I have spent three years locked away in the Vatican archives, in libraries in Ethiopia, and in monasteries in the Judean desert, researching the resurrection of Christ. I spent three years reading manuscripts that most Christians do not even know exist.
And I can tell you that the Jesus you were taught about in church, the Jesus of the catechism, the gentle and sweet Jesus who caresses sheep and hugs children, is real, but he is an incomplete version. It is like you have been given a cropped photograph; what you see is real, but what they cut out completely changes the meaning of the image.
The Ethiopian Bible has eighty-one books, while yours has sixty-six, which is a difference of fifteen books. And in those fifteen books, there is a Jesus that you were never introduced to.
This is a Jesus who existed before the universe was created, a Jesus who descended into Sheol and waged war against death in its own territory. This is a Jesus who, for forty days after his resurrection, taught his disciples secrets about the structure of the human soul, about the spiritual parasites that infect the nature of reality, which the Western Church decided you should not know.
Tonight, I am going to show you that Jesus, the one who exists in the texts that were taken from you, the one that Ethiopian monks preserved for seventeen centuries in stone monasteries carved into cliffs that can only be accessed by climbing leather ropes.
The Jesus who, when you get to know him, makes the Jesus of the catechism seem like a pencil sketch compared to a three-dimensional oil painting. This is the Jesus who existed before the stars.
Your Bible begins the story of Jesus in Bethlehem with a manger, with shepherds, and with a star. It starts with birth, as if there were nothing before birth, as if Jesus began to exist at the moment Mary gave birth to him in a stable in Judea.
But the Ethiopian Bible tells a different story, a story that begins before the universe existed. The Book of Enoch, chapters thirty-seven to seventy-one, in the sections known as the Parables of Enoch, describes a figure called the Son of Man who existed alongside God from before creation.
Enoch, chapter forty-eight, states verbatim that the name of the Son of Man was pronounced before the Lord of Spirits before the sun and stars were created, before the first particle of matter existed, before time began to run, and before there was a before.
We are not talking about a prophet, nor are we talking about a special man chosen by God for a specific mission at a certain time in history. We are talking about a being who shares eternity with God, who was there when the universe was designed, and who participated in the creation of everything that exists.
Enoch, chapter forty-six, describes him with a head as white as wool, with a face full of grace, surrounded by rivers of fire in a heavenly court where angels kneel and the wicked are condemned.
It is exactly the same image as Revelation, chapter one, depicting the resurrected Christ, exactly the same. But Enoch was written centuries before Jesus was born, centuries before John wrote Revelation on the island of Patmos.
And at a certain point in history, that being whom Enoch describes voluntarily decided to compress all that eternity, all that power, and all that cosmic immensity into the body of a baby inside the womb of a Jewish teenager in an insignificant town in Galilee, which did not appear on any important map of the Roman Empire.
The Gospel of John opens with a statement that most Christians recite by heart without understanding the true depth of what they are saying. It states that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
All things were made through him, and without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of mankind.
These lines are a condensed version of what the Book of Enoch describes in much more detail in entire chapters. John is summarizing in one paragraph what Enoch develops across dozens of pages.
When Mary held her baby in the manger, she was holding in her arms the being who had created her own arms, the being who had designed the milk she breastfed him with, and the being who had invented the oxygen they both breathed.
She was holding the being who had created the gravity that kept them stuck to the ground and the stars that shone above the stable. Mary was not holding a prophet; she was holding the architect of the universe disguised as a newborn.
The Ethiopian monks I interviewed at the Debre Damo monastery, a sixth-century monastery accessible only by climbing a fifteen-meter rope up a vertical cliff, explained to me that in Ethiopian theology, the pre-existence of Jesus is not a minor theological detail mentioned in passing in homilies.
It is the foundation of absolutely everything. I was told that if Jesus started in Bethlehem, he is an extraordinary man, perhaps the best man who ever lived, a supreme prophet, and an incomparable teacher, but a man nonetheless.
On the other hand, if Jesus existed before the stars, then what happened on the cross was not the death of a good man; it was the voluntary death of the being who invented the concept of death.
And that changes everything, absolutely everything. It changes the meaning of every word he spoke, it changes the weight of every miracle, and it changes the scale of each sacrifice. Everything changes.
