The Passion of the Christ

Based on Wikipedia: The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson bet thirty million dollars of his own money on a film that no Hollywood studio would touch. The dialogue was entirely in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin—languages that have been dead for centuries. There were no subtitles in the original vision. The subject matter was the graphic torture and execution of Jesus Christ. Every studio executive who heard the pitch must have thought Gibson had lost his mind.

The film made over six hundred million dollars worldwide.

The Passion of the Christ, released in 2004, remains one of the most remarkable gambles in cinema history. It became the highest-grossing independent film ever made, the highest-grossing R-rated film in American history for two decades, and sparked debates about faith, violence, and antisemitism that continue to this day. It's a film that people either venerate as a profound religious experience or condemn as gratuitously brutal propaganda. Very few viewers walk away feeling neutral.

The Final Twelve Hours

The film's scope is deliberately narrow. Rather than attempting to tell the whole story of Jesus's life—his teachings, his miracles, his relationships with his disciples—Gibson focuses almost exclusively on the final twelve hours before Jesus's death. This period is known in Christian theology as "the Passion," from the Latin word passio, meaning suffering.

The narrative begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, sometimes called the Garden of Olives, on the night of Passover. Jesus is praying, asking God to protect him, while his closest followers—Peter, James, and John—have fallen asleep nearby. Satan appears, tempting Jesus to escape his fate. This opening scene includes a striking visual choice: Jesus crushes a serpent's head beneath his foot, a direct reference to the Book of Genesis, where God tells the serpent that the offspring of Eve will crush its head.

Then Judas Iscariot arrives with temple guards. He has been paid thirty pieces of silver by Caiaphas and the Pharisees to identify Jesus. With a kiss, Judas betrays his teacher, and Jesus is arrested.

What follows is a relentless sequence of trials and tortures. Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious court, where Caiaphas accuses him of blasphemy for claiming to be the divine Son of Man. He is beaten. Peter, confronted by the crowd, denies knowing Jesus three times—exactly as Jesus had predicted—and weeps bitterly when he realizes what he has done. Judas, consumed by guilt, tries to return the silver and is refused. Haunted by visions of demonic children, he hangs himself outside Jerusalem.

The Roman Governor's Dilemma

Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, is one of history's most ambiguous figures. In Gibson's film, he's portrayed as a practical administrator caught in an impossible situation. He questions Jesus and finds no fault in him. He sends Jesus to Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee where Jesus is from, hoping to transfer the problem. But Antipas considers Jesus harmless and sends him back.

Pilate then offers the crowd a choice: he will release either Jesus or Barabbas, a convicted murderer. The crowd demands Barabbas.

Still hoping to satisfy the mob without executing an innocent man, Pilate orders Jesus flogged. This is where Gibson's film becomes genuinely difficult to watch. The Roman guards don't merely whip Jesus—they systematically tear his flesh apart with implements designed to maximize suffering. The flagellation scene lasts approximately ten minutes of screen time, which in a film is an eternity. Critics who accused Gibson of gratuitous violence pointed to this sequence as evidence. Defenders argued that Gibson was simply being honest about what Roman scourging actually entailed.

The guards mock Jesus, pressing a crown woven from thorns onto his head. Pilate presents him to the crowd, perhaps hoping his battered appearance will inspire pity. It doesn't. The crowd, urged on by the religious authorities, demands crucifixion. Pilate washes his hands—a gesture that has become proverbial for disclaiming responsibility—and orders the execution.

The Road to Golgotha

Jesus must carry the heavy wooden crossbeam through the streets of Jerusalem to Golgotha, the place of execution. He falls repeatedly. The guards beat him. The crowd jeers. Two thieves, Dismas and Gesmas, walk the same route to their own deaths.

