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Once again, The Passion of The Christtopped the box office, bringing its 12-day total to $212 million dollars.

This success continued to astound and bewilder mainstream critics of the film, many of whom continued launching uncharacteristically reactionary and angry protests.

"I can't recall a movie that has depicted torture in such lavish, fetishistic and excruciating detail as … The Passion," says Brian D. Johnson (Maclean's). "What's most astonishing about [the movie] is that it's so luridly secular. Gibson has made a movie about flesh, not spirit—flesh that's kicked, beaten, flayed, punctured and lacerated for what seems like an eternity. I'm not sure Jews ought to feel offended … but Christians should. Anyone stepping into this movie from another planet, knowing nothing about Christianity, would assume it's a barbaric cult of blood sacrifice."

(Note: Brian D. Johnson is the same critic who described David Cronenberg's Crash, an explicit and shocking film about people who like to have sex in the midst of car crashes, as "exquisitely composed but emotionally impenetrable … brilliant and severely beautiful. It works on the mind and the eye, leaving the viewer shocked, haunted and bewildered—wondering what on earth to feel, which is perhaps the whole point of the exercise." When offended by The Passion, his put-down is to call it "luridly secular"?)

Similarly, Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader) writes, "Gibson stresses only cruelty and suffering, complete with slow motion and masochistic point-of-view shots. The charges of anti-Semitism and homophobia being hurled at the movie seem too narrow; its general disgust for humanity is so unrelenting that the military-sounding drums at the end seem to be welcoming the apocalypse. If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me."

In The Washington Post, Tom Shales refers to anti-Semitism as "the Big Lie." Indeed, using Christ's death as an excuse to be hateful and violent toward the Jews is indeed a grievous sin. But Shales then accuses Gibson of "recycling" the Lie and making money off of it. (Since when has making a profit from your work become a sin?) Shales concludes with his most presumptuous and revealing remark yet: "Surely [Gibson's] parking space in Hell has already been reserved."

It seems to me that with each passing day, more and more film critics are publishing opinions on the film that will, eventually, show them up as reactionaries when it comes to religious art. They are so troubled by the intensity and focus of this work that they reveal a great deal of ignorance about Christianity and the way it has been represented in art throughout history. Many—perhaps even most—are showing themselves far more guilty of discrimination and prejudice than the filmmaker they seek to condemn. If they are so willing to assume that Gibson is anti-Semitic, in spite of his claims to the contrary, in spite of the way in which Gibson's film incriminates those who despise Jews, then why have they remained silent, or even praised other films that exhibit obvious, undeniable prejudice against Catholics and Christians? Their two-faced behavior is almost laughable.

Strangely enough, The Passion has found a staunch defender in the notorious Web rebel, champion film geek, and reigning king of unedited and unspellchecked reviews—Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News. He writes,

When I saw the film all the comments about the film being a 'Jew bashing' spectacle went away for me, because the message I saw being conveyed could not have been further from the mark. To me, The Passion … is an astonishingly powerful work of cinema that's overwhelming purpose is to show the lengths of personal hell one could endure without losing one's purpose or love for one's fellow human beings. It wasn't for exploitation or out of [Gibson's] own perverse sense of bloodlust. To me, that violence was to illustrate in excruciating detail the lengths one could go through and suffer through without raising a hand to defend ones' self, to not cry for revenge, to not curse those that torment you. That in your dying moments you pray for those that would see you dead, not hurl a curse upon them. I find the film an amazing tribute to pacifism.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48