The Ascension of Isaiah, another text that the Ethiopian Bible preserves and that Western tradition eliminated, describes Jesus’ journey from the seventh heaven to earth with a detail that left me speechless when I first read it in a Ge’ez translation provided by a monk from the Abuna Yemata Guh monastery.
This is a rock-cut temple at twenty-five hundred meters altitude that is accessed by climbing a vertical limestone wall with bare hands. The text describes seven levels of heaven, not as a poetic metaphor, but as a real structure with its own laws.
Each level has its own beings, its own luminosity, and its own density of reality. The first heaven is where the angels oversee the affairs of the earth, and the second is where the movements of stars and celestial bodies are directed.
The third heaven is where Isaiah sees paradise, including the tree of life, while the fourth and fifth contain beings of power and beauty that Isaiah can scarcely describe with human words.
In the sixth heaven, Isaiah falls to the ground because the splendor of the beings that inhabit it is too much for a human body to bear. And yet, the glory of the sixth heaven is only a pale reflection of what lies in the seventh.
In the seventh heaven, Isaiah beholds the Beloved, a radiant figure of authority who is about to descend into human existence. And this is where the text becomes cinematically extraordinary.
It describes Christ’s descent level by level with a detail that seems like the script of a science fiction movie written two thousand years ago. At each level of the descent, Christ deliberately hides his divinity so that the beings at that level do not recognize him.
In the sixth heaven, he appears as an angel of the sixth order. His brilliance dims, and his power is compressed. In the fifth, he hides himself more, adopting the appearance of a being of the fifth order.
And so on, level after level, his glory diminishes at each stage like a star gradually fading into an ember, then a coal, then a spark. By the time he arrives in Bethlehem as a human baby, not even the angels of the lower heavens recognize him.
They see him as just another kid, a newborn baby crying in a manger in a forgotten village in a remote province of the Roman Empire. Only God the Father and the Spirit know who that baby really is.
Everything else, including angels, demons, principalities, powers, and even death itself, has been deceived. This was done not out of malice, but by cosmic military strategy, because what Jesus is going to do on earth requires that no one, absolutely no one in all of creation, knows who he really is until it is too late to stop him.
It is the biggest covert operation in history, not just in human history, but in the history of the universe. The Jesus who knew things he should not have known was a constant presence.
The canonical gospels record moments where Jesus demonstrates a knowledge that exceeds all that is humanly possible. He knows that Nathanael was under a fig tree before Philip called him.
He knows that the Samaritan woman has had five husbands without anyone telling her. He knows that Judas will betray him before Judas even knows it himself.
He knows that Peter will deny him three times before dawn. He knows exactly when, how, and where he is going to die.
Your Bible records these episodes as isolated facts, as sporadic flashes of supernatural knowledge that appear from time to time among the teachings and parables.
But the Mashafa Kidan, the Ethiopian text that preserves the teachings that Jesus gave to his disciples during the forty days between the resurrection and the ascension, explains that this knowledge was not sporadic; it was permanent.
Jesus lived in a state of constant perception that allowed him to simultaneously see the past, present, and future of every person who crossed his path. Think about what that means in daily practice.
Every time Jesus looked at someone, he did not just see their face; he saw their whole story. He saw the child that person had been, he could see the traumas they had suffered, and he saw the decisions they had made and the ones they would make.
He saw their death, and he saw what was on the other side of their death. He perceived everything at once in each person, at every moment, without a filter, and without the possibility of turning it off.
When Jesus looked at the adulterous woman whom the Pharisees wanted to stone, he did not just see a frightened woman. He saw the complete chain of events that had led her to that moment.
He saw the man who had seduced her, and he saw the husband who had emotionally abandoned her years before she sought love elsewhere. He saw the Pharisees who were accusing her, and he saw that several of them had committed adultery in their own hearts dozens of times.
He saw everything, and that is why his response was not a judgment or a sermon; it was a simple challenge.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
He did not say it because he was a tolerant liberal who believed that anything goes. He said this because he could literally see the sins of each accuser written on their souls like glowing scars.
According to the Mashafa Kidan, this level of perception was not comfortable; it was completely exhausting. It was like living with your eyes wide open, never able to close them in a world where everyone else blinks.
Jesus saw the pain of every person he met, and he felt the darkness in every heart. He perceived what the Mashafa Kidan calls the winds of error, which cling to people’s souls like invisible parasites that feed on their fear, their greed, and their resentment.
