Movie Review: The Carpenter’s Son (2025)
When I heard about The Carpenter’s Son, a film said to be based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, I was excited. This was going to be the culmination of my life’s work. Everyone will want to know what I think of the adaptation. I’ll be a star. Well, the film was released in late 2025 to minor controversy and little box office returns. Here in Canada, it went right to streaming. No one, it seems, cares.
Except me, and a handful of students who joined me to watch the film last week. Our interest, of course, was to examine how the film utilizes the stories and themes of the apocryphal text. First, though, what is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas? It is one of the earliest apocryphal Christian texts—by which is meant a text that features stories and/or teachings of Jesus but was not selected for inclusion in the New Testament. Scholars generally date Infancy Thomas in the middle to late second century. It was composed in Greek but it is extant also in translations into Syriac, Latin, Old Irish, Georgian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Church Slavic. It was certainly a popular text. But a bit unorthodox. Here is a summary based on its most well-known form.
In the introduction, Thomas the Israelite Philosopher states that he composed the text to tell Gentiles about what Jesus did as a child in Nazareth. Jesus is introduced as a five-year-old boy playing at a stream. His first act is …