Film on Christ stirs passions

With his movie about the death of Jesus under attack as anti-Semitic, Mel Gibson is trying to build an audience and a defense for his project by screening it for evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, right-wing pundits, Republicans, a few Jewish commentators and Jews who believe that Jesus is the Messiah.

Gibson has poured $25 million of his money into the movie, "The Passion," calling it the most authentic and biblically accurate film about Jesus' death.

Now, seven months before its scheduled release next year on Ash Wednesday, the film has provoked a bitter uproar that both sides warn could undermine years of bridge-building between Christians and Jews.

The handpicked audiences who have seen the film defend it as the most moving, reverential — and violent — depiction of Jesus' suffering and death ever put on screen. Its detractors, who have read a script but not seen the film, say it is a modern version of the medieval passion plays that portrayed Jews as "Christ-killers" and stoked anti-Jewish violence.

The dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin. Scholars say that belies the assertion of total authenticity, because the Romans spoke Greek. Gibson had said the film would not have English subtitles. But it is being screened with them, the marketing director, Paul Lauer, said, and they may remain. "The Passion" has no distributor. Lauer said "two major studios" were interested or Gibson might distribute it himself.

The controversy has been cast by many of his supporters as the Jews versus Mel Gibson. But it began when several Catholic scholars voiced concern about the project because of Gibson's affiliation with a splinter Catholic group that rejects the modern papacy and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which in 1965 repudiated the charge of deicide against the Jews.

Gibson has screened "The Passion" for a few weeks for friendly audiences but has refused to show it to his critics, who include members of Jewish groups and biblical scholars. In Washington, it was shown to the Web gossip Matt Drudge, the columnists Cal Thomas and Peggy Noonan, and staff members of the Senate Republican Conference and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, among many others. In Colorado Springs, Colo., a center of evangelical support, the film drew raves. A convention of the Legionaries of Christ, a traditionalist Roman Catholic order of priests, saw a preview, as did Rush Limbaugh.

Audiences wept, and many were awestruck.

"Mel Gibson is the Michelangelo of this generation," said the Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.