Jots & Tittles

Ancient Aramaic Lives! (On the Big Screen)

Imagine the surprise of Bible scholar and archaeologist William Fulco when, while quietly logging ancient artifacts in his Jerusalem office one day last summer, he got a phone call out of the blue, from a man he didn’t know, named “Mel.”

“Hey Padre. It’s Mel. I have a project for you.”

The brash caller turned out to be no less a personage than Mel Gibson, the superstar Hollywood actor and director. He wanted to recruit Fulco, a professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a Jesuit priest (hence the “Padre”), for what promises to be Gibson’s most ambitious, and certainly his most controversial, film to date: a retelling of Jesus’ last 12 hours, filmed entirely in the languages spoken in first-century Palestine. Fulco’s job: Translate the film’s screenplay from modern English into first-century Aramaic—the language Jesus spoke—and Latin (for the Roman characters).

“I figured he’d gone mad,” says Fulco, describing his first reaction to being recruited for such an unusual task. But the project was so intriguing he couldn’t refuse.

The film, called The Passion, won’t be released until Easter 2004, but it is already generating a lot of controversy. In a September 2002 news conference a confident Gibson, who is directing (though not acting in) the film, told reporters, “They [studios and distributors] think I’m crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I’m a genius.”