Nicolas Cage returns via new thriller 'The Carpenter's Son'

In the second century, as the canonical Gospels were being copied and circulated throughout the Roman Empire, another text about the life of Jesus was simultaneously spreading.

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NICOLAS Cage in a scene from the 'The Carpenter's Son' (AP)

(AP)

Although the Infancy Gospel of Thomas didn’t make it into the New Testament, it remained popular among Christians for centuries.

When filmmaker Lotfy Nathan was introduced to the apocryphal text about Jesus’ childhood by his history-loving father, he immediately began poring over it as a springboard for what would eventually become “The Carpenter’s Son,” the supernatural thriller starring Nicolas Cage.

“The thought gave me chills,” recalled the writer and director, who was raised Coptic Orthodox. “The novelty of this, in a way, being an origin story that hadn’t been told before.”

From scroll to screen

The film, which stars FKA twigs and Noah Jupe alongside Cage, follows Jesus as a young boy being tempted by Satan to rebel against his father, Joseph (Cage). The film’s source material is established with an opening title card. “Based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” it reads. But Nathan concedes he couldn’t rely solely on the text and had to fill in narrative gaps, as with a storyline involving Satan.

“It’s written like a laundry list of events. It doesn’t really have an arc, so to speak,” he said of the apocryphal account of Jesus’ life from ages 5 to 12. “I had a historian pull a lot of research for me before I wrote the first draft.”