In the NYTimes, A.O. Scott compares the Passion skirmish over others in the past

Well, it is and it isn’t. Hearing the charges of prejudice and persecution bouncing back and forth between Mr. Gibson’s critics and his partisans, I can’t help but recall the knot of quietly praying picketers I walked past 20 years ago to purchase a ticket for Jean-Luc Godard’s modernized gloss on Jesus’ birth, “Hail Mary,” a film whose nudity was taken, sight unseen, to be blasphemous.

And I also recall the images from 1988 of demonstrators protesting Martin Scorsese’s screen adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” a movie that some of the largest theater chains in the country refused to screen and that Blockbuster Video declined to stock on its shelves. There was also, more recently, the outcry in 1999 over Kevin Smith’s theological gross-out comedy “Dogma,” which was dropped by its original distributor, Miramax, after its parent company, Disney, drew fire from some Roman Catholic groups.

The obvious thing to say about the skirmishes over “Passion,” which will either subside or intensify once the movie opens nationally on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25, is that, since those earlier dust-ups, the sides have reversed.

You might also be interested in a 1996 Carol Iannone article in First Things: The Last Temptation Reconsidered

(Via Bill Cork)