Kim C wrote:

If it makes people think, and opens up discussions, how can that be a bad thing?

Not to get hysterical, but the holocaust (for example) made people think and opened discussions, so things that are in themselves evil can have that effect.

If we restrict the question to talking about works of art, any piece of art will inevitably make some people think and open up some discussions. Do a google search on Gilligan's Island and you'll see what I mean. So to use this as a criterion merely eliminates any possibility of any work of art being bad. That's a viable perspective, but it doesn't make this work of art any different from any other. You could defend a porno movie or a slasher movie or a snuff film on the same grounds.

Big Mick wrote

But I see much of the discussion getting bogged down on issues that are phoney. For example, the whole anti-semitism piece. [...] The simple truth of it is that the Sanhedrin (as opposed to "the Jews"), according to the Gospels, were absolutely involved. Hence they had culpability. Further, there is no question who did the killing. It was the Romans. And they had culpability.

Big Mick, I trust you understand that "the whole anti-semitism piece" is a serious issue. The charge that the Jewish people were responsible for the murder of Christ was the basis for much of the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages, when Jews were subject to oppression and pogroms for it. This is not a "phoney" issue, but has been, as recently as the 1940s (and perhaps in Europe today) a matter of life and death.

Your claim that "The simple truth of it is that the Sanhedrin (as opposed to "the Jews"), according to the Gospels, were absolutely involved." is not quite right. In fact it is the entire crowd that calls for Jesus' crucifixion, in all four gospels, not just the priests. (eg Luke 23:18-21 "They all cried out together...Crucify! Crucify him!" So all the Jews who had a say in the matter, not just the Sanhedrin, called for the death of Jesus. (In some gospels, it is stated that the priests incited them to call out, in others not.)

In Matthew 27:25, the Jews ALL take the blame on themselves and on their children. And for this reason all Jews have historically been blamed. Even though this line occurs in only one of the four gospels, Gibson put it in the movie, and then cravenly did not subtitle it, revealing that he knew precisely how divisive it was. So he KNEW it would be perceived as hurtful by pretty much all Jews, he KNEW it was in only one gospel and thus could have made just as faithful a movie without it, and yet he chose to put it in. It does not sound to me like anti-semitism is a red herring.   

Even this does not get to the heart of the matter for people who don't take the New Testament as absolute truth. That heart is: are the gospels even telling the truth?

The synoptic gospels were all written by people who were not there to witness the events they described. In any case, they are evangelical documents, whose goal is to convert people to Christianity, not history books written for accuracy. Indeed, the idea of accuracy for its own sake had rarely if ever been applied even in historical writing at the time. The only reason the synoptic gospels resemble each other as much as they do, scholars believe, is that Matthew and Luke are both based on Mark.

Thus, there is no reason to assume that the gospels are telling the truth about what happened. Since they are essentially ideological and not historical, there is no reason to assume their ideology did not include anti-Semitism, and the "facts" reported in the Gospels were not invented by Mark or by his source (Peter, some believe) to make the Jews look bad.

In that case, just as the gospels are anti-semitic documents, this is an anti-semitic movie.

Whether Gibson hates Jews or not can't be determined from the movie he made. But he clearly didn't care enough about their feelings to omit the offending line from Matthew. That's at best callous, at worst hateful.