The gospels say that Jesus frequently withdrew to solitary places to pray. Western Christian tradition interprets these retreats as moments of pious devotion, a holy man seeking time alone with his heavenly Father.
But the Ethiopian texts suggest another, more human and more heartbreaking reason. Jesus withdrew because he needed to rest from the constant perception of human suffering.
He needed a place where there were no people so he would not have to see their pain. He needed inner silence, not just outer silence.
He was the spiritual equivalent of an emergency surgeon who, after a twenty-four-hour shift operating on open wounds, needs to be completely alone to stop seeing blood.
There is a moment in the gospels that Western tradition treats as a minor anecdote, but which Ethiopian texts consider one of the most important revelations about the nature of Jesus. It is when a woman suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years touches the edge of his cloak in the crowd and is instantly cured.
Jesus stops and asks, “Who touched me?”
The disciples are completely surprised by the question.
“Master, there are hundreds of people pushing you from all sides. How do you ask who touched you?”
And Jesus replies that he has felt a force come out of him.
Western tradition reads this as just another miracle in the list of miracles, but the Mashafa Kidan explains it in a completely different way. It says that the healing was not a conscious, voluntary act of Jesus; it was automatic.
The woman touched his cloak with such intense faith that healing energy flowed from Jesus without him consciously deciding to do so, as if his body were a life generator that transmitted healing by touch when someone approached with the right frequency of faith.
And what Jesus felt when that energy left was a real, physical, measurable exhaustion. Each treatment cost him something, and each miracle drained his life force.
It was not free magic that has no price; it was a transfer of his body into another person’s body. He would give and the other would receive, and what he gave he would later lack.
If this is true, then every miracle Jesus performed during his three years of public ministry was an act of personal sacrifice that progressively weakened him.
Each blind person who opened their eyes had to use some of his own strength, and each paraplegic who walked took a part of his energy with them. Each leper who was cured took away a fragment of his life.
Each demon that was expelled required an inner battle that left invisible marks on his spirit. The gospels record that in the last months of his ministry, Jesus began to speak more and more openly about his impending death.
He told his disciples at least three times that he would go to Jerusalem, that he would be handed over to the priests, that he would be condemned to death, and that on the third day, he would rise again.
The conventional interpretation is that Jesus prophesied his crucifixion with supernatural knowledge, that he intellectually knew what was going to happen because he was God and God knows the future.
But there is another possible reading based on the Ethiopian texts. Jesus not only prophesied; he felt that his body was getting tired.
He felt that the accumulation of three years of constantly transferring life to thousands of people was physically consuming him. Each miracle had taken something from him that he could not get back, and each cure had shortened his time.
It was not that he knew intellectually that he was going to die; it was that he felt it in his bones, in the muscles that no longer responded as before, and in the blood that circulated with less and less force through a body that had given too much of itself for too long.
By the time he arrived in Gethsemane on the night of his arrest, Jesus was not only carrying the spiritual weight of the world’s sin; he was also carrying the accumulated exhaustion of thousands of healings that had drained his body for three years.
The hematohidrosis that Luke describes, the sweating of blood, was not only the result of the emotional stress of anticipating the crucifixion; it was the physical manifestation of an organism that had been functioning at the limit of its capacity for years and was finally breaking down from within.
But perhaps the most disturbing teaching of the Mashafa Kidan, the one I fully understand why the church removed, is the doctrine of the two winds.
According to this text, Jesus taught his disciples during the forty days after the resurrection that within each human being there blow two winds: the wind of life and the wind of error.
The wind of life is the divine spark that God breathed into Adam at the moment of creation. It is what connects you with God, what allows you to intuit the truth, and what pushes you toward compassion, generosity, love, and creativity.
It is the inner voice that tells you what is right and what is wrong before your rational mind even analyzes the situation. The wind of error is the exact opposite.
It is not Satan, nor is it an external demon; it is a spiritual parasite that enters the human soul through greed, fear, lies, and resentment. Once inside, it attaches itself to the soul like a tick and begins to feed.
It feeds on your negative thoughts, your anxiety, your hatred, and your envy. The more you feed it, the more it grows, and the more it grows, the hungrier it gets.
And the hungrier it is, the more negative thoughts it generates to feed itself. It is a self-reinforcing cycle that can completely consume a person if it is not stopped in time.
