Before The Passion of the Christ reached theaters, an unauthorized copy of an earlier draft of the screenplay reached a group of nine Catholic and Jewish scholars convened, at the request of Catholic and Jewish organizations, to review how the film handled the Passion narrative's long and painful history of being read as an accusation against Jews collectively. Their unanimous finding was that the draft was historically inaccurate in places, unfaithful to the Gospel accounts it claimed to follow, and likely to reinforce a one-sided, negative portrayal of the Jewish characters in the story, concerns the Anti-Defamation League then raised publicly ahead of the film's release.
Gibson and his production company disputed the committee's standing to review a leaked draft and made changes to the film before its final cut, including trimming a subtitled line drawn from Matthew's Gospel, "His blood be on us and on our children," a verse with its own long and documented history of being invoked to justify antisemitic violence across the centuries. The finished film still drew sustained criticism on the same grounds after release, alongside substantial support from viewers, particularly within American evangelical and Catholic communities, who experienced it as a serious and moving devotional work rather than as an argument about collective guilt.
Two decades later, the film remains a standard reference point in discussions of how a work can be devotionally significant to millions of viewers while also carrying scholarly-documented risks tied to the specific way it stages an ancient and contested story.