Reading Gibson’s Passion

“Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin — not to mention the spattering blood — speak for itself.” In addition, the scholar who was in charge of creating the dialogue confesses that he threw in a few intentional inaccuracies, some for artistic reasons, and some just for a laugh.