Star Trek’s Captain Kirk Vs Jesus
Star Trek has always had an interesting relationship with religion. A new publication has revealed that Gene Roddenberry wanted to take that further and have Kirk fight Jesus.
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According to The Hollywood Reporter a recently released, unauthorized Star Trek publication claims that the original version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture would have had Captain Kirk fighting an alien disguised as Jesus. The Fifty Year Mission, by Edward Gross and Mark A Altman, claims that Gene Roddenberry, the god of Star Trek, worked on a number of concepts that never came into fruition.
One of the wackier concepts in the book would have pitted James Kirk against shape-shifting alien that could pose as biblical characters such as Jesus. Time travel adventures were also developed where the crew would travel back to thwart to Kennedy assassination and stop various other atrocities.
Star Trek has always had a indifferent view towards religion, seeing it as something humanity evolved beyond. A scene involving Kirk fighting Jesus would actually be pretty metaphorical and make the view literal. Star Trek author, Michael Jan Friedman, was employed to take the concepts and make them into a novel but he struggled with the idea of Kirk fighting with Jesus and failed to create anything from the outlandish concepts. He described the ideas:
"“To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was — and still is — one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him. But when I read the material, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw this time could not possibly have been his best work. It was disjointed — scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ … So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus.”"
We are hoping the new movie that is set to hit the cinemas in a few weeks won’t feature any biblical characters, but it is sure to be an epic movie.
See the trailer: