I was at the library about the same time it came out. The librarian was Jewish. Somehow the movie got mentioned. She became enraged....never saw anything like it. It's been a while but I still remember her rage being heightened by the fact that it came out on Easter. I was stunned.
Love the man dearly. He must be a good guy because Hollywood has no such love for him.
The Passion of the Christ was the last movie my mom saw. We would see movies every Sunday night with my father and uncle, and my mother had become very weak, but she insisted on seeing this movie when it opened as a friday matinee in March 2004.
For some reason, the word got out that Gibson had added a lot of anti-Semitic stuff to the story. He didn't "add" anything. The lines that most people found offensive came directly from Matthew's Gospel.
Lucky for the librarian I wasn’t there. After I got done with them their head would have exploded.