Hollywood has given us a new Jesus. Released in theaters November 2025, Nicolas Cage stars in The Carpenter’s Son, a supernatural thriller that reimagines the childhood of Christ through the lens of an ancient apocryphal text.[1] The film follows a young Jesus—simply called “the Boy”—as he discovers mysterious powers, questions his guardian Joseph’s authority, and faces temptation from Satan himself. It’s eerie, unsettling, and according to early reviews, depicts Jesus as a figure who needs to find himself, to learn to control his abilities, to grow into his identity.
The film is based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a second-century text that never made it into the Bible but has captivated imaginations for nearly two millennia.[2] And while the movie has sparked predictable outrage from some Christians (Nicolas Cage reportedly got stung by bees during filming, which a few took as divine judgment), the more disturbing reality is this: the impulse behind The Carpenter’s Son isn’t new. It’s the same temptation the early church faced when they rejected texts like the Infancy Gospel. It’s the same impulse we all face every day:
We want to remake Jesus in our own image.
The Gospel We’ve Always Wanted to Edit
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a strange document. Written sometime in the mid-to-late second century, it purports to fill in the gaps of Jesus’ childhood—those “silent years” between His birth and His appearance in the temple at age twelve.[3] What it gives us is a portrait of Jesus that oscillates between wonder-working child and, frankly, something closer to a pagan deity learning to control his temper.
In one episode, the young Jesus fashions twelve sparrows from clay and brings them to life. In another, a boy bumps into him and Jesus strikes him dead, later raising him after Joseph begs for mercy. Teachers try to educate him and find themselves humiliated by this precocious child who knows more than they do but seems to delight in showing them up.[4] It’s a Jesus who is powerful, yes—but capricious. Unpredictable. Still figuring things out.
The text was popular. Stories from it spread throughout the ancient world, appearing in Christian art, medieval plays, and even making their way into the Quran.[5] Yet the early church decisively rejected it. Irenaeus of Lyon called it spurious in the late second century. Eusebius dismissed it as heretical fiction in the fourth century. Pope Gelasius I included it in his list of forbidden books in the fifth.[6]
Why? It wasn’t just that the text was late or lacked apostolic authorship (though those were factors). The deeper problem was theological: the Infancy Gospel fundamentally misunderstood who Jesus is. And in doing so, it revealed what we most want—and most fear—about the real Christ.
A Jesus We Can Manage
What makes The Carpenter’s Son appealing isn’t hard to diagnose. Nicolas Cage himself put it plainly: “I saw it as a family drama about an existential crisis.”[7] A Jesus facing an existential crisis—now that’s a Jesus we can relate to. That’s a Jesus who seems accessible, human, struggling with the same moral ambiguities we navigate. That’s a Jesus who doesn’t make us feel quite so small.
This is the gravitational pull we all feel: the desire for a Jesus who mirrors us rather than judges us. A Jesus who’s on a journey of self-discovery, who needs to “find himself,” who occasionally loses his temper or makes mistakes or has to learn the hard way. We want a Jesus who validates our autonomy rather than confronting it. We want a Jesus who’s fundamentally like us—just a little better, maybe, but still figuring it out.
Hollywood isn’t alone in this. We do it in subtler ways every Sunday. We emphasize Jesus the teacher and downplay Jesus the judge. We celebrate His compassion but flinch at His claims to divinity. We love the Sermon on the Mount but struggle with His declaration that He is “the way, the truth, and the life” and that “no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). We craft a Jesus who affirms our political preferences, baptizes our cultural values, and never really makes us uncomfortable. We make Him relatable by making Him like us.
The problem is, we don’t need a Jesus who is like us. We need a Jesus who is not like us—and this is precisely what the gospel offers and what our hearts naturally resist.
Why the Church Said No
When the early church fathers encountered the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, they didn’t hesitate. The text had to be rejected—not out of a desire to suppress alternative voices or maintain institutional control, but because accepting it would have meant abandoning the gospel itself.
Here’s why: the entire edifice of Christian salvation rests on Jesus’ sinlessness. As the book of Hebrews declares, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). Jesus’ moral perfection wasn’t incidental to His mission; it was essential. He had to be both fully human (to represent us) and fully sinless (to be an acceptable sacrifice). Any compromise on either point collapses the entire gospel structure.
