What is "The Carpenter's Son"?

In our society, someone will try to corrupt everything. In a recent development of this, filmmakers are taking innocent properties and turning them into horror movies, as they have with Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. So I guess it really shouldn't be a surprise that someone's made a horror movie based on Jesus.

Are you offended? I'm pretty sure that's the point. So before we go any further, I want to point out that when Christians go into full outrage mode over things like this, it just adds to the joke for these people. I hope everyone remains calm and just politely ignores this. A big protest will only get them more attention, which will make them more money.

At this point, I don't think anyone's seen the movie. All we have is trailers and the early official synopsis:

The Carpenter’s Son tells the dark story of a family hiding out in Roman Egypt. The son, known only as ‘the Boy,’ is driven to doubt by another mysterious child and rebels against his guardian, the Carpenter, revealing inherent powers and a fate beyond his comprehension. As he exercises his own power, the Boy and his family become the target of horrors, natural and divine.

I know, "Hollywood is being sacrilegious again, yawn." I don't expect to watch it because it looks bad, besides being blasphemous. However, I decided to write about the film because it's supposedly loosely based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. As that bit of information comes out, I expect people will have questions.

For years, skeptics have talked about the Gospel of Thomas. This isn't that. The usual Gospel of Thomas is a list of sayings supposedly from Jesus. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas presents stories of things Jesus allegedly did as a child. Some have described the apocryphal gospels as fan fiction; the Infancy Gospel of Thomas would be really bad fan fiction.

In this "gospel" we see a young Jesus casually playing with the power of God:

When this child Jesus was five years old, he was playing by the ford of a stream; and he gathered the flowing waters into pools and made them immediately pure. These things he ordered simply by speaking a word. He then made some soft mud and fashioned twelve sparrows from it. It was the Sabbath when he did this. A number of other children were also playing with him. But when a certain Jew saw what Jesus had done while playing on the Sabbath, he left right away and reported to his father, Joseph, "Look, your child at the stream has taken mud and formed twelve sparrows. He has profaned the Sabbath." ... Jesus clapped his hands and cried to the sparrows, "Be gone!" And the sparrows took flight and went, off chirping.¹

We also see him being casually cruel:

Now the son of Annas the scribe was standing there with Joseph: and he took a willow branch and scattered the water that Jesus had gathered. Jesus was irritated when he saw what had happened, and he said to him: "You unrighteous, irreverent idiot! What did the pools of water do to harm you? See, now you also will be withered like a tree, and you will never bear leaves or root or fruit." Immediately that child was completely withered. Jesus left and returned to Joseph's house. But the parents of the withered child carried him away, mourning his lost youth. They brought him to Joseph and began to accuse him, "What kind of child do you have who does such things?"

In another passage he kills a boy who runs into him. Then he blinds anyone who complains about it. And so on. Not that it's all that bad, but it's all that odd.

Reading this reminded me of The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", where a boy with godlike powers terrorizes a town, punishing anyone who displeases him or complains about his actions. That's a bit dated, but you might have seen the spoof The Simpsons did for one of their Halloween episodes. Either story is about a brat who wields awesome power with a short temper. This sounds very much like the Jesus presented in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

Is this work an accurate account of Jesus' childhood? Highly doubtful. As usual, skeptics and Christians disagree about the dating, but just about everyone agrees it's a second century work, and Christian scholars put it from the late second century; either way it was written long after the people who knew Jesus as a child were gone. And it shows a feature Peter Williams pointed out is common in these noncanonical gospels: they lack the historical and geographic details that pepper the canonical gospels.²

The creator of this work of fiction knew Jesus spent time "in Egypt" and eventually went to Jerusalem, but other than that, it doesn't try to name any locations. Unlike the movie, the "gospel" doesn't have Joseph as a carpenter but a farmer. Besides that, there really isn't much "local detail" that is so common in the real gospels. Nothing in this seems like a real Jewish or Egyptian village; it's just a nondescript place for the story to occur. It doesn't bear that marks of eye witness material but of imagination.

So this infancy gospel is quite forgettable, which is how the early church treated it. Hopefully this movie will suffer the same fate.


1 quotes taken from Lost Scriptures by Bart Ehrman

2 See Can We Trust the Gospels?

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