Responding more or less directly to the release of Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of Christ, in 2004 this anthology offers a historical context within which to evaluate the historical and cultural significance of that event. A number of prominent art historians sketch the artistic background of representations of the Passion in Christian art from the early Christian period to the Baroque, describing the values that informed them. James Marrow, Miri Rubin and Stephen Campbell all concur that one of the most prominent characteristics of these images is their antisemitism, their interest in projecting the light of Christian truth on to the darkness of Jewish ignorance. The acceptance of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth century emphasised the importance on the body of Christ and its celebration in the eucharist. Rubin associates this development with the growing importance of the Virgin's role as co-redemptrix:

It was not long before the first blood libel persecutions, in which Jews were accused of torturing and killing innocent Christian children in mock renditions of eucharistic ritual, or robbing, mutilating and destroying eucharistic wafers, took place. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, European Jewry suffered savage reprisals for fabricated tales of infanticide and host desecration.

Examining Gibson's film within this tradition, Adele Reinhartz suggests that the actor's fundamentalism, his utter dependence on the Passion narrative recorded in the Gospels, inevitably resulted in an antisemitic bias. The Gospels, written at a time when the Christian recognition of Jesus as the Messiah was being rejected by Judaism, were inevitably antagonistic to the Jewish faith. Instead of putting their record of events in historical perspective, the film, like the Gospels, dwells on the Jews as Christ's murderers. Comparing the film to medieval Passion plays, Jody Enders reflects that the latter never ended with Christ's torture and death, but with the joyful event of the Resurrection. In focusing so relentlessly on Christ's agonising end, the film seriously distorts the nature of the Christian message.

Marc Saperstein dwells on the Jewish response to Christian accusations. In the nineteenth century this often took the form of arguing that the Romans bore greater responsibility for Christ's death than did the Jews. Writing in 1901 Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf, an American of German background who had attended the Oberammergau Passion play, wrote an impassioned attack on its antisemitic nature:

Lisa Saltzman's striking contribution turns attention to the way in which Jews have made use of Passion imagery as a way of drawing attention to their own persecution. She argues that Barnett Newman's abstract paintings known as the Stations of the Cross (1958–66) are a memorial to the Holocaust that is not only aesthetic but ethical, ‘a declaration of respect for all that cannot, or more to the point, perhaps should not be depicted’:

David Nirenberg closes the volume with a philosophical speculation entitled ‘A brief history of Jewish enmity’. Nirenberg demonstrates how both the Christian and Muslim traditions have used the otherness of the Jews as a foil for the promotion of their own beliefs. Just as early Christianity defined itself in opposition to Judaism, so Luther called Catholics Jews, and Marx defined capitalism as Jewish. He concludes that ‘it is not Jewish power that produces anti-Judaism, but anti-Judaism that “Judaizes” power’ (p. 234).

In an age of fundamentalisms, this volume is a reminder of the dangers associated with dogmatic belief. Every assertion of how the world should be known is inevitably associated with a rejection of those who would believe otherwise. In drawing attention to the limitations of our theories of knowledge, it advocates respect for the universe of our ignorance.