Ten years ago, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ film was released amid a swirl of controversy and after a relentless public relations campaign playing up the director's celebrity status and his adamant refusal to change the film amid concerns of insensitivity and anti-Semitism.
Gibson's Passion was a passion of hate. His film bought into all of the troubling representations of the Passion that fortified church-based anti-Semitism through nearly 2,000 years of Christian history. The Jews were depicted as a blood-thirsty mob. The Jewish High Priest Caiaphas was a vengeful bully. At every single opportunity, it seemed, the movie reinforced the notion that the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob were the ones ultimately responsible for the Crucifixion.
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