Why It’s Time for Churches to Stop Showing The Passion of the Christ

One morning, I flicked toothpaste into my eye. Painful. Humiliating. And utterly missing the point of toothpaste.

Watching The Passion of the Christ (2004) feels, in retrospect, a little like that. There’s an overwhelming focus on pain and suffering—visceral, prolonged, and sensationalised—but with little about the actual story.

I first watched the film as a seventeen-year-old with a solid Christian faith. It moved me to tears. It haunted me. I was convinced it had shown me something real. But with time and deeper reflection, I’ve changed my mind. This is not a matter of taste or preference. It’s a matter of accuracy, necessity, and ethical responsibility.

And it’s time churches stopped using it. 

Entertainment Weekly ranked The Passion of The Christ as ‘the most controversial film of all time.’ I’ve heard Christians say this is because the gospel is offensive and divisive, but that’s not the reason the magazine gave. It was for its extreme depictions of torture and violence. For context, they ranked this ahead of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a film for which the phrase ‘ultra-violent’ was invented.

Let that sink in.

This is not simply a film that includes violence; it is a film about violence. It lingers on torn flesh, broken bones, spittle, shrieks, whips, blood, and nails. It stylises suffering with the eye of a horror director, not a biblical storyteller.

The usual defence I hear from the films defenders is that this is necessary to accurately tell the story. But what if it’s not accurate, and what if it’s actually messing with the story?

1. Historical Inaccuracies and Anachronisms

There’s a lot we could nitpick, but let’s so straight to the main issue. The film depicts Roman soldiers as excessively brutal, almost sadistic, in their scourging of Jesus. While flogging was common in Roman execution procedures (Josephus, Jewish Wars 2.14.9), the sheer extent of physical violence in the film far exceeds what historians would consider even remotely plausible.

Contrary to a lot of what we find on the internet, the scourge whip embedded with bone and metal isn’t found in any historical record. The Gospels’ mention a ‘reed’ (Matt. 27:30; Mk. 15:19), which was the common practice. The closest thing we have from archaeology to what the film depicts is a very small ceremonial instrument carried by pagan priests (which wasn’t used for torture). The next closest is a ‘plumbate’ whip, which wasn’t around for another 400 years, and then not in Palestine. The type of ‘whipping’/’scourging’ in the film is entirely fictitious.

In the film Jesus is lashed, flogged, and scourged across several positions, with several embellished tools, over one-hundred times. If the film is correct (contrary to all archeological, biblical, and literary evidence) and Jesus was tortured in such an unprecedented and remarkable way – and one that diverges so completely from Roman custom – you would have thought that one of the Gospels (or any number of historical sources) would have mentioned it?

2. Use of Extra-Biblical Sources and Theological Distortions

Despite its claims to authenticity, The Passion presents a heavily stylised, historically questionable portrayal of Jesus' trial and execution. It draws largely on extra-biblical traditions, especially those found in the Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the 19th-century mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, these sources are highly speculative and lack scholarly credibility.

While Gibson claimed to rely on the Gospels, many scenes, such as Mary wiping up Jesus’ blood after the scourging or Satan walking among the crowd, have no biblical basis and stem instead from Emmerich’s apocalyptic vision. Her writings have been criticised for anti-Semitic undertones and a theology rooted in guilt and substitutionary violence, which the film largely reproduces.

The result is a depiction of Christ's Passion that is not only extrabiblical but also deeply shaped by a problematic lens. The Gospel accounts themselves do not linger on the graphic details of Jesus’ torture. In fact, they narrate the crucifixion with a stark economy of language. The Gospel writers appear more concerned with the meaning of the Passion than with its mechanics.

3. Aesthetic Choices, Violence, and the Ethics of Representation

Whereas the Gospels focus on the teaching and person of Christ without overly concentrating on his physical pain, The Passion of The Christ completely reverses this emphasis. It dials up the torture to a degree that is indefensible from either historical or biblical evidence, and it loses the real person and mission of Jesus behind it.

The visual style of The Passion is intentionally baroque—dark, saturated, and bloody. Gibson has claimed that such brutality is necessary to reveal the cost of sin and the extent of divine love. But this raises important ethical questions - especially when the accuracy is thrown into doubt. When does depiction become glorification? When does an attempt at realism descend into voyeurism?

Adele Reinhartz (2005) argues that the film's excessive violence functions less as a call to repentance and more as a form of visual punishment. Viewers are invited to feel guilty, but not necessarily to understand the theological depth of the reason for the Passion. The film offers pathos rather than meaning, suffering rather than redemption. Its emphasis on blood and gore resonates more with horror film conventions than with Gospel proclamation.

4. Gospel Silence and Narrative Compression 

Another notable aspect is the film’s silence on the broader context of Jesus’ ministry, teachings, and resurrection. By focusing exclusively on the final 12 hours, The Passion isolates the Passion from the rest of the Gospel narrative. While this is a deliberate narrative choice, it results in a Christology overly focused death with little attention to incarnation, resurrection, or eschatology.

The most glaring issue throughout the two-hour violent depiction of Jesus’ torture and death is that at no point does the film address the question why? For what reason did Jesus die?

The canonical Gospels balance Jesus’ death with his resurrection, constantly pointing forward to the hope of vindication. Paul writes that ‘if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith’ (1 Cor. 15:14). By ending with only a brief resurrection moment, The Passion leaves viewers with a theology of despair and guilt more than a theology of new creation or kingdom hope.

Discernment in our Devotion

Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a cinematic achievement in terms of production and visual storytelling, but it is also a theologically fraught and historically problematic interpretation of the Gospels. Rather than bringing viewers closer to the biblical Jesus, it mediates a version of Christ filtered through Catholic mysticism and an aesthetics of violence.

For Christian educators, preachers, and theologians, the film presents both an opportunity and a challenge. It has sparked spiritual reflection in many viewers, but it also requires careful unpacking.

As with all cultural artefacts, The Passion must be subjected to critical theological scrutiny. A faithful representation of Christ’s Passion must attend not only to its emotional weight but to its covenantal, redemptive, and resurrection-shaped hope. It must not trade theological depth for cinematic spectacle.

Are we seeking to emotionally overwhelm people into faith? Are we confusing trauma with transformation? Or are we indulging a strange and twisted desire to rewatch Jesus suffer in graphic detail?

The danger here is voyeurism disguised as devotion. The film does not invite reflection; it overwhelms it. For survivors of abuse, trauma, or PTSD, it may even retraumatise. And let’s be honest, no church would screen another 18-rated film simply because it had Christian themes. The only reason we make an exception here is because we believe this particular violence is sacred.

But Jesus never asked us to remember his death by recreating it with CGI blood and a slow-motion high def crucifixion.

He asked us to break bread.

Bibliography

• Berlin & J. Magness. Two Archaeologists Comment on The Passion of the Christ. The Archaeological Institute of America, 2004.

• Emmerich, Anne Catherine. The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Trans. C.E. Schmöger. Rockford: TAN Books, 1983.

• Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War. Trans. G.A. Williamson. Penguin Classics, 1981.

• Philo of Alexandria. On the Embassy to Gaius.

• Reinhartz, Adele. Jesus of Hollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

• Vatican Council II. Nostra Aetate. 1965.

• Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK, 2003.