Along the way, small moments of compassion punctuate the brutality. Jesus's mother Mary appears, and they share a brief moment of connection. A woman named Veronica wipes his bloody face with her veil—a scene drawn from Catholic tradition rather than the Gospels, relating to a relic called the Veil of Veronica that supposedly bears the imprint of Jesus's face. An unwilling bystander named Simon of Cyrene is pressed into service to help carry the cross when Jesus can no longer manage it alone.

At Golgotha, Jesus is nailed to the cross. He prays for God to forgive his executioners. One of the thieves crucified beside him, Dismas, expresses faith and repentance; Jesus promises him paradise. The other thief, Gesmas, mocks him.

Finally, Jesus dies. A single drop of rain falls. An earthquake shakes the ground. In the Second Temple in Jerusalem, the veil covering the Holy of Holies—the most sacred inner chamber—tears apart. Caiaphas and the Pharisees watch in horror.

To ensure Jesus is dead, a Roman soldier named Cassius spears his side. The body is taken down and entombed. The film ends with a brief glimpse of the resurrection: Jesus rising from the dead, whole and healed, walking out of the tomb.

Speaking in Tongues

Perhaps the boldest creative choice Gibson made was the language. The entire film is spoken in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin—reconstructed versions of these ancient tongues. Aramaic was the everyday language of Jews in first-century Palestine. Hebrew was the sacred language of Jewish scripture and worship. Latin was the language of the Roman occupiers.

Gibson originally wanted no subtitles at all. He believed the story of the Passion was so universally known that audiences would follow along regardless, and that hearing familiar English dialogue would break the spell. As he put it, "I think it's almost counterproductive to say some of these things in a modern language. It makes you want to stand up and shout out the next line, like when you hear 'To be or not to be' and you instinctively say to yourself, 'That is the question.'"

He eventually relented and added subtitles, but the effect of the ancient languages remains powerful. You're watching something that feels genuinely foreign, genuinely historical. The distance created by the language barrier paradoxically makes the violence more visceral—you can't retreat into the comfort of familiar words.

The translation work was done by William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Fulco made interesting choices. He deliberately incorporated errors in pronunciation and grammar when characters were supposed to be speaking a language unfamiliar to them—a Roman soldier's Aramaic, for instance, would be rough and accented. Some of the crude language used by the Roman guards wasn't translated in the subtitles at all, leaving modern audiences to miss the obscenities just as they would have missed the nuances of street Latin two thousand years ago.

The Sources Behind the Passion

Gibson drew on multiple sources beyond the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gospels themselves differ in their accounts of Jesus's final hours. Only Luke, for instance, mentions a trial before Herod Antipas. Gibson incorporated this scene.

More controversially, Gibson was deeply influenced by the mystical visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun who lived from 1774 to 1824. Emmerich was bedridden for much of her life and claimed to receive detailed visions of Jesus's life, particularly his suffering and death. These visions were recorded and published by the poet Clemens Brentano in a book called The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Emmerich's visions provided Gibson with vivid details that aren't in the Gospels—the appearance of Satan, specific tortures inflicted by the Roman guards, and an expanded role for Mary, Jesus's mother. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004, the same year the film was released, though the Vatican was careful to note that her visions, as recorded by Brentano, were not officially approved as authentic.

The film also incorporates visual traditions from centuries of Catholic art. The fourteen Stations of the Cross, a devotional practice depicting scenes from Jesus's final journey, provided a structural template. Gibson drew inspiration from the Shroud of Turin, a controversial relic that believers claim is the burial cloth of Jesus, bearing the imprint of his face and body. The actress Maia Morgenstern, who played Mary, suggested incorporating elements of the Passover Seder—the ritual Jewish meal—into early scenes.

The Violence Question

No discussion of The Passion of the Christ can avoid the violence. The film earned an R rating in the United States, and some critics argued it should have been rated NC-17. Gibson was accused of wallowing in suffering, of creating something closer to torture pornography than religious art.