According to the Mashafa Kidan, Jesus taught that what Western tradition calls demonic possession is actually the advanced stage of infection by the wind of error.
It is not that a demon enters from the outside as an independent entity and takes over an innocent person who was living their life peacefully. It is a gradual process.
The person begins by feeding the parasite with small resentments, with envy that seems harmless, with fears that are justified as prudence, and with lies that are called courtesy.
Each act of feeding makes the parasite grow a little more, and as the parasite grows, it generates more hunger, creating a greater need for negative thoughts to continue growing.
It is a spiritual addiction that works exactly like a chemical addiction. The addict needs increasingly more of the substance to obtain the same effect.
The one infected by the wind of error needs more and more negativity to feed the parasite growing inside them. In the initial phases, the person still controls their actions.
You can choose between feeding the parasite or letting it starve. But if feeding continues for years without interruption, the parasite grows to occupy more space than the wind of life.
And at that point, which the Mashafa Kidan calls the reversal point, the person loses control completely. It is no longer they who decide; it is the parasite who decides through them.
The person becomes a vehicle for the intentions of the wind of error. They speak words they do not recognize as their own, and they act in ways that horrify them when they have rare moments of lucidity.
And those moments of lucidity become shorter and more distant from each other until they disappear completely.
The healing that Jesus performed when he cast out demons was not an exorcism in the theatrical sense that the medieval Church created and that Hollywood popularized with horror movies.
It was not about shouting phrases in Latin, throwing holy water, or waving crucifixes. It was a direct intervention on the wind of error.
Jesus could see the parasite attached to the person’s soul; he could see its size, its shape, and its anchor point. With an act of will, he would tear it out like a surgeon who removes a tumor quickly, cleanly, and definitively.
But this was incredibly costly because tearing out an advanced wind of error required an enormous amount of energy that Jesus had to draw from his own life reserve.
This teaching was eliminated for a very specific reason. If the wind of error is a parasite that enters through greed, fear, and resentment, and if anyone can learn to identify and weaken it without the need for a priest, then the Church loses its monopoly on spiritual healing.
You do not need an episcopally authorized exorcist if you can learn to recognize the parasite in your own soul and stop feeding it.
You do not need a confessional if you understand that sin is not a legal stain that requires institutional absolution, but a living parasite that dies when you stop feeding it.
It is a teaching that returns spiritual power to the individual, telling each person that they have within themselves the necessary tools for their own spiritual healing. It shows that they do not need intermediaries, institutions, or paid rituals to access God.
And any institution that has built its power, wealth, and influence on the basis of being the obligatory intermediary between God and people has a direct and urgent interest in seeing that teaching disappear from the face of the earth.
The medieval Church became one of the richest institutions in Europe precisely because it sold access to God.
Mandatory tithes, indulgences that promised to reduce time in purgatory in exchange for money, fees for baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and confessionals where the priest had the monopoly on forgiveness all sustained this system.
That entire economic system depended on a single belief: that you could not reach God on your own, and that you needed the church as an intermediary.
And the teachings of the Mashafa Kidan destroy that belief from the root. Consequently, it disappeared from all the Bibles in the world, except one: the Ethiopian one.
Because the orders of destruction that came out of Rome and Constantinople never reached the monasteries in the Tigray mountains. The deserts and mountains of Ethiopia acted as a natural wall that protected those texts from the men who wanted to destroy them.
Sometimes geography saves what politics tries to kill. The descent into Sheol was the war that no one filmed.
Now I want to talk about what happened between Friday at 3 p.m., when Jesus died on the cross, and Sunday at dawn, when Mary Magdalene found the tomb empty.
This is approximately forty hours. It is forty hours about which your sixty-six-book Bible says practically nothing, leaving a huge gap in the narrative.
The main character of the story dies, and for forty hours, the story stops as if nothing happened.
But the Ethiopian texts and the Gospel of Nicodemus, which Western tradition classified as apocryphal so that it could be ignored, tell what happened during those forty hours.
And what happened is the most epic, most brutal, and most cinematically spectacular scene in the entire history of Christianity.
That is exactly what I am filming right now in Cinecittà with a budget of one hundred million dollars. And that is exactly what no Western church has ever told you.
When Jesus died on the cross, his spirit did not ascend to heaven; it descended downward to Sheol, the mansion of the dead. The Book of Enoch, chapter twenty-two, describes this as a place with four different compartments.
