“One would have thought just the opposite, that after listening to the Passion, instead of seeing the villainy of the Jews, one would see the magnanimity of God,” he says. “But that doesn’t tend to be the way it’s gone.”

Gomes says that similar events could occur following the release of Gibson’s film, noting, “It’s nothing new, it’s sad to say, and it could indeed have that effect.”

Many defenders of the film have argued that, despite the history of the passion play, modern audiences will be able to stomach potentially anti-Semitic material with an open mind. But Fredriksen is particularly pessimistic about The Passion’s potentially detrimental effects. At the end of “Mad Mel,” she concluded that “once its subtitles shift from English to Polish, or Spanish, or French, or Russian,” violence would be inevitable.

She says a scene in the 1985 documentary Shoah, wherein a Jewish Holocaust survivor returns to his childhood hometown in Poland, influences her opinion. While initially greeted with friendliness, Fredriksen says, “within five minutes, they are screaming at the man who they had just been affectionate and shy towards.” The sudden aggression arises out of a simple dispute over a passage in the New Testament, reinforcing the notion that anti-Semitism is still a presence in the modern world.

At one point in the Shoah scene, an old lady evokes a line from Matthew 27:25, in which a rabid Jewish mob calls for Jesus’s crucifixion, proclaiming “His blood be on us, and on our children.” This line in particular has been a major focus of the controversy, as it has traditionally been identified as evidence of collective Jewish guilt for deicide.

Included in the original script, Gibson later altered the speaker of the line, which now emerges from the mouth of Jewish high priest Caiaphas. Gibson says he did so only under intense pressure from the film’s editor, stating that if he left the line in, “they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come to kill me.”

Though Fredriksen retorts she “would actually just kill his goldfish,” she calls the line another instance of the script’s deliberate inaccuracy and another assertion from Gibson that his journey could lead to martyrdom—he’s joked several times that the film is potentially career-killing.

But Gomes disagrees with Fredriksen’s notion of The Passion stirring anti-Semitic incidents abroad.

“This is not 1939, this is not even 1949; we live in a different world where consciousness is a little higher,” he says.

And though he says he recognizes recent anti-Semitic activity in Europe, Gomes explains the country “is not as insular or isolated from the world of discourse as it was even thirty years ago, which is a very good reason for me to believe that it would not be affected by a corpus of world debate.”

Lecturer on the Modern West Brian C.W. Palmer agrees that dialogue would be the best way to quell any potential anti-Jewish “reprisals.”

“In general, I have the feeling more discussion and debate and not less is the most likely way to prevent hostility and violence,” he says. “And that the fact that this film provokes such strong feelings among many different people suggests the questions it touches upon haven’t been settled.”

But Blaine Saito ’04 is not as optimistic that the level of academic discussion would reach all corners of the globe. “While that’s nice to say, when debate gets so heated to the point of violence, it’s hard to construct a nuance, and without a constructive nuance we don’t get anywhere, and that could lead to rioting,” he says.

Saito has experienced such a heated debate on a much smaller scale: the Hillel-Open email list. Several months ago, a post by a non-Harvard student concerning The Passion sparked a fiery exchange among the list members. Saito says it quickly became “nasty and out of control.” The list manager eventually disallowed further discussion of the issue, encouraging participants to continue their discourse outside the list.

Yet, in spite of the publicity that has been generated over such controversies, some say there seems to be little hope for the film’s commercial prospects, with its appeal restricted to the curious and the fanatic.