Gibson's defense was theological. The whole point of Christian belief in the Passion is that Jesus suffered unimaginably for the sins of humanity. A sanitized, PG-13 version would miss the point entirely. "This is a film about love, hope, faith and forgiveness," Gibson said. "Jesus died for all mankind, suffered for all of us."

There's a long tradition in Christian art of depicting the Passion graphically. Medieval crucifixes often showed Jesus's body in gruesome detail, wounds gaping, blood flowing. Paintings of the flagellation didn't shy away from the mechanics of torture. Gibson was arguably returning to an older, more visceral tradition after decades of relatively bloodless Hollywood depictions of Jesus.

But there's a difference between a static painting and a ten-minute film sequence with realistic sound effects. The extended nature of the violence—the repetition, the duration, the relentlessness—goes beyond what most viewers had ever experienced in a religious context. Whether this serves the film's spiritual purpose or undermines it remains a matter of fierce debate.

The Antisemitism Controversy

Before the film was even released, Jewish groups and scholars raised concerns about antisemitism. The Passion narrative, as traditionally told, places blame for Jesus's death on Jewish authorities—Caiaphas, the Pharisees, the crowd that chose Barabbas. For centuries, this narrative was used to justify persecution of Jews as "Christ-killers."

The Second Vatican Council, in its 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate, formally rejected the charge of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus's death. Many Christian denominations followed suit. The question was whether Gibson's film would reinforce the old, dangerous narrative or reflect the newer theological understanding.

Critics pointed to several troubling elements. Caiaphas is depicted as manipulative and cruel. The Jewish crowd bays for blood while Pilate, the Roman, shows reluctance and even sympathy. Some scenes seemed drawn from Emmerich's visions, which scholars have noted contain antisemitic elements common to nineteenth-century German Catholic piety.

Gibson made some changes in response to criticism. A line where the Jewish crowd shouts "His blood be on us and on our children!"—present in the Gospel of Matthew and historically used to blame Jews for the crucifixion—was removed from the subtitles, though the Aramaic dialogue remains audible. Gibson insisted the film blamed all of humanity for Jesus's death, not Jews specifically, and pointed to sympathetic Jewish characters like Simon of Cyrene and Veronica.

The debate was complicated by revelations about Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, who had made public statements denying the Holocaust. Mel Gibson initially refused to distance himself from his father's views, though he later apologized for antisemitic remarks he made during a drunk driving arrest in 2006.

A Production Unlike Any Other

Gibson couldn't get any major studio to finance the film. Twentieth Century Fox had a first-look deal with Gibson's production company, Icon Productions, but passed after the antisemitism controversy erupted. Other studios followed. Gibson funded the entire production himself—approximately thirty million dollars for filming and another fifteen million for marketing.

The film was shot in Italy, at the famous Cinecittà Studios in Rome and on location in Matera and Craco, two towns in the Basilicata region in southern Italy. Matera is famous for its ancient cave dwellings, called sassi, carved into the hillside. It has served as a stand-in for ancient Jerusalem in numerous biblical films. Craco is a ghost town, abandoned after earthquakes and landslides, whose crumbling stone buildings provided an appropriately desolate backdrop.

Gibson saved money by reusing sets from Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, which had recently wrapped production at Cinecittà. Catholic priests visited the set daily to provide confession and communion to Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Jesus. Traditional Latin Masses were celebrated for cast and crew.

The production had its share of strange incidents. Jan Michelini, a key set production assistant, was struck by lightning twice during filming and earned the nickname "Lightning Boy" in the credits. Minutes after the second strike, Jim Caviezel was also hit by lightning while filming the Sermon on the Mount scene.

The Lead Actor's Ordeal

Jim Caviezel, who was thirty-three years old during filming—the same age Jesus is traditionally believed to have been at his death—endured extraordinary physical hardship for the role. The makeup process to create his wounds took hours each day. The prosthetics were heavy and uncomfortable. The scenes of torture required him to be physically struck, albeit with controlled force.

