Gibson has been widely accused of stirring up anti-Semitism - mostly, it must be said, by people who have seen only a version of the screenplay, not the film itself. One religious scholar, Sister Mary Boys of the Union Theological Seminary, has offered the dire prediction that we are about to see "one of the great crises in Christian-Jewish relations". Another, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, has warned Gibson he can expect blood on his hands.
This is not an easy controversy to judge, since the film has no distributor and is not expected to arrive in cinemas until next year's Lenten season at the earliest. Of the chosen few who have been accorded advance screenings, however, conservatives and Gibson's fellow super-traditionalists have - perhaps predictably - tended to love it, while the Anti-Defamation League, a conservative Jewish group which kicked up a huge fuss until it too was allowed a look, felt - also predictably - that the film confirmed all its worst anti-Semitic fears.
Certainly, Gibson hasn't helped himself by trumpeting his film as an enduring work of art that corrects all the mistakes of previous versions of the Gospels. "This film will show the passion of Jesus Christ just the way it happened," he told a television interviewer earlier this year, before the controversy erupted. "It's like travelling back in time and watching the events unfold exactly as they occurred." And how, pray tell, can Gibson be so sure that he is right, especially when the Gospels themselves are contradictory and vague on many of the details? "The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film," he said. "I was just directing traffic."
Andrew Gumbel Independent UK 6 August 2003relatively in-depth short profile of Gibson, and his father.