There is one for the righteous who died before the coming of Christ and who awaited redemption in a state of relative peace, and another for ordinary sinners.
There is another one for those who were unjustly murdered and whose blood cried out for justice from the earth, and another for the worst sinners in history who awaited final judgment in a state of torment.
The Gospel of Nicodemus describes what happened when Jesus arrived at the gates of Sheol.
Death, which in this text is a conscious entity with its own will, senses that something is approaching, something it has never felt before, something that terrifies it.
Because death has devoured every human being who has existed since Adam. She has never lost, never been challenged, and never been afraid.
But what is approaching now is not an ordinary human being coming to be devoured. He is the being who created death itself and comes to destroy it in its own house.
The text describes how Jesus arrives at the gates of Sheol and orders them to be opened.
The voice that speaks is not the voice of a man; it is the voice that said, “Let there be light,” at the beginning of creation. It is the same voice that parted the waters of the Red Sea, and the same voice that stopped the sun over Gibeon.
And when that voice says, “Open, eternal gates,” the bronze gates and iron bars that have kept the souls of the dead locked up since the beginning of time resist for the first time in their existence.
Death tries to keep them closed with all its might. It concentrates all the strength it has accumulated over millennia of devouring human souls to keep those gates sealed.
But Jesus breaks them down with a single word.
The gates of death, which had remained closed since the creation of the world and which had withstood the prayers of millions of righteous souls who begged to be freed, shatter as if they were made of glass under the impact of a hammer.
And the first thing that enters Sheol is not Jesus; it is light.
This is a light that Sheol had never known, because Sheol was created as a place of absolute darkness. It is a light so intense that the demons guarding the prisoners disintegrate like shadows at dawn.
It is a light that reaches every corner of the last compartment and touches every imprisoned soul like a ray of sunlight. It touches the face of someone who has been locked in a basement for years.
And what Jesus does inside Sheol is what convinced me that this film had to be made, not as just another project, but as the most important work of my career.
He seeks out the prisoners, goes compartment by compartment, freeing the souls of the righteous who have been waiting in darkness for millennia.
The Gospel of Nicodemus describes how Adam is the first to see him.
Adam, the first man, had been locked in Sheol for thousands of years, waiting for the descendant promised to him in Genesis, chapter three, verse fifteen. This was the descendant of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head.
There were thousands of years of waiting, thousands of years of darkness, and thousands of years wondering if the promise was true or if God had forgotten him.
And then the light enters Sheol like an explosion, and Adam sees a face. It is a face with features he recognizes because they are the features of his own offspring, mixed with something no human descendant could have.
It is a brilliance that does not come from outside, but from within. It is an authority that does not come from power, but from pure love.
Adam falls to his knees and weeps. He weeps as only someone who has waited thousands of years in darkness can weep, and who finally sees the light that was promised to him.
Because he recognizes in that face the being who created him, the being who breathed life into his nostrils in the Garden of Eden.
Jesus is his creator, but he is also his son, separated by thousands of generations, but his son nonetheless, flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bones.
And that creator son has descended to the lowest abyss of creation to take his imprisoned father by the hand and lead him out of the darkness where he has been locked away since the day he ate from the tree.
Abraham is there, along with Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, who waited thirteen centuries.
David is there, who wrote psalms about liberation from Sheol, not knowing he was prophesying his own liberation.
Isaiah is there, who prophesied the suffering servant, not knowing that that servant would come personally to bring him out of death.
Jeremiah is there, who wept for Jerusalem and now sees the being who will rebuild what Babylon destroyed.
Daniel is there, who saw the Son of Man in night visions and now sees him in person for the first time.
All the righteous of the Old Testament who died believing in a promise they did not see fulfilled in life see him enter Sheol. They understand that the waiting is over, that the promise was true, and that God did not lie.
They see that the being Enoch prophesied, the Son of Man whose name was spoken before the creation of the stars, has descended to the darkest corner of creation to rescue those whom death had held captive.
Ethiopian tradition says that Jesus took Adam by the hand and led him out of Sheol, literally by the hand.
The being who created the universe with a word decided that the liberation of the first man from death would not be accomplished by a cosmic decree issued from the throne of heaven.
