge drama as Passion story."
The mid-18th-century revisions made by a local Benedictine monk doubled the play's length and made it more Catholic by including extended lamentation scenes for the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. Oberammergau was scarcely unique; some 300 Bavarian villages staged passion plays until they were banned as unseemly in 1770. But Oberammergau successfully toned down its play and managed to get dispensation. Another significant revision occurred in 1811 when the play was purged of its on-stage devils, thus leaving the Jews to carry the burden of villainy.
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Having the devils be the villains is more in tune with Paul, who said that Jesus was crucified by the "rulers of this age" who are interpreted to be the demons who rule the lower sphere.
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