The Young Messiah opens today in theatres around the country, and I encourage everyone to see it. It’s a movie about the seven year-old Christ, and it encourages Christians to wonder what He was like as a child. The Gospels don’t much tell us, and we’re left to speculate. Was he a normal kid? Did he like to run around and play with toys? Or was He already gifted with more than human intelligence and knowledge? It’s a puzzle as old as the earliest heresies. Was He human more than divine, as the Arians claimed, or was He divine but not truly human, as the Monophysites asserted?

In the film, Christ is both, which is the orthodox view of the question, and as The Young Messiah has been praised by bishops you don’t have to rely on me that the writers and directors, Cy and Betsey Nowrasteh got it right.

The film isn’t a theological lecture, however. It’s a stunningly beautiful and well-acted film that you can’t take you eyes off as you watch it. Go see it!

If Cy Nowrasteh’s name is familiar, by the way, it’s because of his previous films, The Stoning of Soraya M in 2009and The Path to 9/11 in 2006. The latter film was an ABC four-hour miniseries that explained how 9/11 happened, and revealed how the Clintonistas had had the opportunity to take out Osama in 1998 but blinked. Because of this the film was subjected to an extraordinary attack from the Democrats and the media, and ABC denied to release it on DVD.