Paul Richardson, the assistant bishop of Newcastle, recently criticized Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, as a violent film that borders on pornography. Richardson went further and claimed that the Lord of the Rings had “stronger religious themes.”

While I am loathe to give Gibson’s film — which has been lambasted as both historically inaccurate and as rife with potentially anti-Semitic material — yet more publicity than it has already received, Richardson’s comment is important in that it underscores the fact that the film should be seen as a meditative piece born of director Mel Gibson’s own religious beliefs and not as an accurate portrayal of historical fact.

As Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, a distinguished historian of the early Christian period, stated:

“It’s important to remember that this is Lent, and meditations on the Passion of Christ are an important part of the cultural interpretation of human suffering. There’s a context for the movie in the history of art. When Christians read the Gospels as historical acts, they will say what Mel Gibson says: that this is the truth, this is our faith. But the important thing is that this film ignores the spin the gospel writers were pressured to put on their works, the distortions of facts they had to execute. Mel Gibson has no interest whatsoever in that.”

The Passion of the Christ is an expression of Gibson’s religious faith; it is neither history nor fact, and to risk misinterpreting it as such would further encourage anti-Semitism inspired by a feeble understanding of history.  

Mimi Hanaoka