They don’t give you the journey, but the Ascension of Isaiah does.

The traditions preserved in the Ethiopian church do.

The broader landscape of early Christian cosmic theology does.

Gibson is Catholic.

He’s deeply rooted in tradition.

Whether or not he draws directly from texts like first Enoch or the Ascension of Isaiah, the theological ideas behind those texts have echoed through Christian thought for centuries.

In the Apostles Creed’s phrase, he descended into hell.

In medieval vision literature in Dante, in Milton, these ideas never fully disappeared.

They simply went underground.

A Gibson resurrection film that takes the multi-realm cosmic descent tradition seriously could achieve something remarkable.

It could introduce millions of viewers to a version of the Christ story that is wilder, more visually stunning, and more theologically ambitious than anything mainstream cinema has attempted.

It could show audiences that the story they think they know has dimensions they’ve never experienced.

Think about the visual potential alone.

Seven heavens, each one unique, each one growing in glory and fear.

Angels that don’t look like Hallmark cards.

They resemble the creatures described in Ezekiel and Revelation.

Wheels within wheels, eyes covering every surface.

Voices that shake the foundations of reality.

a Christ figure moving through these realms, not as a passive spirit, but as a conquering king, reclaiming territory, breaking chains, descending into the deepest darkness before rising through every level of creation.

That’s not just a religious film.

That’s a cinematic spectacle.

And the cultural impact could be enormous.

The Passion of the Christ didn’t just make money.

It changed how people talked about faith in public.

It sparked conversations in churches, classrooms, and living rooms that lasted for years.

A resurrection film that draws on the cosmic traditions of early Christianity could do the same thing, but with a broader scope.

It could make people ask questions they’ve never thought to ask.

Questions about what was left out of the Bible, about who made those decisions, about what else might be waiting in the manuscript traditions of churches they’ve never heard of.

And it could send many people to their search engines typing in phrases like Book of Enoch, Seven Heavens, and Ethiopian Bible, which might be exactly what this story needs.

We tell ourselves nothing is hidden anymore.

That every manuscript has been scanned, every mystery uploaded, every secret turned into searchable text.

And yet the most powerful truths are often the ones we never think to search for.

In the highlands of Ethiopia within the tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Teahedo Church, those pages still exist, not as relics, but as living scripture, preserved through conquest, isolation, and centuries of doubt.

If a modern filmmaker reaches back into that ancient well, if the next chapter on screen dares to show the unseen realm between death and resurrection, it won’t just be cinema.

It will be a meeting between forgotten theology and a global audience that never knew it was missing something.

So the real question isn’t whether these books survived.

They did.

The question is this.

When the rest of the world finally looks up and sees what was always there, will we recognize it as lost history or as something we were never meant to forget?

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