This distinction is crucial: Jesus experienced everything that comes with being human—genuine hunger and thirst, physical exhaustion, emotional grief, the full weight of temptation pressing on Him from outside. In Gethsemane, we see Him in agony, sweating drops of blood, pleading with the Father for another way. This wasn’t theatrical; it was the horror of a fully human person facing torture and divine wrath. But notice what Jesus didn’t experience: He never wondered whether obedience was the right choice. He never felt an internal pull toward sin. He didn’t have to discover His moral purpose or grow in righteousness. His struggle in Gethsemane was submission to a known, terrible cost—not moral uncertainty.
A Jesus who strikes children dead in anger—even if He later raises them—reveals not just divine power but moral instability. This is categorically different from Jesus overturning tables in the temple. His righteous anger in that moment was a morally perfect response to the desecration of His Father’s house. But the Infancy Gospel portrays a child who lashes out in temper and then has to clean up the mess. That’s not sinless perfection—that’s moral learning through regret.
A Jesus who has to learn morality through trial and error cannot be our righteousness. A Jesus who struggles with the same ethical ambiguities we do cannot be the one who imputes His perfect obedience to us. If Jesus needed to grow into righteousness—if He had to discover who He was meant to be—then He cannot save us from our unrighteousness. He would be just another fallen human, albeit one with extraordinary powers.
The canonical Gospels give us something radically different: a Jesus who is “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), who can say without qualification “which one of you convicts me of sin?” (John 8:46), who demonstrates perfect obedience to the Father from beginning to end. The temptations He faced in the wilderness weren’t struggles to find Himself or moral dilemmas requiring discernment; they were external assaults on His mission that He decisively rejected with Scripture and unwavering clarity. When He experienced righteous anger—cleansing the temple, denouncing hypocrisy—this wasn’t uncontrolled emotion requiring correction but holy indignation perfectly calibrated to the offense against God’s glory.
The early church understood what was at stake. If they accepted a portrait of Jesus that compromised His sinlessness, they would lose their Savior. Better to reject a popular text than to sacrifice the gospel.
The Jesus We Actually Need
This is where the biblical portrait of Jesus proves not just superior but infinitely more compelling than any reimagined version Hollywood—or we—could devise. The real Jesus is better precisely because He’s fully one of us while remaining wholly other than us.
Consider the profound mystery the Scriptures present: Jesus is fully God, possessing all divine attributes, yet He became fully human, taking on flesh and entering our world of suffering, temptation, and limitation. He experienced genuine hunger in the wilderness, genuine weariness at Jacob’s well, genuine grief at Lazarus’s tomb. He was “tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb. 4:15, NIV). This wasn’t playacting. The incarnation was real. The temptations were real. The emotional pain was real. When Jesus wept, those were real tears. When He agonized in Gethsemane, that was real dread.
Yet—and here’s the breathtaking wonder of it—He never sinned. Not once. Not in thought, word, or deed. Not in a moment of weakness or a lapse of judgment or an emotional outburst He later regretted. His righteousness wasn’t the result of moral effort or progressive self-discovery. It was the natural expression of who He is: the holy Son of God united with a human nature.
Luke tells us Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). This growth was genuine—He learned His father’s trade, studied Torah, developed human relationships, came to understand the culture and customs of first-century Judaism. He grew physically from infant to child to man. He matured intellectually and socially. What He didn’t do was grow morally. There was never a point where Jesus became more righteous, more obedient, or more aligned with the Father’s will. From His first breath to His last, He was perfectly holy—but that holiness expressed itself through a genuinely developing human life.
This is the Jesus we need. Not a mirror showing us ourselves, but a Savior offering us what we lack. We don’t need someone to validate our moral struggles; we need someone who conquered them while experiencing their full weight. We don’t need a Jesus finding His way; we need a Jesus who is the way—and who walked it perfectly as a real human being. We don’t need divine therapy for our existential crises; we need divine rescue from our sin, accomplished by one who knew human existence from the inside yet remained untainted by our corruption.
And here’s the gospel: this perfectly righteous Jesus came not to show us how to pull ourselves up by our moral bootstraps, but to give us His righteousness as a gift. He lived the life we should have lived and died the death we deserved to die. He offers us not moral improvement but complete transformation—union with Him, counted righteous in Him, secure in Him.
