What gets me is the nonsense about historical accuracy. As best I can make out in this smoky skirmish, Icon informed a reporter for The Wall Street Journal that the script was based not only on the Gospels but also on the writings of two visionary nuns, writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So much for historical accuracy. (These later writings, luridly painting Jews as 'Christ-killers,' are what most trouble the scholars.) There is also the small problem of inconsistency among the evangelical accounts of Christ's passion and death: Mr Gibson will necessarily have had to choose to follow one of the Gospels, and to ignore the others, with regard to each of many details. Finally, there is the nonsense of casting the dialogue in Aramaic - which was indeed the ligua franca of Palestine in Jesus's lifetime, and probably his native language - and in Latin, which nobody, not even the Roman occupiers, spoke in that part of the Empire. What cosmopolitan people spoke in the eastern part of the Roman Empire was Greek. The Gospels themselves were composed in Greek. I can imagine the meeting at which people who knew better chose instead to defer to Mr Gibson's announcement that his new movie would be shot in 'authentic' Aramaic and Latin. Mr Gibson is a rich, major movie star who has contributed heavily to a breakaway church that, while claiming to be Catholic, recognizes neither the authority of Vatican II nor that of the popes since Pius XII - a church, in short, for which the revival of Latin is a touchstone. Only a knucklehead, then, could conceive of an historically accurate Passion based on all the Gospels and the wholly extra-Scriptural visions of much later writers, and filmed, moreover, partly in Latin. The urge to snort derisively is irresistible. But the misconceptions that apparently underlie The Passion highlight the peculiar relation of Catholics generally to the Bible.