"Anti-semitism is not only contrary to my personal beliefs, it is also contrary to the core message of my movie," he said. He funds a "traditionalist Catholic church" in Los Angeles, a spin-off from mainstream Catholicism that rejects the second Vatican council which, among other things, cleared Jews of being collectively responsible for Christ's murder.īut Gibson is adamant that the film is not anti-Jewish. The controversy has also put Gibson's own religious beliefs under the spotlight. They signed confidentiality agreements before the screening. He is showing a rough cut of the film to selected evangelicals, religious leaders, pundits and politicians, including David Kuo, of the White House's faith-based initiatives. Gibson responded by accusing the scholars of illegally obtaining stolen property - the draft script - and extortion while threatening court orders and lawsuits. The panel was convened by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops with the help of the Jewish advocacy group, the Anti-Defamation League. "We're really concerned that this could be one of the great crises in Christian-Jewish relations." All the way through, the Jews are portrayed as bloodthirsty," said Sister Mary C Boys, a professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary. "When we read the screenplay our sense was this wasn't really something you could fix. But a panel of three Jewish and six Catholic scholars, who have studied a draft script, say the film is anti-semitic and theologically inaccurate, portraying Jews as bloodthirsty and vengeful and reviving the worst traditions of the passion plays which contributed to deadly attacks against Jews over the centuries. I hope the film has the power to evangelise". The star has claimed the "Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just directing traffic. Yet the film, co-directed by Gibson, who has spent $25m (£15.6m) of his own money on the project, has already attracted lavish praise from evangelicals and stern criticism from Jewish and Catholic scholars, with one academic warning that it could provoke within the US "one of the great crisis in Christian-Jewish relations". It is not even certain whether the final product will have subtitles. Portraying the final 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ, it has no distributor, features no stars and the dialogue is in Latin and Aramaic. On the face of it Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion, appears to be little more than a work of celluloid self-indulgence by a Hollywood veteran.