Monday, November 26, 2007

CAN'T MAKE IT UP -- Movies on Jesus in India:
Hollywood takes action hero Jesus to India

Film based on Aquarian Gospel to cover years left out of New Testament

Randeep Ramesh in New Delhi
Monday November 19, 2007
The Guardian

Hollywood is to fill in the Bible's "missing years" with a story about Jesus as a wandering mystic who travelled across India, living in Buddhist monasteries and speaking out against the iniquities of the country's caste system.

Film producers have delved deep into revisionist scholarship to piece together what they say was Jesus's life between the ages of 13 and 30, a period untouched by the recognised gospels.

[...]
The Aquarian Gospel is a modern forgery, which doesn't exactly count as "revisionist scholarship" or, indeed, any kind of scholarship.
Jesus Christ gets an evil twin in fantasy film
Mon Nov 26, 2007 1:14pm IST

By Tony Tharakan

PANAJI, India (Reuters) - There's no mention of him in the Bible but the plot of a fantasy film set in India gives Jesus Christ a twin brother -- and an evil one at that.

German filmmaker Robert Sigl's "The 13th Disciple" is still in the planning stage but producer Mario Stefan is in Goa trying to attract an Indian co-producer for the project.

"It's a fantasy-adventure film and takes place completely in present-day India," Stefan said on the sidelines of the 38th International Film Festival of India, which opened over the weekend.

The story traces the journey of two German archaeologists looking for evidence that Jesus visited India.

The researchers, who are twins themselves, find that Jesus had an evil twin brother who is reincarnated in the present as the scheming head of a religious sect.

[...]
The third-century Acts of Thomas places the Apostle Thomas in India, but that's quite a late tradition and in any case is rather a different matter from putting Jesus there.

Also the wandering Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, who lived at the same time as Jesus and is sometimes compared with him, reportedly (according to his third-century biographer Philostratus) traveled to India and hung out there with the gymnosophists for a while. But I'm not aware of any remotely ancient apocryphal traditions that put Jesus in India.