The Jesus Video (novel)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Jesus Video is a 1998 published science fiction - novel by Andreas Eschbach . Eschbach was awarded the German Science Fiction Prize for the fourth time in 1999 for Das Jesus-Video .

overview

The novel is about a skeleton that is found during an archaeological excavation and is 2000 years old. He has the operating instructions for a video camera that will only be on the market in three years. The one found is apparently a time traveler who likely filmed Jesus Christ. The finders now suspect that his camera is still buried somewhere. A race begins between the donor of the excavations, the student Stephen Foxx and the Vatican, which does not want to see such a video published at all.

The novel has since been published in numerous languages ​​and was also made into a film for television in 2002 under the title Das Jesus Video .

action

American college student Stephen Cornelius Foxx finds the remains of a man who died 2000 years ago during archaeological digs under Professor Charles Wilford-Smith in Israel . Next to the skeleton is a linen bag containing the operating instructions for a video camera that also appears to be 2000 years old, but whose video camera is not expected to be on the market for three years. According to the first assumption, the find is said to be the skeleton of a time traveler who is said to have traveled 2000 years into the past to shoot a video of Jesus Christ. The media czar and financier of the project, John Kaun, starts a search for the associated camera, which the researchers suspect is hidden in a secret location along with the film footage. He gets support from the German writer Peter Eisenhardt, who is supposed to help Kaun with his imagination to find the camera, and several specialists in antiquity, who are supposed to find a suitable hiding place for the camera with their specialist knowledge of the Israel of the time. where it could survive unnoticed for 2000 years. Kaun seems to have almost inexhaustible financial reserves.

But Stephen Foxx, who doesn't want to be marginalized, wants to find the camera on his own. He is supported by the excavation assistant Judith Menez and her brother Yehoshuah, an employee of the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. The three young people are always one step ahead of John Kaun, also because Stephen Foxx withholding a folded letter when he found it, which the three are able to make partially legible at the Yehoshuah Institute. In this it becomes clear that the time traveler did not carry out a planned action, but by chance fell through time during a vacation in Israel with nothing but the camera in hand and reappeared in Israel at the time of Jesus. He writes in the letter that he was taken in by a family who were learning their language and who later married. He also writes about how he heard about Jesus, filmed him and where he hid the camera. While they are hiding in the institute, they are found by Ryan, Kaun's security chief, but are able to escape. The letter was destroyed and parts of the laboratory's equipment caught fire. Stephen, Judith and Yehoshuah suspect the camera is buried under the Western Wall because of the letter , but have to realize that the visible part of the Western Wall is only the uppermost and the camera should therefore be buried at a depth of 20 meters. The father of Judith and Yehoshuah, a man who used to research the wall, reveals to the two that there is a tunnel at the point where the camera is suspected of the three, which has not yet been examined by anyone. It was dug hundreds of years ago by monks who later built a monastery in the Negev desert .

The three conclude that the monks must have found the camera and keep it hidden in their monastery . When they reach the monastery, they are tracked down by Kaun and his security guards, who have been persecuting them all along. But they manage to follow one of the monks into hiding. There they discover that their theory is correct and that the monks are actually keeping the camera hidden. Every hundred years one of them is allowed to look in the “mirror”, as they call it, turn on the camera for a split second and see the face of Jesus. Stephen and Judith are given the camera on condition that they show each of them the picture of Jesus. They escape through a well through which they get out of the monastery. They get lost in the desert and are found shortly before dying of thirst by Kaun, who saves them but takes the camera. When they come to in a hospital set up by Kaun, Kaun watches the video in an adjoining room. A representative of the Vatican Secret Service named Scarfaro, whom Kaun previously alerted with the utopian demand of $ 10 billion not to publish the video, gains access to Kaun, shoots him and steals the video to put it on the spot to destroy. Foxx is banned from entering Jerusalem for five years because the only thing that can be proven is that archaeological artifacts were damaged during the excavation, and he continues to head his software company.

Three years later, Stephen Foxx makes a couple of observations and discoveries that give him the idea that then excavation director Charles Wilford-Smith knew more than he was ready to admit. Together with the writer Eisenhardt, he goes to him in England and confronts him with his theses, all of which he admits. According to this, Wilford-Smith accidentally discovered a Sony cassette in a cave near Qumran in 1947 , but at that time he could not do anything with it, since such cassettes had not yet been developed. It wasn't until the first videos were invented in the decades that followed and Sony became a major brand that he realized what he must have discovered back then. He gave up his job and began to study archeology in the hope of eventually finding the missing camera to be able to play the video. When he discovered that the camera he had been looking for for decades would be released in a few years, he lost interest in looking for it. The aging professor shows them the video that shows a Jesus whose appearance corresponds to the common ideas of how he eats bread with other people, talks to them and does other everyday activities. Shortly thereafter, they are ambushed by unidentified gunmen who have followed Foxx and appropriated the video. While Foxx is enthusiastic and transformed by the video, Eisenhardt is disappointed and expresses the assumption that it must be posed. Wilford-Smith reveals to the two that he and others have made numerous copies and have already passed them on worldwide. The video can no longer be destroyed.

After another two and a half years, Eisenhardt visits Stephen in his home country in America, where he is currently running a friend's restaurant in Arizona, while he is unable to attend due to illness. With Stephen is also Judith, whom he visited after his five years in Israel and with whom he has been together ever since. They talk about the video and Stephen tells him that a kind of community has formed that meet regularly to watch the video and share it with others. While they are talking, a young man enters the restaurant who starts a conversation with them. The man who calls himself John wants to travel to Israel to see the famous religious sites and he proudly says that he bought a new, modern camera especially for this. It becomes clear that this young man is the one who a little later will unintentionally travel through time and shoot the Jesus videos.

continuation

In April 2014, Eschbach announced via the newsletter on its homepage that a manuscript with the title The Jesus Deal was almost finished. It is both a sequel and a prehistory of Das Jesus-Video . The novel The Jesus Deal has been published by Bastei Lübbe since October 8, 2014 .

Editions and filming

Translations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book shelf: "Jesus Video" at Andreaseschbach.de, accessed on October 17, 2012.
  2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.luebbe.de