"It's hard to describe it," Pastor McKinney said. "People have asked if I enjoyed it. I don't know how you would enjoy it. It's graphic and brutal. I think it's R for real," he said, echoing a comment made by James Caviezel, the 35-year-old actor Gibson hand-picked to play Jesus Christ. (Moviegoers will recognize Caviezel, before he is beaten and bloodied, as the lead character in the film "The Count of Monte Cristo.")

As he viewed the film, including a lengthy segment where Jesus is flogged mercilessly by laughing Roman guards with blood-spattered faces, Pastor McKinney said he initially wondered whether the violence was overplayed. On the plane back home, however, he reread the gospel accounts of the Passion "and came away thinking, no, it wasn't. . . . I don't think it takes away from the message," that Jesus "purposefully went to the cross. It was no accident, but something he intended to do."

Pastor Harry Berg of Draper Friends Christian Church said he had heard many of his fellow evangelicals say the movie was "rated R, but Jesus didn't die a PG-13 death."

"We see it as something where maybe you could sit in church for a year and listen, but it would not have the same impact. We see it as a tool, really," to help explain the "message of the cross."

That message — that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world — is what Gibson said inspired him to embark on a 12-year quest to make a movie he has acknowledged could be a "career-breaker."

His work had its genesis more than a decade ago "during a time in which I found myself trapped with feelings of terrible, isolated emptiness," Gibson wrote. "Because I was brought up to be a good Christian and a good Catholic, the only effective resource for me was prayer. I asked God for his help."

He said it was through prayer and meditation that the idea began to take shape, and he searched out images of the Passion in great works of art by Caravaggio, Mantegna, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca. The four New Testament gospels and "accepted visions of the Passion," including a book by an obscure 19th-century nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, who was later beatified by the Vatican, were the basis for the film.

Emmerich's accounts of her visions, including purgatory and the Passion, are collected in the book "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ." An Augustinian nun who lived in Germany between 1774 and 1824, she was conversant with spiritual phenomena, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. The faithful believe that while confined to her bed in 1813 she experienced external "stigmata" or marks reminiscent of Christ's wounds, on her hands, feet and head, and died only after insults, suspicion and investigation by church leaders failed to prove her a fraud.