Our Jesus, ourselves Mel Gibson did a fine job of capturing modernity's hatred of human flesh. Imagine what our world would be like if Jesus were depicted in a state of arousal during the Passion. BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

AMID THE REAMS of copy devoted to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, little to nothing has been said about what’s really at the heart of the controversy over the film: who has the right, and the moral authority, to portray Jesus? Over the centuries, Jesus has been presented by different cultures in radically different ways. Images of him have spanned race, body type, hair color, visage, affect, and — thanks to Edwina Sandys’s crucified, bare-breasted Jesus, created in 1975 to commemorate the United Nations’ Decade of the Woman — gender. In the United States alone, as Stephen Prothero notes in his excellent new study American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), Jesus has been "black and white, male and female, straight and gay, a socialist and a capitalist, a pacifist and a warrior, a Ku Klux Klansman and a civil rights agitator." And then, of course, there is Gibson’s portrayal of Jesus, neatly summarized by Andrew Sullivan as "largely a piece of soul-deadening pornographic sadism."

The one constant through the ages — as blasphemous as it may sound to some — is that Jesus is always sexy. Could you even imagine a paunchy, balding Jesus with bad teeth? Jesus has, as novelist Elinor Glyn proclaimed of silent-movie star Clara Bow, "It." Whether it be Albrecht Dürer’s intense, manly Jesus in the 1512 engraving Christ Before Pilate, or the mass-produced images — commonplace since the 19th century — of Jesus as the smiling, gentle Good Shepherd, the man has sex appeal. It has always been true of Hollywood’s portrayal of Jesus — think of comely Jeffrey Hunter in 1961’s King of Kings looking like a cross between teen heartthrob Tab Hunter and a slightly stoned angel from a fresco by Fra Angelico. In ABC’s scripture-of-the-week television movie Judas this past Monday, Jonathan Scarfe’s portrayal of Jesus is so cute and flirty with his come-on smile and hugs for everyone that it’s almost embarrassing. And it’s certainly true of James Caviezel, the star of Gibson’s film, who, even while being tortured, is over-the-top gorgeous.

That there have been such myriad representations of Jesus doesn’t mean he was a religious chameleon. Rather, Jesus is tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which cultures build the images of him it most wants or needs. Expressing a sentiment often ascribed to Jesus, Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 9:22: "I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some."

SO WHAT DOES it mean that Gibson’s portrayal of an utterly victimized, brutalized Jesus has so much appeal today? The decision to dwell (single-mindedly, some critics would argue) on the Passion of Jesus is certainly valid aesthetically. There are precedents for such portrayals throughout Western art, although it could also be argued that contemplating a physically realistic 13th-century crucifix of the wounded Christ is quite different from watching 90 minutes of unrelieved physical torture in a dark movie theater. Nevertheless, Gibson’s violent portrayal of Jesus’ suffering has struck a chord. To date, moviegoers have dropped $212 million in just two weeks to see Gibson’s Jesus. It certainly says much about the times that — despite the broad panoply of accumulated Jesus iconography at our disposal — Gibson’s savage imagery is so popular.

Many critics have pointed out that the violence in The Passion is really no different from that permeating many of Gibson’s other films, such as Lethal Weapon and Braveheart. But to see The Passion simply as a toga-and-loincloth version of Braveheart misses the point. The audiences flocking to The Passion are interested in the theology of the film, which lies just below its surface. Beneath the familiar story of the death of Jesus, Gibson’s deeply felt conviction is that the human body — in this case, Jesus’ — is meant to be destroyed, because it isn’t important. The body is intrinsically inconsequential.

It’s no surprise that such a message resonates with so many people. We live in a culture that is deeply conflicted about the human body and sexuality. It is obsessed with beauty, sex, and body image, while simultaneously proclaiming that these concerns are irrelevant to our spiritual lives. Commercialized sexuality is at the heart of popular culture, and yet there is a nearly overwhelming prohibition on speaking frankly and honestly about sexuality. Why is it that every major television network will air smarmy, smirky advertisements for Viagra, but consistently refuse to sell airtime for condom ads? The hysterical reaction over Janet Jackson’s "costume reveal" (which pushed the Super Bowl entertainment envelope about a millimeter of an inch) was so great that people actually made a federal case out of it. The same media culture that promotes Britney Spears among preteens bemoans the effect she may have on them. No wonder Gibson’s conviction — that if the spiritual life is to triumph, the body must be destroyed — is so popular. Whatever one thinks of Gibson’s art, politics, or religious beliefs, you have to give him this: he has tapped into a powerful theme in popular consciousness. His Jesus is obviously the one many in our culture want and need.