Jesus Christ
- You may be looking for Jesus Delporto.
Jesus of Nazareth, originally known as Joshua-bar-Joseph according to the Roman Gemellus, was the central figure of Christianity. According to Gemellus, he lived during the time of the Caesars Augustus and Tiberius in the regions of Judaea and Syria. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
Biography
Gemellus maintained that he was a carpenter's son, a child prodigy, and "extremely handsome, charismatic and persuasive". He was able to amass great audiences when he spoke, and his lectures often attacked Judaism as inadequate to inform the rigours of daily life.
Those who came to follow Jesus as a deity believed he was the Messiah, "Christos" meaning "saviour" in Greek. Others thought of him as a "maverick rabbi", or a "false prophet".
Eventually, betrayed by Jewish religious leaders who had become jealous of his abilities, he was nailed to a stauros, or cross, on Easter. In the 21st year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the Pharisees, leaders of the Jewish community, influenced the Roman procurator of the area, Pontius Pilate, to have Jesus executed for heresy.
Gemellus also knew of a story, of which he was no great believer, that Jesus' body, after death, had somehow vanished after its entombment. Christians, he said, believed that he had come back to life, resurrected by the Jewish God. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
References
The Tenth Doctor hinted to have been present at Christ's birth (TV: Voyage of the Damned) and to remember what really happened at the first Easter, (TV: Planet of the Dead) the time of his death. (PROSE: Byzantium!) The Eighth Doctor had already claimed to have attended the first Christmas in Bethlehem. (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions)
Christians from just after the time of Christ believed they were being systematically suppressed by the same combination of Jewish and Roman interests who had killed Jesus. The First Doctor once met a man named Daniel who insisted that the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem was conspiring to discredit Christianity. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
On 3 March 1215, Kamelion, disguised as King John, sang a chant about the liberation of Christ's tomb in Palestine from the Saracens in the Crusades. (TV: The King's Demons)
In 1968, the Sentience appeared to Abbot Mervyn Winstanley as Jesus Christ so it could feed on his life energy. (PROSE: Nightshade)
Jack Harkness implicitly compared Jesus' conception to how a Nostrovite exobiologically implanted its eggs into Gwen Cooper. (TV: Something Borrowed)
Owen Harper compared himself to Jesus, as both came back from the dead, but "without the beard". (TV: A Day in the Death)
After the Eleventh Doctor helped capture the Atraxi's prisoner in 2008, he called the Atraxi back to Earth. The Atraxi displayed an image of the Corcovado statue, the iconic statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, when the Doctor asked, "Is this world a threat to the Atraxi?" (TV: The Eleventh Hour)
Behind the scenes
Jesus was played by Kenneth Colley in the 1979 film Monty Python's Life of Brian, and by John Hurt in the 1981 film History of the World Part I.