David Shtulman is an avid Mel Gibson fan, which is why the executive director of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Jewish Committee hopes Gibson's film of Jesus' crucifixion won't feed anti-Jewish stereotypes the way passion plays have done in the past.

"The Passion of the Christ," opens Wednesday, but it has been the subject of hot debate and worry for months.

"Jews and Christians are going into this film with such different expectations that they are coming out having seen two different films," said Shtulman, who has not seen the film but has heard and read accounts from those who have.

"Jews go in knowing the background of passion plays historically leading to anti-Jewish incitement and pogroms," he said. "In light of that experience, they see the film and say, 'My God, it's bloodier than "Braveheart," ' with so much focus on the blood and gore and suffering of Christ, and presenting Jews as powerful and Pontius Pilate as weak. They come out saying that this is terrible, and the only result can be the promotion of anti-Semitism.

"Christians are going in and seeing the story of Jesus, and getting very caught up, emotionally overwhelmed," he said. "When they come out, they haven't paid any attention to the Jewish crowd and can't understand what Jewish viewers are upset about."

For Shtulman, whose office is co-sponsoring a March 28 interfaith forum on the film at 3 p.m. in Sixth Presbyterian Church, Squirrel Hill, "The Passion of the Christ" is an opportunity to educate a wide audience about how distorted interpretations of Jesus' crucifixion have led to persecution of Jews.

Adolf Hitler sent SS troops to see the famous Oberammergau passion play in Bavaria, since revised, because he believed it would fan hatred of Jews. Many older American Jews have childhood memories of being beaten up and denounced as "Christ killers" after Holy Week re-enactments.

For centuries, passion plays often reflected a folk theology, which was never official Catholic doctrine, that held all Jews for all time guilty of killing Jesus. It drew on a passage in the book of Matthew (27:25), in which a crowd urges a reluctant Roman governor to crucify Jesus, saying, "Let his blood be on us and on our children!"

In 1965, at Vatican II, the Catholic church forcefully rejected any teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. Follow-up documents in the 1980s called for revision of passion plays so that Jews were not portrayed as greedy and bloodthirsty, and so that it was made clear that Jesus and his followers were Jews and it was the Romans who crucified him.

One modern interpretation views the passage, "Let his blood be on us and our children" as an unknowing prayer for the salvation that is about to be offered through Jesus' blood. But the passion play guidelines say it would be better to leave it out, as three of the four gospels do, if there is any possibility of negative interpretation.

'Recognize our responsibility'

Some of the fears that Catholic scholars and Jewish groups expressed about Gibson's film from the beginning arose because Gibson was raised in a schismatic traditionalist Catholicism that rejects Vatican II and the reforms that stemmed from it.

His film has been marketed to evangelical Protestants, who lack a tradition of passion plays and appear baffled that anyone would expect anti-Semitism in a movie about Jesus.

The Rev. Jay Passavant, senior pastor of the evangelical North Way Christian Community in Pine, said the pre-screening he saw was a profound revelation of God's love. He called it "extremely accurate" scripturally.

Although some Jewish leaders are shown advocating Jesus' death, "There is not a direct reference to their Jewishness," Passavant said. "I think the overwhelming impression was that what Jesus endured was for the sake of mankind."

Another person who has seen the film, Elizabeth Lev, who teaches art history in Rome for Duquesne University, said she saw the influence of the Renaissance artworks of Michelangelo and Caravaggio on Gibson.

"[Caravaggio] knew how to get the audience's attention and how to make them look and think and recognize each individual's responsibility toward his or her own salvation," Lev said. "Mel Gibson does the exact same thing. He is vivid, he is often brutal, but he makes us pay attention and recognize our responsibility, not that of the Jews, not that of the Romans -- ours and ours alone."

But Michael Cook, a New Testament scholar who is professor of Judaeo-Christian Studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, said the movie fed hatred because it "lacks any message of hope, and radiates an image of Jesus of which he himself could well have disapproved. The film glorifies violence for the sake of violence."

Cook was one of the Christian and Jewish scholars who initially raised concerns about anti-Semitic motifs in the script. Cook says the film earns its R rating as "a torture film predicated on Gospel materials."

Despite Gibson's claims of historical accuracy, the script and rough cuts contained major gaffes, Cook said. While Gibson's Romans speak Latin, 1st-century Romans spoke Greek. More ominous were scenes not taken from the Bible, such as the cross being constructed inside the Jewish Temple.

