A piece by scholar Stephen Prothero

…. Even if we take the Gospels as gospel, we simply do not have enough information to squeeze out anything close to a two-hour movie. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not screenplays, or even treatments of them. To make a Jesus film based on the Bible you have to go outside it (as Gibson reportedly did, consulting the visions of a female mystic recorded in “The Dolorous Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ”). You have to make millions of idiosyncratic choices about dialogue, sequence, action. You have to choose this line from John rather than that line from Luke. And you have to make things up.

Among the most monumental choices Gibson made was to restrict himself to Jesus’s final 12 hours — in other words, to make a passion play. Having made that choice, Gibson inherited an unholy host of genre-specific conventions not only from medieval European anti-Semitism, but also from the ancient thirst of drama for conflict. There is conflict in the Gospels themselves, but they are not dramas intended to entertain. So while the temptation to crank up the violence against Jesus and turn the Jews into bad guys can be justified by the Bible (for example, the “blood curse” in Matthew where the crowd cries out, “His blood be on us, and on our children”), it is really inspired by Dionysus.

Scholars tell us that the passion narrative circulated long before the Gospels were written. And while large chunks of the story made their way into each Gospel, it was never canonized separately as its own New Testament book. That’s because early Christians decided the good news concerned Jesus’s entire life, not merely his death. To emphasize Jesus’s death is to highlight the fact that some Jews were set against him. To emphasize his life, on the other hand, is to embed Jesus in Jewish culture — to see him traveling to Jerusalem for the Passover, arguing the Law with rabbis in the Temple, interpreting the Hebrew Bible in parables.