It would be done in the most human way possible, by taking him by the hand, like a father taking a child out of a dark room where they have been locked away for too long. If this is not material for the greatest movie ever made, I do not know what is.
The forty-day Jesus is remarkable, but what comes after Sheol is perhaps the most important of all, and it is the part the Western Church most determinedly cut out.
The canonical gospels briefly mention that Jesus spent forty days with his disciples between the resurrection and the ascension.
Luke says that during those forty days he spoke to them about the kingdom of God, but he does not record exactly what he said.
These were forty days of teaching from the most important being in the universe to the men who were going to carry his message to the world. And yet, your Bible does not transcribe a single sentence of what he taught.
The Mashafa Kidan does transcribe, or at least preserve, a tradition about what Jesus taught during those forty days.
And what he taught is so radically different from what the Western Church preaches that you immediately understand why it was cut out.
He taught that the kingdom of God is not a geographical place that you go to when you die.
It is a state of consciousness you access when the wind of life overcomes the wind of error within your soul.
The kingdom of God is within you, not as a metaphor, but as a literal reality.
It is a state where you perceive reality as it is, without the filters of fear, greed, and resentment. It is a place where you see each person as what they truly are: a spark of divine light enveloped in a temporary body of flesh.
It is a state where you understand that death is not the end, but a doorway, and where the separation between you and God is revealed as an illusion created by the wind of error.
He taught that prayer is not a list of requests you send to God expecting him to fulfill them like a genie in a lamp.
It is an act of tuning, like adjusting the frequency of a radio to pick up a signal that is always being transmitted, but that you normally cannot hear because there is too much noise.
The noise is the wind of error, while the signal is the wind of life. Prayer is simply the act of turning down the volume of the noise so you can hear the signal clearly.
He taught that forgiveness is an act of moral generosity toward the person who wronged you, but it is not actually something you do for the other person.
It is an act of spiritual survival you do for yourself, because resentment is the primary food of the wind of error. It is its favorite food, its main course.
Every time you relive an offense you received, every time you reconstruct the scene of the wrong in detail, every time you imagine scenarios of revenge where you humiliate the person who hurt you, and every time you feel that dark, addictive pleasure of hating someone who wronged you, you are setting a feast before the parasite.
And the parasite eats, grows, and demands even more. Forgiveness does not free your enemy; your enemy probably does not even know you hate them.
Your enemy is living their life while you waste your vital energy feeding a parasite with your own resentment.
Forgiveness frees you. It cuts off the parasite’s food supply and weakens it until it dries up and detaches from the soul like a dead tick that no longer has blood to feed on.
I have studied this teaching for months, and what struck me is how incredibly practical it is.
It is not abstract theology, nor is it complicated moral philosophy; it is a concrete instruction manual for cleansing the soul of spiritual parasites.
Step one: identify the parasite. Step two: stop feeding it. Step three: the parasite dies on its own.
You do not need an exorcist, you do not need a priest, and you do not need to buy anything or pay anyone.
You just need to understand the mechanism and stop cooperating with your own destruction.
He taught that silence between thoughts is the gateway to the kingdom of God.
We normally live trapped in a constant torrent of thoughts that follow one after another without pause, like cars on an endless train that never stops.
One thought leads to the next, which leads to the next, which leads to the next continuously.
And that torrent is largely generated by the winds of error to keep us busy, distracted, exhausted, and unable to perceive the reality beneath the noise.
But if you learn to create a space of silence between one thought and the next, even if it is just for a second, and even if it is just the smallest fraction of time you can imagine, you perceive something in that space.
You perceive a presence that has no name, a peace that does not depend on external circumstances, and a certainty that does not come from the mind, but from a place deeper than the mind.
And that place is where the wind of life lives, where God lives within you.
That place has never been contaminated by the wind of error because the wind of error cannot exist in silence; it only exists in noise, and it only feeds on thoughts.
If thoughts stop, even for an instant, the parasite is left without food.
And in that instant, you can perceive what you truly are beneath all the layers of fear, greed, and resentment that have accumulated over the years.
I have read these teachings of the Mashafa Kidan dozens of times, and every time I read them, I am struck by the same thing.
They sound less like a first-century religious sermon and more like a twenty-first-century contemplative neuroscience manual.
What Jesus describes as the wind of error, modern neuroscience calls the brain’s negativity bias.
