Your Own Personal Jesus

At First Things, Anthony Sacramone notes that, with his latest work, Paul Verhoeven hopes to do for Christianity what Showgirls did for stripping:

One always hopes that a new year will both usher in what's truly new and show the door to what's proven stale. An example of the latter would be yet more "new" revelations about the "real" Jesus. No such luck. Paul Verhoeven, the man who brought us Robocop, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and the Citizen Kane of lap-dancing melodramas, Showgirls, is making his own foray into that besotted enterprise.

I was particularly taken with how taken Mr. Verhoeven is with the gravity of his project: "[My story] really goes into the politics of the time and tries to show a lot of things that have been buried and eliminated by Christianity. My scriptwriter told me not to do the movie in the United States because they might shoot me. So I took his advice and decided to write a book about it first."

[Verhoeven also uttered this gem:

"I was interested in Black Magic and the Occult and then started to be interested in miracles [laughs]. My view was always, 'Well this is impossible, in fact it's self-contradictory'. So I became interested in the historical facts: what time did he get up and so on. I feel like Hercule Poirot investigating Jesus!"]

Yes, you remember how the perpetrators of the Jesus Seminar scam--where casino-inspired card flips passed for real scholarship--were mowed down, Mob-style. You remember how the streets ran red with blood when The Da Vinci Code sold skatey-eight million copies and then went on to make more than $200 million in fundamentalist America. And, of course, there was that dirty bomb that went off on publication of the Gospel of Thomas and that continues to make several area codes in the Mid-Atlantic states uninhabitable.

Another brave artist daring to speak truth to power. I can't wait for Verhoeven's next project where he unveils shocking new revelations about the "real" Muhammad.

Unfortunately, Sacramone concludes that Verhoeven's effort in this area will not be the last:

In other words, just as publishers will continue to pump out Star Trek and Star Wars stories as long as there are kids who dream of the heavens, so there will be revisionist Jesus tales as long as there are grown-ups who believe they're already on their way to heaven and fear nothing of hell.