Paul Verhoeven’s Jesus movie resurrected

On paper, the idea of the guy behind Basic Instinct and Showgirls working on a movie about Jesus may seem off, an attempt for studios to keep pace with big-budget productions about Noah and the life of Moses. But Verhoeven has always had a keen interest in the Christian figurehead, serving as a member of the Jesus Seminar—a group of scholars and Christ buffs who use colored beads to vote on the historical factuality of deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. He even published his own pseudo-scholarly text on the subject, 2008’s Jesus Of Nazareth, and has long expressed interest in making a movie on the subject. But don’t expect a piece of explicitly Christian crucifixploitation like Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. (Or, alternately, do see all that stuff, in Verhoeven's own Dutch thriller, The Fourth Man, which is laced with perversely sexualized Christian imagery.)

In keeping with his book’s secular bend, Verhoeven’s Jesus movie will cast the famous Nazarene as a shit-stirring prophet, stripping away all that miracle-working and returning from the dead stuff. As Verhoeven writes in the first pages of Jesus Of Nazareth: “I picture [Jesus’] travels more like the camping trips my friends and I used to go on when we were teenagers. Being crammed into a tent with your buddies has its drawbacks…Jesus’ companions must have heard him snore, snuffle, and fart.” So expect, also, the fartingest depiction of the King of Kings ever seen on the big screen.