That image is preposterous, Cook said, and comes straight from the visions of the Venerable Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, 1774-1824, whose "Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" Gibson has cited as an inspiration. Her visions include some of the goriest scenes, such as Jesus having his head slammed into a pillar.

Jesus part of Jewish culture

Other reported scenes drawn from her visions were classically anti-Semitic portrayals of Jewish leaders bribing Jews and Roman soldiers to frame and abuse Jesus, and a Pilate who Gibson's critics say sounds more like a noble philosopher than the heartless, morally bankrupt governor of either Scripture or history.

But the line that critics are most concerned about is Matthew's "His blood be on us and our children." Filmed as a mob scene, it was reduced to a statement by the high priest Caiaphas, then cut altogether, then apparently restored and cut again. Cook is uncertain of what will be in the final release. He said, however, 38 of 48 of what he considered troubling motifs remained as of last month.

One reason conservative Christians have discounted the objections of liberal biblical scholars is the latter's belief that parts of the Gospels, including much of the conflict with Jewish leaders, never happened. Theological conservatives tend to view criticism of the film as skepticism about the Bible.

But an eminent evangelical New Testament scholar, the Rev. Ken Bailey, believes that many Jewish concerns about traditional interpretation of the passion narratives are valid. Bailey taught for 40 years at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut and the Ecumenical Institute for Theological Research in Jerusalem and is now the canon theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

While Bailey doesn't believe the Gospels contradict each other, he says the writers chose different images to make different theological points. In Bailey's view, Mark, whose account Matthew follows, was analogous to a filmmaker using cameos to drive certain points home. Mark constructed his narrative to evoke the biblical Book of Lamentations, which recorded the destruction of Jerusalem 600 years earlier, so the people who mock Jesus in Mark and Matthew parallel those who mocked Jerusalem, he said.

Luke, Bailey believes, is more like news footage. And in Luke most of the crowd is sympathetic to Jesus. "It's in Matthew that the crowd cries out to crucify him, but not in Luke," he said.

"There has been a long history of trying to see Jesus as non-Jewish, and that is very tragic. Unfortunately, it created a lot of anti-Semitism and made it impossible to penetrate the deeper levels of what he had to say, because Jesus was part of Jewish culture."

Bailey does not plan to see "The Passion of the Christ" because he believes the Gospel writers deliberately chose not to describe the crucifixion.

"They didn't want any pornography of suffering connected with the cross. They did not want you to think about the gory details. They wanted you to think about what it meant: the costly demonstration of unexpected love," he said.

Two groups of local Christian and Jewish leaders have issued statements rejecting any anti-Semitic interpretations of the Gospels, and expressing cautious concern about whether the film and its marketing might inflame differences between Jews and Christians. Among the signatories was Bishop Donald W. Wuerl, whose Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh is making an all-out effort to educate parishioners about both the interfaith difficulties and devotional opportunities the movie may present.

Numerous articles will appear in the Pittsburgh Catholic, and packets have been sent to all clergy, religion teachers and other leaders to help them explain issues, such as the meaning of Jesus' death and current church teaching on the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. A private showing of the film will be arranged to help prepare these leaders to lead discussions in the light of Catholic theology and ecumenical and interfaith concerns, said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, diocesan spokesman.

The Rev. Lloyd Baugh, who teaches theology and film studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, has written in the Jesuit magazine America that while some scenes go beyond Scripture and the movie lacks a theology of hope, it is "balanced" in its treatment of Jews. While Jewish leaders who push for Jesus' death "may be slightly stereotyped and their power over a weak and perhaps too good Pilate exaggerated, their position is balanced by several dissenting members of the council -- Jews who strongly condemn the judicial inquiry as a travesty," he wrote.

In the version he recently pre-screened, "His blood be on us and our children" was gone.

When Mary stares into the camera in the "Pieta" scene, Gibson "is saying, more strongly than any other director has, that it is not the Jewish people who killed Jesus; every one of us sinful human beings is responsible for his death," Baugh wrote.

The most vocal critics concede that they don't expect many Americans to emerge from the film with a desire to persecute Jews, but fear reaction in the Middle East and elsewhere, where virulent anti-Semitism is part of the culture.

"We have never accused Gibson of being an anti-Semite. ... We do not believe that Gibson intended his film to be a passion of hate," said a Feb. 3 statement from the Anti-Defamation League.

But given the history of passion plays, the statement continued: "Our concern is that the images could be used by those who are disposed toward hatred to harden their hearts. Jewish and Christian leaders have not given up hope. We have urged Gibson to consider adding to the movie a postscript with him coming on screen at the end to implore his viewers not to let the film turn some toward a passion of hate."