Here’s Why Making The Young Messiah Was ‘Fraught With Peril’

It’s not quite a miracle, but you don’t often see a movie and its prequel playing theaters at the same time. Still, that would appear to be the case in this, the season of faith-based cinema: Risen, a nonbeliever’s-eye view of the first Easter, arrived last month. Now, hot on its sandaled heels, The Young Messiah presents an episode out of the so-called “lost years” in the life of Christ.

One hesitates to use the term “branded content” in regards a Jesus movie, but the mania for movie prequels is all about elaborating on existing popularity and name recognition—consider recent examples like Pan and Minions. But The Young Messiah is in a class by itself: Based on Anne Rice’s 2005 novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, it spins an entirely new narrative, replete with Satan and miracles, within a sliver of the biblically unaccounted-for time between the Nativity stories and the 12-year-old Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem at Passover (Luke 2:41-52).

It’s also very careful not to tread on any Christian dogma: Jesus’ brother James, for instance, whose kinship to Jesus has been interpreted by theologians in various ways, is portrayed as a sibling, but is also called a cousin, and in any event is described as “adopted,” lest anyone think The Young Messiah was arguing with the doctrinal tradition of the virgin birth. Elsewhere, Satan throws an apple in the path of a running child; the 7-year-old Jesus raises him from the dead.