01:00 AM EST on Friday, April 2, 2004

IF THE BOX OFFICE has been good to The Passion of the Christ, the critics have been less so. By and large, detractors have hated the thing. And none has been more vehement in his dislike than David Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker.

In his March 1 review, Denby calls the film "one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema." He goes on to say that "the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony. . . ."

From all accounts, The Passion invites such a visceral reaction. But I would hazard that Denby is also a case of the pot calling the kettle personal.

In 1991, Denby returned to Columbia University, his alma mater, to re-read the classics of Western literature. There, this middle-aged Jew developed something like a classic college crush, only it happened to be on Jesus.

In Great Books, the 1996 volume chronicling his experiences, Denby describes what it was like to read the Gospel of Matthew: ". . . what I felt was delight in Jesus, an unanticipated elation and excitement."

Denby's Jesus is not so much the atoning savior of traditional Christianity as a man of unparalleled intellectual vigor. Small wonder, then, that Gibson's Jesus should give Denby fits. In Gibson's portrayal, bodily suffering dominates. Jesus-as-thinker is largely absent.

Stephen Prothero, a scholar at Boston University, finds room for both men's Jesus and a good many others in his new book American Jesus.

Patiently marshaling his evidence, Prothero charts how American conceptions of Jesus have changed since the nation's founding and continue to do so.

In colonial times, he says, Jesus was far less central to Christianity than was God the father. Change came with the Revolution. Prothero reads a democratic impulse in the dethroning of the authoritarian father, and his replacement by the more approachable son. And certainly the argument is compelling. Colonists who had just rid themselves of the king were bound to have issues with an arbitrary Calvinist god.

One of Jesus's most fervent admirers was Thomas Jefferson, who, using two Bibles, cut and pasted together his own account of what he considered the real Jesus. Jefferson's Jesus, closer to Denby's than Gibson's, was an ethical genius who neither performed miracles nor atoned for anyone's sins.

Later on, in 19th Century America, Jesus bore a strong resemblance to the meek, self-sacrificing angels of Victorian womanhood. A backlash against what some saw as this overly feminized Christ led to a more masculine Jesus in the era of Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. The popular "baseball evangelist" Billy Sunday crossed the country proclaiming his vision of Christ as a scrapper.

The Jesus movement, which emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s, produced a Jesus who bucked social convention. "Christ really socks it to you," proclaimed Duane Pederson, the editor of a popular movement paper.

At the same time, Jesus has been embraced by Americans practicing non-Christian religions. Within Judaism, attempts to emphasize Jesus' Jewishness are longstanding. American Hindus have found in Jesus one of many incarnations of God. During the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the Mormons ran me-too ads emphasizing their love of Jesus.

And these are only a few of the American Jesuses who appear in Prothero's pages. To those who think of Christ as unchanging, following his account can be unnerving. Yet Prothero makes a strong case for how Jesus-centered American religion is and remains, even as it grows more pluralistic.

The overarching trend, as Prothero finds evidenced in today's nondenominational mega-churches, has been toward a friendlier Christ, Jesus as pal.

It goes without saying that this is not Mel Gibson's Jesus. Gibson is a conservative Catholic who rejects the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II. His focus on the physical agony of Jesus flows directly from Catholic devotional tradition. And yet American Protestants, flocking to the movie, hardly seem to mind.

The question may be whether it is religious tradition that so undergirds The Passion or film tradition -- a rhetoric nearly every American is comfortable with and that includes heavy doses of violence.

Denby was not the first to point out that Gibson's Jesus strongly resembles the type of movie character Gibson himself likes to play. For Gibson the actor, pain and suffering are almost always part of the job description. Braveheart is a virtual handbook of mayhem, and in it Gibson both "suffers" and directs the suffering of others.

In a recent New York Times essay, Prothero speculates that Gibson's Jesus, and his film's immense popularity, could signal a return to a Jesus from whom Americans are more estranged. Gibson's suffering man-god may be harder to comprehend than the admirable guy many Americans thought that they had come to know.

Of course, what Prothero's book does not begin to explain is why this human God, in all his protean forms, remains so compellingly at the center of American spiritual experience. "I fell in love with Jesus, my Jesus. . . .," Denby remarks toward the end of Great Books. Gibson's Jesus is ultimately just as personal, and the "my" of his film every bit as mysterious.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal's editorial board.