Caiaphas, the Jewish priest shown leading the charge against Jesus, remorsefully utters the controversial line “His blood on us and on our children!” Due to lobbying by Jewish groups, the subtitle for the line is removed but the audio for the line - delivered in Hebrew - remains in the film.
Many critics note that the portrayal of Jews as grotesque, hook-nosed pharisees is deeply rooted in anti-Semitic stereotypes. (Well, we know what Gibson’s father thought of Vatican II.)įebruary 25, 2004: “The Passion of the Christ” is released in theaters. The readers also note that the idea that a Jewish campaign was responsible for Christ’s crucifixion was rejected by the Catholic Church through Vatican II. Conference of Catholic Bishops issue a statement calling the screenplay “one of the most troublesome texts, relative to anti-Semitic potential, that any of us had seen in 25 years.” The plot, they write, depicts Jesus as being “relentlessly pursued by an evil cabal of Jews” who pressure Pontius Pilate to sentence him to death. Fox passes on distributing the film.įebruary 2004: After reviewing an advanced script for “The Passion of the Christ,” the ADL and the U.S. It really takes us back to the Dark Ages,” Hikind says. “It will result in anti-Semitism and bigotry. Ryder claims that Gibson asks Aucoin “Oh wait, am I gonna get AIDS?” At some point, Jews come up in conversation and Gibson allegedly asks Ryder “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?”Īugust 2003: Before the release of “The Passion of the Christ,” former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind leads around 50 Jews to the Fox News offices in Manhattan to dissuade 20th Century Fox from distributing the film, claiming its content suggests that Jews as a people bear collective guilt for the death of Christ. In or around 1996: Ryder and her friend, the make-up artist Kevin Aucoin, who is gay, are at a crowded party with Gibson, who is smoking a cigar. His father, a World War II veteran, was a Catholic fundamentalist who believed the Second Vatican Council - which modernized the church - was a “Masonic plot backed by the Jews.” Decades later, in the lead up to the release of “The Passion of the Christ,” Hutton Gibson is interviewed by radio host Steve Feuerstein and claims that “most of” the Holocaust was “fiction ” that Holocaust museums are a “gimmick to collect money ” and that there were more Jews in Europe after World War II than before. January 3, 1956: Mel Colmcille Gerard Gibson is born in Peekskill, N.Y. Because we seem to return to this topic like clockwork, we’ve compiled a handy guide to Gibson’s long and sordid history of anti-Semitic remarks - including other alleged instances of that loathsome “oven dodger” slur - along with his many fumbled efforts at a mea culpa.
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