[Restorer]

His original idea to film The Passion in dead languages WITHOUT subtitles was nutty, too, IMO.

I'm probably alone in this, but it bugged me that he had the Romans speaking Latin rather than Greek. Greek was the universal language of the eastern Mediterranean. Just about everybody spoke it, at least to some extent, as did all upper-class Romans. So the Romans would have used Greek to communicate with their Jewish subjects.

OTOH, Latin sounds very cool.

[Antoninus]

So the Romans would have used Greek to communicate with their Jewish subjects.

The Roman soldiers spoke Aramaic to the common Jews in The Passion. I don't know if the common Jews would have spoken Greek, so it's quite probably accurate. The soldiers in the movie only spoke Latin to each other.

There's one scene I love--where Pilate first interviews Christ and begins speaking to him in Aramaic. Jesus answers him in Latin and Pilate gets a look on his face like he's utterly shocked--and impressed.