Mark Silk, a professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Connecticut, recently completed a study of the media's coverage of the film and the religious issues involved. His final report, titled "A Case Study in Media Manipulation?" details how Gibson fanned the flames of controversy while complaining about the heat. "Gibson appears to have been doing what Hollywood producers always try to do: get as much positive buzz as possible about his film before the public," he says. "What's different here, of course, is that the people he has gone to for such buzz have not been the usual collection of flacks and blurb-meisters but some of the most ideologically engaged media folks in the country." Silk concludes, "To say this has been a press agent's dream is to understate the case on a truly biblical scale."

Then again, Gibson's motivations might be much more, as they say, faith-based. As the premiere looms closer it seems increasingly clear that Gibson genuinely believes he has been targeted by shadowy forces aligned to subvert his message of salvation. The strongest evidence of this notion is the film itself, a rough cut of which I saw last week. "The Passion of the Christ" is indeed as bloody, grueling and ultimately difficult as Gibson promised it would be. (I clocked a climactic flagellation scene at just over 10 minutes.) Leaving aside the portrayal of Jewish clerics as vengeful villains and of Pontius Pilate as a sympathetic stooge who was essentially bullied into crucifying Christ - that matter is better debated by Bible scholars - the film is obviously the work of a man who believes he possesses the truth and that the truth has enemies.

I got a brief but intense tutorial in that perspective from Gibson's father, Hutton, the 84-year-old author and activist who has criticized the Vatican for more than 30 years, writing books titled "Is the Pope Catholic" and a newsletter, "The War Is Now!" which rails against a pope he calls "Garrulous Karolus, the Koran Kisser." Last November, Hutton Gibson invited me for a weekend at his home near Houston to share his revisionist takes on the pope's declining health ("I think he's playacting"), the scandals facing the Catholic Church ("The Vatican bred it all"), and historical accounts that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust ("I don't believe that for a minute").

In comments since that interview was published, Gibson has sought to downplay his father's extremism while suggesting that the holocaust denials were somehow squeezed out of an innocent bystander as part of a sinister plot. "As soon as we started filming, that beacon of journalistic integrity the New York Times dispatched someone to go down there and take advantage of my father," he told Sawyer. "Their whole agenda here, my detractors, is to drive a wedge between me and my father."

I'll admit that I was deeply anguished during the two days I spent listening to Hutton Gibson. But it wasn't because I felt badly about "driving a wedge" between father and son, or about talking to a man who is, after all, as entitled to his opinion as the pope, a Supreme Court justice or anyone else active in public life at an advanced age. The source of my angst in Texas had nothing to do with Hutton Gibson's age and everything to do with his worldview; as he laid out his alternate history of the 20th century, I had that gut-churning sensation familiar to any journalist witnessing something horrible -- the shock of seeing it, laced by the excitement of being on hand to record it. And while I never assumed that Hutton spoke for his son, the film Mel produced and his comments about it certainly suggest father and son share a core of moral certainty that can alternately come off as righteous, uncompromising or pathological.

So which is it: Is Gibson a master marketer or a conspiracy-minded ideologue? After a year of reporting on and following this remarkable story, I still can't decide. Gibson himself seems happy playing both roles. He said it best at the press conference at Rome's Cinecitta Studios two years ago. Twirling a cigarette mischievously and looking for all the world like the wild-eyed cop who always gets his way, he told the crowd, "They think I'm crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I'm a genius."

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