It is the documented evolutionary tendency of the human nervous system to pay more attention to threats than opportunities, to remember negative experiences more intensely than positive ones, and to automatically and involuntarily generate thoughts of worry, anticipation of danger, and catastrophic scenarios.
Neuroscientists have measured this tendency with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and confirmed that the human brain reacts more quickly and intensely to negative stimuli than to positive ones.
This is exactly what the Mashafa Kidan describes as the wind of error feeding on negative thoughts.
What Jesus describes as the silence between thoughts, modern science studies under the name of mindfulness meditation.
Researchers at Harvard University, led by Sara Lazar, have documented with fMRI that the regular practice of meditation produces measurable changes in brain structure.
There is an increase in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for conscious decision-making, and a reduction in gray matter in the amygdala, the area responsible for fear and stress responses.
Literally, the brain of a person who regularly practices inner silence is physically reconfigured in a way that reduces the influence of what Jesus called the wind of error and increases the influence of what he called the wind of life.
What Jesus describes as the wind of life, cutting-edge researchers in neuroscience and quantum physics are beginning to explore under concepts such as non-local consciousness and quantum coherence fields.
This is the idea that consciousness is not a product of the brain, but something that exists independently of the brain, and that the brain functions more as a receiver than a generator.
It is an idea that sounds mystical until you read the articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that are seriously investigating it.
I am not saying that Jesus was a neuroscientist. I am saying that the teachings the Church removed from the Bible describe, using ancient terminology, phenomena that twenty-first-century science is only just beginning to understand.
And that should make us ask why they were removed.
Because if these teachings were simply wrong, they would not be dangerous; they would be completely ridiculous. Nobody removes ridiculous texts.
They remove the texts that are true and that threaten the power of those who decide what is true. They hid the cosmic Christ from you.
In Western churches, Jesus is presented primarily as the good shepherd: kind, compassionate, approachable, the friend who is always there when you need him, the one who forgives seventy times seven, and the one who speaks comfort.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
And that is true, but it is only one facet of a polyhedron with many more sides.
The Ethiopian texts present a Christ who is simultaneously the kind shepherd and something much greater, much more terrifying, and much more incomprehensible to the human mind.
The Book of Enoch describes him as a being whose head is white as wool, whose eyes are like flames of fire, whose voice makes mountains tremble, and whose presence causes the most powerful angels in heaven to prostrate themselves on the ground, unable to look him directly in the eye.
It is exactly the same description that appears in Revelation, chapter one, verses thirteen to sixteen.
There is the same white head like wool, the same eyes like flames of fire, the same feet like burnished bronze in a blazing furnace, the same voice like the sound of many waters, and the same double-edged sword coming out of his mouth.
Revelation is in your Bible, but Enoch is not, yet the two describe the exact same being with the exact same words.
The question is obvious, and no one asks it: if Enoch’s description matches Revelation’s point by point, and if they both use the same imagery, the same words, and the same metaphors to describe the same being, why was Enoch removed from the Bible and Revelation was not?
University of Iowa scholar George Nickelsburg spent decades producing the definitive scholarly commentary on the English Book of Enoch.
When he placed the two texts side by side, Enoch and Revelation, he said the parallels were undeniable, and the weight of that realization took him years to fully assimilate.
He argued that the author of Revelation was drinking directly from the Enochian tradition; he was not inventing something new. He was repeating a vision that was already ancient when John wrote the first word on Patmos.
And there is one more fact that most Christians do not know: the Epistle of Jude, which is in your Bible right now in verses fourteen and fifteen, quotes the Book of Enoch verbatim, word for word.
Jude treats Enoch as an authoritative prophecy, worthy of standing alongside the Torah and the writings of the prophets.
The New Testament authors knew Enoch, quoted Enoch, and treated Enoch as sacred scripture. And yet, three centuries later, powerful men decided that you did not have the right to read it.
In the year 363, the Council of Laodicea formally rejected the Book of Enoch. Copies were systematically destroyed, and the text was labeled dangerous, far too dangerous for ordinary believers.
That was the official position, but they did not get close to getting all the copies.
The answer to why they eliminated Enoch and not Revelation is that Enoch describes the cosmic Christ in a context the Church simply could not control.
Enoch speaks of fallen angels who taught humans metallurgy, cosmetics, astrology, and weaponry. He speaks of giants born from the union of angels and women, and he speaks of a corruption of creation that was the true cause of the flood.
