Mel Gibson, a brilliant actor and self-promoter, invested $30 million in the making of his film “The Passion of the Christ.”

He then made certain that it would gain international opposition and support over the last year. Many Jewish religious and secular leaders vociferously opposed it, assuring that it gained widespread media coverage.

For a conservative, anti-Vatican II Roman Catholic, he improbably won the support of fundamentalist Protestants.

The film itself devotes 15 minutes of fairly innocuous narrative, but two hours of mayhem and violence on the body of Jesus as he was scourged, beaten and savaged.

Gibson has stated he was following the Gospels.

This is untrue.

He took segments of the four Gospels, plus medieval and later material.

He featured Mary, the mother of Jesus, from beginning to end, while she appears at the crucifixion only in the Gospel of John with little elsewhere — and not at all in the Letters of Paul.

The film is in many ways a true Gibson film with violence without end — “Lethal Weapon,” “We Were Soldiers,” “The Patriot” and “Braveheart.”

In these films, the innocent, brave Gibson is inevitably brutalized, always wounded to save others.

Virtually all of the characters in the film are caricatures: The evil Jewish High Priest, his soldiers and his Jewish followers, as well as the sadistic Roman soldiers who brutalized Jesus.

The Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, contrary to historical references, is portrayed as sensitive and thoughtful, who reluctantly accedes to the Jewish demand for Jesus’ execution.

Because of the historical experience of Jesus, from ancient persecutions through the Crusades and pogroms — ending with Holocaust — naturally, Jews are sensitive to having reinforced the role of some of their ancestors in the execution of Jesus, who Christians see as the Messiah and God. There are no Romans left to attack, but Jews remain.

I personally do not fear a rise in anti-Semitism because of the film. Those already anti-Semitic will have their hatred reinforced.

People of goodwill, however, will not become anti-Semitic, but will continue to follow Jesus’ command “to love your fellow human as yourself.”

What should be most disturbing for Christians is Gibson’s horrible skewing the life and mission of Jesus into his last 12 hours of suffering.

The resurrection, with its promise of eternity and immortality for believing Christians, is given only a few seconds at the film’s end.

Certainly, Jesus’ suffering is important in the Christian drama, but it is a means to an end.

Gibson’s rendition in his movie makes the suffering an end in itself, reinforcing guilt and travail in true believers.

Missing are most of the vital messages of Jesus about love and morality, teachings presented sensitively in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7 and Luke 6. 20-49).

Jesus’ life and death were part of God’s plan, according to the New Testament.

Believing Christians do havoc to God and Jesus’ teaching of love and forgiveness when they remove Jesus’ life from this context and use it as a pretext against anyone.

The following words from the Gospel of John make this clear.

“No one takes my life from me but I lay it down myself (10:18).”

“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (3:16).”

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Joseph Rosenbloom is a rabbi at the Ames Jewish Congregation.