The canonical Gospels give us a Jesus who can actually save us. The apocryphal gospels—and their modern cinematic descendants—give us only another version of ourselves. One offers hope; the other offers only a more powerful reflection of our own inadequacy.
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?
So what do we do with The Carpenter’s Son and the impulse it represents?
First, we recognize the temptation in ourselves. Before we critique Hollywood for reimagining Jesus, we should examine the ways we’ve done the same. Where have we softened His claims, domesticated His demands, or reshaped His character to fit our preferences? Where have we wanted a Jesus who affirms us rather than a Jesus who transforms us? Where have we been more comfortable with a Christ who needs to find Himself than with the Christ who declares “I am”?
Second, we return to the Scriptures with fresh eyes. The biblical Jesus—the one who makes us uncomfortable, who refuses to be managed, who demands everything—is the only Jesus who can save. He’s the only one who can look at our moral failure, our self-righteousness, our desperate attempts to remake Him in our image, and say, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).
The rest Jesus offers isn’t the rest of self-discovery or self-acceptance. It’s the rest of being declared righteous not by our own merit but by His. It’s the rest of surrendering our autonomy and finding freedom in His lordship. It’s the rest of ceasing our attempts to make Him palatable and instead bowing before Him as He is: holy, righteous, just, and merciful beyond comprehension.
This is why the church rejected the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This is why we should reject any Jesus—in film, in theology, or in our own hearts—that diminishes His sinless perfection. Not because we’re afraid of questions or uncomfortable with mystery, but because we need a Savior who is truly other than us, truly holy, truly able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him.
The real Jesus is better than any version we could imagine. And He invites us to know Him not as we wish He were, but as He is: the eternal Son of God, the sinless Lamb, the risen Lord, the only hope for sinners like us.
Will the real Jesus please stand up? He already has. The question is whether we’ll bow before Him.
Questions for Reflection
- In what ways have you been tempted to reshape Jesus to fit your preferences or make Him more comfortable? What does this reveal about your heart?
- How does Jesus’ sinlessness affect your understanding of salvation? Why is His moral perfection essential to the gospel?
- Where do you see our culture trying to reimagine Jesus today (beyond just films)? How can you discern between the biblical Christ and cultural counterfeits?
- What difference does it make that Jesus was “tempted in every way” yet remained without sin? How should this truth shape how you approach temptation?
- Why do we naturally resist the biblical portrait of Jesus? What fears or desires drive us to prefer a more “relatable” savior?
Prayer Points
- Confession: Ask God to reveal the ways you’ve reshaped Jesus in your own image—the areas where you’ve wanted a manageable Savior rather than a holy Lord.
- Thanksgiving: Thank God for the real Jesus—for His perfect righteousness, His genuine humanity, His willing sacrifice, and His complete sufficiency as Savior.
- Petition: Pray for the church to faithfully proclaim the biblical Christ in all His holiness and grace, resisting cultural pressure to soften or domesticate His claims.
- Witness: Pray for those who are encountering distorted portraits of Jesus (through films, false teaching, or cultural messaging) that they would meet the true Christ who alone can save.
[1] “Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ Turns an Apocryphal Text About Jesus’ Youth Into a Horror Film,” ABC News, November 13, 2025, https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/nicolas-cages-carpenters-son-turns-apocryphal-text-jesus-127483598. Accessed November 21, 2025.
[2] Tony Burke, quoted in “Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son.’”
[3] “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated November 13, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Infancy-Gospel-of-Thomas. Accessed November 21, 2025.
[4] Ibid. The text describes Jesus as “caring, mischievous, and occasionally cruel as he struggles to come to terms with his divine power.”
[5] Ibid. Stories from the text “permeated ancient Christian lore, art and even some medieval plays. One account from the text about Jesus giving life to clay birds even made its way into the Quran.”
[6] Ibid. “Early Christian writers regarded the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as inauthentic and heretical. Eusebius rejected it as a heretical ‘fiction’ in the third book of his fourth-century Church History, and Pope Gelasius I included it in his list of heretical books in the fifth century.”
[7] Nicolas Cage, quoted in “Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son,’” ABC News.
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