Daily Mail, 27 February 2004

As a Jew, I left the screening of The Passion in a state of shock. In the course of two hours, the ancient calumny fuelling centuries of Jewish persecution is boosted by the turbocharge of Hollywood’s most sophisticated form of emotional manipulation.

After decades of decent Christian attempts to interpret the Gospels in a way that does not blame the Jewish people for the death of Jesus, this horrific film resurrects the core charge against the Jews of deicide.

It portrays the Jews as a bloodthirsty mob, led by cruel and malicious leaders, who repeatedly bay for Jesus to be crucified. It makes no acknowledgement of the fact that, writing decades after the death of Jesus and under the yoke of Roman tyranny, the Gospel writers would almost certainly have wanted to present the Jews in the worst possible light rather than the Romans who actually crucified Jesus along with many other Jews.

Instead, the film depicts the Romans sympathetically, presenting Pontius Pilate as a decent man facing a dilemma and the Romans in general as baffled and taken aback by the murderousness of the Jews. The fact that Jesus himself is depicted as a Jew is neither here nor there. The Jews are presented as so vicious they would even have one of their own tortured and crucified. This is a film which unequivocally and deliberately presents the Jews as guilty of the most horrific crime in human history, killing the son of God.

And to ram home his point, Gibson bludgeons his audience with the most sickening scenes of violence, torture and sadism, wrenching the final hours of Jesus’s life out of context and going far beyond what is actually in the Biblical account. It shows the Jews themselves beating Jesus; and if the Romans really had scourged Jesus to the horrific extent depicted in the film, it is hard to see how he would not have died of his injuries then and there, let alone been able to support the weight of the cross.

What effect will all this have on those who see this film? There may be Christians who emerge with their faith strengthened and who will welcome a production which performs such a rare function. Thoughtful Christians, however, may feel distinctly uncomfortable to be confronted so graphically with the charge of racial guilt laid against the Jews, which is at the core of the Gospel story but which the Church is now at pains to downplay.

Among others, images of the Jewish mob screaming for Jesus’s death will simply be an incitement to hatred. At a time when Jew-hatred has been revived and attacks on Jews are rising around the world, such a film could have an incendiary effect.

Whatever Mel Gibson’s intentions, this disgusting film leaves the Jewish people once again vilified, and the oldest hatred resuscitated.