Top 10 Ways that Mel's Passion Isn't As It Was, Number 6...

6. The cross is wrong.

There's actually two things wrong with the cross used in Mr. Gibson's Passion.

Any manufactured cross had two major pieces - the stipe and the patibulum. The stipe is the vertical piece of the cross. It was always left at the execution site, planted upright in the ground. The vertical piece, the patibulum, was the only part of the cross that the victim was compelled to carry to the site.



So every picture you've seen of Gibson's Christ dragging a complete cross through Jerusalem? Wrong. Didn't happen. It's a pretty picture, but completely inaccurate.

Also note the shape of the cross in the picture above. At the execution site, a slot in the patibulum would be placed over the fitted top of the stipe. This resulted in a T shape, which in the Greek alphabet was the letter Tau. "There is fairly overwhelming archeological evidence that it was on this type of cross that Jesus was crucified."

So even the very shape of the Passion's cross is wrong. This is one of the few things that Martin Scorcese got right in The Last Temptation, by the way. The crucifixion there was historically accurate.

There's simply no excuse for trying to pass this movie off as what actually happened.