Caviezel has spoken about dislocating his shoulder when the cross was dropped into its hole during the crucifixion scene. He suffered hypothermia during outdoor shoots. The crown of thorns, though made of rubber, still cut his head. He developed skin infections from the makeup. The role, he said, was the most difficult thing he had ever done.

Whether the intensity of his physical experience translates to the screen is subjective. Caviezel spends most of the film in agony, with limited opportunity for traditional acting. His Jesus is defined almost entirely by suffering—the few flashback scenes showing Jesus teaching or performing miracles serve mainly to contrast with the brutality of his final hours.

Box Office Phenomenon

The Passion of the Christ opened on February 25, 2004—Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent, the forty days of penance and reflection leading up to Easter. The timing was deliberate.

The film earned eighty-three million dollars in its first weekend, an astonishing figure for an R-rated film in Aramaic about religious torture. It went on to gross over three hundred seventy million dollars in the United States alone, making it the highest-grossing R-rated film in American history—a record it held for twenty years. Worldwide, it earned over six hundred million dollars against a forty-five million dollar total investment.

Much of this success came from organized religious communities. Churches bought out entire theaters. Congregations arranged group viewings. Some set up tables in theater lobbies to answer questions and share prayers with moviegoers. The United Methodist Church and the Seventh-day Adventist Church both endorsed the film as an evangelization tool. More than a dozen Catholic bishops and cardinals issued statements of praise.

Gibson, who had distributed the film himself after studios rejected it, made an enormous fortune. Conservative estimates suggest he personally earned over three hundred million dollars from the film's theatrical run alone, not counting home video sales and licensing.

Critical Division

Professional critics were deeply divided. Roger Ebert called it "the most violent film I have ever seen" but gave it a positive review, praising its artistic ambition and emotional power. The New Yorker's David Denby called it "a sickening death trip." Some Catholic and evangelical critics hailed it as a masterpiece of religious cinema. Others found it unwatchable.

The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Cinematography, Best Makeup, and Best Original Music Score. It won none. The score, by John Debney, was particularly acclaimed, using orchestral arrangements conducted by Nick Ingman with recurring use of a technique called the wailing woman—a keening vocal element that emphasizes grief and mourning.

Two albums of original songs inspired by the film were also released, produced by Mark Joseph and Tim Cook. Both the soundtrack and the songs album won Dove Awards, the Christian music industry's equivalent of the Grammys.

Legacy and Sequel

The Passion of the Christ fundamentally changed how Hollywood viewed religious films. For decades, biblical epics had been considered commercially risky and artistically passé. Gibson proved that a well-made religious film could generate blockbuster returns, especially if marketed directly to faith communities.

The success of The Passion opened the door for films like Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Risen, and numerous lower-budget Christian productions. Not all of these films succeeded, but the category was revived. Faith-based cinema became a recognized market segment with its own distribution networks, marketing strategies, and audience expectations.

Gibson has been working on a sequel for years. Titled The Resurrection of the Christ, it will be released in two parts in 2027 and will focus on the period between Jesus's death and his ascension to heaven. The project has a new cast—Caviezel will not return—and Gibson has described it as even more challenging than the original. Depicting the resurrection, he has said, requires depicting heaven and hell, realms that cannot be filmed on location in Italy.

Whether the sequel can recapture the cultural lightning of the original remains to be seen. The Passion of the Christ was released at a specific moment, when the wounds of the September 11 attacks were still fresh and questions of faith, violence, and the meaning of suffering were particularly urgent in American culture. It was also released before streaming, before social media fragmented audiences into niches, before the culture wars reached their current intensity.

The film itself remains available, watched and rewatched by millions, argued about by critics and theologians, shown in churches and avoided by those who find it too painful. It is exactly what Mel Gibson intended: a work of art that demands a response, that refuses to be ignored, that makes the ancient story of the Passion feel immediate and visceral and real. Whether that's a great achievement or a questionable one depends entirely on what you bring to the theater.