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'The Young Messiah' Raises Questions

There's a little mystery about The Young Messiah that suggests to me that there were problems during production. The one-sheet poster outside the theater says The Young Messiah is based on the novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by best-selling vampire story writer Anne Rice, but I saw in the credits of the movie itself no mention of Anne Rice; so I bought a copy of the paperback and found in it two notes by Rice that described several years' worth of background study of Jesus and His times as well as testimony of Rice's sincere Christian belief and a notice for the second volume of what promises to be a many-volume biography of Jesus. The credits in the movie city no historical authority whatsoever, and I would have expected the producers to have used the name of as popular a writer as Anne Rice, unless Rice herself wanted her name kept off the project.

Which she might well have wanted to do.

Jesus is played by a supposed seven-year-old who shows no acting talent to speak of and is badly cast; he is obviously not a Mediterranean type, his fair skin would surely crinkle under a desert sun, and he's so delicately pretty that I at first wondered why Christ was being played by a little girl. The novel pretends to be written by Christ in his later years, which enables Rice to reveal His thoughts to a degree the movie can't approximate, and this raises serious questions the novel at least tries to answer. Most importantly, since Jesus is already building a record for raising the dead and giving sight to the blind, why has He never been told the story of his miraculous birth?

I could go on; but I've probably done enough damage to what may be a sincere attempt to tell and important story. Let's hope for better luck next time.