Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Carpenter’s Son’ turns an apocryphal text about Jesus’ youth into a horror

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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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 five to 12. “I had a historian pull a lot of research for me before I wrote the first draft.”

As fate would have it, Cage had already read the Infancy Gospel of Thomas years ago, during a period in his life of deep philosophical curiosity and reflection. When Nathan came to the Oscar winner with the script, Cage said he saw a through line to a type of story he’s long been attracted to.