Is your church ready?

The Passion of the Christ is being touted as the most authentic and biblically accurate film on the subject, but according to Rev. Mark Stanger, "It's absolutely not."

An interview in Salon shows why Christians should worry. It seems Mel Gibson doesn't have much regard for "biblical scholarship" and looks to The Book for the literal truth.

Did you feel in the storytelling there were any particularly glaring omissions or otherwise historically inaccurate stuff?
Not really, except that Jesus' crucifixion was made too singular. This was an ordinary event. Jesus was one of dozens of insurrectionists that the local Roman occupiers would have crucified, but [Gibson] tried to make his suffering especially agonizing and horrible. That was the other subtext — I thought there was an unspoken assumption that somehow, for Jesus' death to have meaning to believers, it had to be more horrible than any other kind of suffering and death.
...
Holding this up as somehow emblematic of something central to our belief — this preoccupation with both sin and blood sacrifice — is just absolutely primitive.

There's an effort to use the film as a tool of conversion, but it's too Hollywood to work. Strictly preaching to the choir.