The Real Jesus Revealed For the Very First Time. Again.

People have been in the business (and it is a business) of discovering the “real” Jesus for a long time. Just last year, Tom Hanks and The Da Vinci Code helped us realize that God really was like one of us, seeing as Jesus had a wife and kids and a minivan. Probably with an onboard DVD player and GPS. For all their cross-Palestine roadtrips.

Now comes news that Paul Verhoeven, the director of deeply theological Hollywood films like Starship Troopers and Showgirls, is planning to give us his own version of Jesus. He says, “I just want to go for what is historically, sociologically and politically real, and is defendable. I mean we couldn’t have the scene of Jesus praying at Golgotha when everyone else is sleeping. How could we have a report of that when everyone’s sleeping? That’s a contradiction in the text already. So all those will be eliminated.”

In case you’d like to keep track of the many things Jesus was besides the Son of God, a post in First Things gives us a helpful cheatsheet listing all the “startling authentic facts other ‘authorities’ have unearthed about Jesus, which St. Paul, the early Church, the Vatican, and Fox News have kept hidden in a vault somewhere.” Here’s what they’ve unearthed:

Jesus was a woman .

Jesus was a space alien and is buried in Japan .

Jesus survived the crucifixion and is buried in Kashmir .

Jesus was a Buddhist .

Jesus was a Muslim .

Jesus was a Mormon .

Jesus was a magician .

Jesus was a Gnostic .

Jesus was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier .

Jesus never existed .

Jesus was never executed .

Jesus was married and had children .

Jesus was a social revolutionary when he was not a mere Mediterranean peasant .

Jesus was an itinerant visionary whose real teachings exist only in distorted, fragmented form .

Jesus was insane .