ABSTRACT
On 25 February 2004, thousands of people across North America, New Zealand, and Australia, flocked to their local movie theaters to see a man being systematically and brutally tortured, hauled off to the authorities, condemned to death, tortured some more, and executed. Within a few weeks, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ had spread like a virus around the globe and, by the time of its re-release in March 2005, had grossed $370,782,930 in the US alone.1