He speaks of a final judgment where the Son of Man will judge not only humans, but the very angels who rebelled against God.
This context was completely unacceptable to a church that was building a monopoly on spiritual truth.
Because if fallen angels taught humans advanced knowledge, then the origin of human civilization is not at all what the Church teaches.
And if the Son of Man is going to judge the angels, then his authority far exceeds that of any earthly institution that claims to represent him.
And if the corruption of the world has an angelic as well as a human origin, then the doctrine of original sin that the Western Church built upon Augustine of Hippo is seriously challenged.
The Book of Enoch was suppressed because it contained too much truth in the wrong hands.
It was theological dynamite that could demolish the foundations of ecclesiastical power if ordinary people had free access to it.
And that is why the monks of Ethiopia, isolated on their cliffs thousands of miles from Rome and Constantinople, were the only ones who preserved it. This was not because they were rebels, but simply because they did not know they were supposed to destroy it.
The orders to destroy it never reached those remote mountains. This history informs what I am filming.
When I sit on the soundstage at Cinecittà every morning and look at the sets my team has built for the resurrection of Christ, I think of those monks.
I think of men who lived in caves carved into cliffs two thousand meters high in the Tigray Mountains of northern Ethiopia.
These were men who rose before dawn to pray, who ate once a day, who slept on the cold stone floor, and who spent the daylight hours copying manuscripts by the light of oil lamps made from sheep fat. Their hands were cracked from the cold of the altitude, and their eyes were ravaged by decades of meticulous work on parchment.
Each manuscript took them months of hard labor, and some took years.
They prepared the parchment by scraping goatskins until they were as thin as paper, and they mixed ink with ground minerals and plant extracts.
They cut reeds to make quills, which they sharpened with obsidian knives.
And then, letter by letter, line by line, and page by page, they copied the sacred texts in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language, which they themselves barely understood because it was so ancient that no one spoke it in everyday life anymore.
They did not know that what they were preserving would one day change the world.
They did not know that two thousand years later, a Hollywood film director would read their manuscripts and decide to invest one hundred million dollars to put their words on the big screen. They knew nothing of that.
They simply did it because they believed it was the absolute truth, and that the truth deserved to be copied, preserved, and passed on to the next generation, regardless of whether anyone would ever read it.
They did it whether she needed it or not, because truth does not need to be needed to deserve to exist.
The Garima Gospels, discovered in the monastery of Abba Garima and carbon-dated by a team from Oxford University to between the years 330 and 660, are among the oldest surviving illuminated Christian manuscripts anywhere on Earth.
They contain full-color illuminations of the life of Christ, preserved in astonishing conditions for over sixteen centuries inside a remote mountain monastery, completely unknown to the Western world until a few decades ago.
Jacques Mercier, the French art historian who helped bring these manuscripts to international attention, described the experience of seeing them for the first time as a literal physical shock.
Seventeen centuries later, someone is reading it, and not just reading it, but filming it with a one hundred million dollar budget and the most advanced technology that modern cinema can offer.
This is being done so that three hundred million people may see on a movie screen what those monks saw in the fragile pages of their manuscripts.
The Jesus we are going to put on screen in 2027 is not the meek Jesus of the catechism, nor is he the blond, blue-eyed Jesus of old Hollywood movies.
He is not the domesticated Jesus that the Western Church has been selling for centuries as if he were a mass-market product.
He is the Jesus who existed before the stars, the one who descended through seven heavens, concealing his divinity at each level to execute his plan.
He is the one who walked among human beings for thirty-three years, seeing the deep pain of every person he met, and transferring his own life force to every sick person he healed.
He is the one who sweated blood in Gethsemane because his body was physically destroyed after three years of giving without stopping.
He is the one who died on the cross and descended into the depths of Sheol to take Adam by the hand and bring him out of the darkness.
He is the one who rose again and, for forty days, taught his disciples secrets about the two winds of the soul, which the Church considered far too dangerous for you to know.
This is the cosmic Christ that Enoch prophesied and that Revelation confirms, and the one that the Ethiopian Bible preserved in full for seventeen hundred years while the rest of the world made do with the abridged version.
The Ethiopian Bible has eighty-one books, while yours has sixty-six.
And in the fifteen that are missing is the complete Jesus, the one they never introduced you to, and the one you are finally going to know.
