A reminder that some of the sharpest reviewers saw Gibson's agenda in "The Passion of the Christ" even as others saw it as a political opportunity for the Christianist wing of the Republican party:
We soon see the human agents of his distress in a cutaway shot of Judas meeting with the Sanhedrin, the rabbis and Pharisees who oversee the Jerusalem temple and convey in their every act and utterance the sort of unfeeling villainy you would see in a Punch and Judy landlord. They also, not incidentally, lock firmly into the caricature of Jewish venality and cunning for which Passion plays have been infamous ever since the Middle Ages. The most subtle anti-Semitic trope in the portrayal of the Sanhedrin is also the most telling: the high priest, Caiaphas, is almost never pictured alone. The entire Sanhedrin, in fact, moves continually in a pack - you imagine that they have to navigate through doors sideways - and this casual thronging instinct, together with their boxy period headwear and white prayer shawls, gives the impression that they are ancient Hebrew forerunners of the imperial Storm Troopers in Star Wars. As in George Lucas's cinematic spiritual fables, the effect here is to depict a grouped set of evil impulses rather than identifiable individuals.
I see also that a friend of Gibson is claiming that Gibson could not remember his anti-semitic tirades because of an "alcoholic blackout". At 0.12?