The Carpenter’s Son (James McGrath, Religion Prof Blog).
The movie The Carpenter’s Son is the childhood of Jesus reenvisioned as a horror movie. It takes some inspiration from the apocryphal text known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Although the opening sequence of the film mentions apocryphal extracanonical texts, the movie bears no close relationship to that or other ancient texts in terms of its contents.A detailed review by a New Testament scholar. Informative. Has lots of spoilers, but flagged well in advance. If you want to see the movie, you should probably do that before you read the whole thing.[...]
This Jesus horror movie could have used more heresy. Critics worried ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ would be blasphemous but it hews to orthodox interpretations (Mira Fox, The Forward).
Before the movie came out, many Christians passed around petitions and wrote blogs about the film’s blasphemy. But The Carpenter’s Son is not, in fact, subversive at all. First of all, Jesus is not a petulant toddler; he looks to be around 20. All the notable anecdotes from the apocrypha are missing: He hardly smites anyone, doesn’t animate his toys and never even blinds the neighbors. In fact, he repeatedly rejects temptation, death and evil. There’s even a cheesy CGI halo, the appearance of which made the audience snicker the night I saw the film.A Jewish perspective on the film. By the way, Jesus is a child in the Infancy Gospel, but not a toddler.
There are also video interviews with the director and with the actor who played Jesus. Summarized in these articles, with links to the videos on YouTube.
Director Lotfy Nathan Shares Inspiration Behind R-Rated Jesus Film Starring Nicolas Cage—And Its Apocryphal Origin (Jesse Jackson, Church Leaders)
A longer summary: The Director of a Controversial Horror Movie About Jesus Insists It’s ‘Not as Evil as People Are Assuming’ (Barry Levitt, Time Magazine).
As Nathan researched, he was struck by how frightening a lot of what he read was. “A lot of the subject matter is pretty harrowing. A lot of the Bible is, in fact. That really inspired me to put a genre lean on it,” he says of The Carpenter’s Son. According to Nathan, the film could have been a great deal more controversial had he stuck closer to the Infancy Gospel. “It would be a lot more salacious,” he insists. “I think it presents a much more petulant and less redeemable story. I just took the essential idea of these lost years, and read between the lines in identifying a troubled dynamic between Joseph the carpenter and Jesus, and this parental feud. The inclusion of the stranger and where the story goes by the end, that’s all my invention.”
The Carpenter’s Son Interview: Noah Jupe & Lotfy Nathan on Darkness, Faith, and Humanity (John Nguyen, Nerd Reactor)
“I think it’s actually a good thing to be able to see what’s at stake,” he [Jupe] added. “But then there’s obviously the practical controversy of depicting Jesus as anything but divine, to imply that he had human frailty and vulnerability in his psyche, in his soul. A lot of Christians would disagree with that fundamentally, and that’s already like a non-starter. So I’m aware that it’s not for everybody, but to me, this was an honest effort in making a story that could be relatable to many different kinds of people.”Apparently the film is only loosely inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
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