Since The Passion of the Christ is in theatres...part 10
[noticed via open book]

Today's American passion plays, like the granddaddy of them all at Oberammergau, offer paying customers titillation and brutality, good guys and bad guys, and casts of biblical proportions. But unlike Oberammergau (and Gibson's "Passion"), they tend to be rather upbeat. Some refuse to restrict themselves to the last days of Jesus's life, setting his trial and execution against his teachings and miracles. Others, like the popular "Glory of Easter" play staged annually at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., emphasize the resurrection over the crucifixion.

Like most drama, these performances traffic in the illusion of reality. When it comes to passion plays, however, this illusion is particularly dangerous -- and theologically distorting. If we were to travel back to Oberammergau in 1900 we would probably find it difficult to suspend disbelief. But audiences at the time were transfixed, transported from modern Bavaria to ancient Jerusalem. The actors played their parts "with absolute realism," one American pilgrim reported, and even Krauskopf called the play "realistically rendered." ...

But what other than blind faith informs such endorsements? Even if we take the Gospels as gospel, we simply do not have enough information to squeeze out anything close to a two-hour movie. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not screenplays, or even treatments of them. To make a Jesus film based on the Bible you have to go outside it (as Gibson reportedly did, consulting the visions of a female mystic recorded in "The Dolorous Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ"). You have to make millions of idiosyncratic choices about dialogue, sequence, action. You have to choose this line from John rather than that line from Luke. And you have to make things up.

Among the most monumental choices Gibson made was to restrict himself to Jesus's final 12 hours -- in other words, to make a passion play. Having made that choice, Gibson inherited an unholy host of genre-specific conventions not only from medieval European anti-Semitism, but also from the ancient thirst of drama for conflict.

---from at Honest to Jesus by Stephen Prothero