"Scholarly" conversation on The Passion?

At the recent meetings of the American Academy of Religion & Society for Biblical Literature, I was invited to the University of Birmingham's breakfast reception, where I briefly met Mark Goodacre, who blogs the NT Gateway Weblog.

Mark has posted an extended account of the SBL "Interview with the Writers of The Passion" (featuring translator William Fulco and screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald), but I'm not sure we were at the same event.

I spoke with about a dozen people during after the session. It left all of us with a bad taste in our mouths mostly because the whole "conversation" appeared to have been staged and there were no questions from the floor. This is absolutely inexcusable for a scholarly conference.

By contrast, here's what Mark calls "tough" interviewing: "David Shepherd did put the difficult questions, though, and in particular pressed Fulco on the issue of Greek." Mark "wondered whether Alice Bach was a little starstruck; she did not ask any difficult questions ...and she was a little touchy-feely with Fitzgerald as if very pleased to be sitting up there with him." Considering that Alice Bach was the only woman on the panel and the only one of the three interviewers to raise the issues of antisemitism and violence--no doubt she was pushing the boundaries of some list of pre-determined interview topics--this is a deeply unfair, not to mention incredibly disrespectful, description.

My take: Screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald at first insisted that the movie was entirely true to the gospels ("nothing in the film is not in the gospels," he said) but then admitted to using the texts attributed to Anne Catherine Emmerich and Mary of Agreda. Fitzgerald also claimed there was no antisemitism because (a) he (Fitzgerald) grew up in Italy where "that just wasn't a problem," and (b) Fulco had a Jewish assistant who advised a "sensitive" Mel Gibson behind the scenes. Fulco admitted out loud - and this is a quote - that Mel wanted a "macho Jesus in charge." Fulco also described Christopher Noxon's early 2003 New York Times Sunday Magazine piece as an intentional slam because, he alleged, Noxon's father had it in for Hutton Gibson. Fulco went on to accuse Noxon of visiting Hutton Gibson under false pretences, specifically alleging that he posed as a "student of theology." In other recollections of the 2003 pre-Passion controversy, Fulco opined that he "learned a lot in terms of suffering" during the Ad Hoc Scholars' Committee "incident," adding that this was especially ironic because it took place during Holy Week. [Actually, it didn't: as Mark Silk points out in his contribution to After The Passion is Gone, the scholars only received their copies of the script around that time; what Fulco is remembering is a Los Angeles Times article about scholarly concerns that appeared on Easter Sunday 2003.]

To his credit, Mark describes this exchange as

an interesting moment, not least because some of those present would have been fresh out of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section just beforehand, at which Amy-Jill Levine and Paula Fredriksen had spoken about their suffering at that same time. I couldn't help feeling that there was something utterly peculiar about having these two sessions about The Passion of the Christ, from such different perspectives, without any connection between the two, in each of which the speakers were commenting on their suffering, and in each of which no questions or comments from the floor were allowed. An outside observer at either session might have wondered what kind of academic conference this was, that in these sessions the audiences were not able to contribute.

I agree with Mark that this was a "fascinating" session, but I suspect we have different reasons. I was fascinated that the SBL would permit a session with no open Q&A, fascinated that the "interviewers" might have agreed to pre-defined ground-rules, and fascinated at the utter glibness with which Fulco and Fitzgerald treated their encounter with the scholarly community.

[UPDATE - 6/11/05 - Mark notes my objections in an addendum. He's right that I shouldn't have put "tough" in quotation marks - it incorrectly implied that the word was his. I am glad that we agree about the problematic lack of audience involvement, though.]