From "Why Did They Kill Jesus?" Ched Myers. Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, Anti-Semitism and the Gospel: The Markan Trial Narrative as Political Parody, Tikkun:
I stand by what I wrote at the outset of Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark Story of Jesus, upon which the above comments are based: Mark's social criticism, though necessarily historically specific, is addressed to every culture and political formation. To limit it to late Second-Temple Judaism is not only to miss his point badly; it is to perpetuate the murderous historical legacy of misunderstanding and oppression that has too often characterized the attitude of gentile Christians (and pseudo-Christians) toward the Jewish peopleThe opponents of Mark Jesus were, to use apocalyptic semantics, owers,a rubric that embraces not only members of the Roman and Judean ruling classes then, but also those in North American now (1988:37f). At the conclusion of our forum, I suggested to Rabbi Lerner that from the perspective of first century Palestinian history, the cross was a Jewish symbol before it was a Christian one. Could the cross, which has for so long been a symbol of persecution for Jews on one hand, and a symbol of docetic salvationism for Christians on the other, be rehabilitated as a new symbol for the practice of nonviolent resistance that might be embraced by both Jews and Christians?
