Philip Cunningham is the executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College. His article in the April 5 issue of America magazine, "A Dangerous Fiction: 'The Passion of the Christ' and post-conciliar Catholic teaching," is the best commentary that I have read on the anti-Semitic elements in the extraordinarily successful Mel Gibson film.

Too many commentators --- even those who have strongly criticized other aspects of the film --- have either downplayed the anti-Semitic elements or have denied that they are present at all. Some of those who have addressed the film's anti-Semitism have failed to make the clear-cut case that Philip Cunningham has.

Cunningham's article reviews first a series of Catholic teachings and guidelines on the proper use of biblical materials, and especially those that pertain in any way to Jews and Judaism.

He begins with Pope Pius XII's landmark encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), on the promotion of biblical studies --- a document that urged Catholic biblical scholars for the first time to make use of all of the critical tools, exegetical and historical alike, that are necessary to disclose the actual meaning of the texts.

Cunningham points out that the basic orientation of the encyclical was reiterated by the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (1965) and again in an "Instruction on the Bible and Christology," released by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1984.

The following year, the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued one of the most pertinent of the post-conciliar documents. "The Gospels," the pontifical commission reminded us, "are the outcome of long and complicated editorial work.... Certain [Gospel] controversies reflect Christian-Jewish relations long after the time of Jesus."

In 1997 Pope John Paul II declared that "erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability [for the crucifixion] have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people."

In the United States, the national conference of bishops has applied these various directives with even greater specificity. In 1988 the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy issued guidelines for preaching about the Jews and Judaism, and, in the same year, the Bishops' Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs published "Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion."

Philip Cunningham points out that, unless those who present Passion plays and films follow only one of the four Gospel accounts straight through, they run the risk of producing a homogenization that is, in reality, a hodgepodge (my word, not Cunningham's) that will inevitably distort the meaning of the biblical narratives.

In an interview prior to the opening of his film, Mr. Gibson dismissed the various critical concerns expressed by some Catholic scholars about the film's treatment of the Jews. He protested that he did not need a bunch of letters after his name to make sense of what, in his opinion, is the self-evident meaning of the biblical texts.

One wonders what answer he would have given if someone had asked him directly about the three stages in the development of the four Gospels, as attested in the 1964 Instruction of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on the historical truth of the Gospels. Without an understanding of this crucially important reality, one will almost inevitably "present theological debates that had not yet emerged during Jesus' lifetime as if they had already been taking place at the time of his death" (Cunningham).

The Instruction itself is even stronger in its language. Anyone who ignores "those factors which have a bearing on the origin and the composition of the Gospels....will fail in his duty of ascertaining what the intentions of the sacred writers were, and what it is that they have actually said."

Since the Gospels provide few particulars about the Passion, those who write Passion plays and or produce films on the subject must somehow provide many additional details out of their own or someone else's pious imagination. Otherwise, the drama would be far too brief.

The question is: what other, non-biblical sources would the playwright or film-maker draw upon?

Philip Cunningham argues in his America article that Mr. Gibson's film "unquestionably fails to follow official Catholic teaching on biblical interpretation and the presentation of Jews and Judaism."

That is a serious charge, of course, but one that Cunningham supports in some detail.

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.