What drew you toward Jesus—and what have you learned by looking closely at the crucifixion story and its cultural afterlives?

Rick Rosner tells Scott Douglas Jacobsen he has become “increasingly a fan of Jesus,” sparked by restoring a battered, high-relief 3D crucifixion mosaic in his office. Staring at it daily pushes him to contrast gospel portrayals with modern Christian nationalist claims and to learn textual details he missed: in John’s passion narrative, Jesus is already dead before soldiers consider breaking legs, and the spear-thrust follows. He points to the “glutton and drunkard” taunt, notes early devotion to Christ, then riffs into pop-culture reimaginings, an “Old Jesus” pitch, and a brief Alex Pretti coda. before heading back to bed at dawn.

Rick Rosner: So I’m increasingly a fan of Jesus.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you mean by that? What are the specific reasons?

Rosner: A couple of years ago, I bought this very beat-up giant 3D mosaic of Jesus up on the cross, with his friends—his mom, Mary, and his disciple, John—standing beside him.

It’s a pretty unique mosaic because it’s three-dimensional. It’s high relief. The body of Jesus and the cross, and Mary and John, aren’t flat. They’re actually sculpted and covered with mosaic tile. And I got it for cheap. I got it for 120 bucks at auction because about 3% of it was missing. Giant chunks of it had fallen.

I assume the thing weighs almost 25 pounds because it’s 3D, and mosaics are heavy anyway, and then you’ve got the bodies of everybody. I think it probably tore out of the wall where it was hanging, and it knocked a bunch of pieces off. For the past two years, every once in a while, I’ll get in there and paste in a couple more tiles, and I’m about 93% of the way to completely restoring it.

It’s in my office. I stare at Jesus and friends every day, and it makes me think about Jesus. And at a time when it would really be nice to have Jesus around—when tens of millions of Americans call themselves Christians but are acting in very unchristian ways—these are the Christian nationalist, white nationalist, racist mofos who want the browns and the blacks and the yellows and what have you out.

They’re not Christian at all, but they’re claiming Jesus for themselves. And I don’t know, I’ve been putting Jesus tweets up. I put one up today. I said, “Community agitator, executed by Roman authorities, no investigation forthcoming,” and then I put up a little video of Jesus dragging his cross and then getting nailed up there. It’s an obvious point to make. But for a Jew, I think a lot about Jesus.

And I’ve learned new stuff about Jesus. I used to see the classic image—Jesus on the cross, eyes closed—and I thought of him as still alive, suffering. But in the Gospel of John, the sequence is: the soldiers come to break legs, they see Jesus is already dead, so they do not break his legs, and then a soldier pierces his side with a spear. That’s when the wound in the side happens in that account.

The stabbing of Jesus—I didn’t understand this at all. We don’t learn about Jesus in Sunday school if you’re Jewish. I thought maybe the centurion was doing him a favor by stabbing him so he’d die quicker and wouldn’t suffer as much. But in John, it’s not framed as mercy; it’s after they’ve judged him dead, and the spear is part of the crucifixion scene that follows that judgment.

And in that same passage, when he’s pierced, blood and water come out. John reports it as an observed detail and a point of testimony, but it’s not something we can treat like a neat “toothpick test” medical proof from the text alone.

So I had no idea that I was restoring a mosaic of a dead guy, instead of a soon-to-be-dead guy, which kind of creeps me out.

Jacobsen: What else have you learned?

Rosner: Today I asked, “Was Jesus a good hang? Was he fun to be around?” The historically grounded version is: he clearly ate and drank with people enough that opponents mocked him as “a glutton and a drunkard” and “a friend of tax collectors and sinners,” which at minimum suggests he wasn’t living like a hermit. He could also be confrontational at times—think temple disruption scenes in the gospels—so “always mild” is not accurate, either.

Jacobsen: Are there any aspects you do not like?

Rosner: I do not like that we have no idea what he actually looked like. If you go by what we can infer from skeletal data for the region and period, one scholarly estimate puts average adult male height in Jesus’s region at about 166 cm (about 5’5″), give or take—but nobody recorded his height.

And the “he probably had smallpox because everybody did back then” part is not right. Smallpox is ancient, but its presence, timing, and ubiquity in the Greco-Roman world are debated, and you cannot responsibly assume Jesus had it, let alone that “everybody did.”

Because if Jesus comes back, it is a problem if he comes back in the body he had. Because then he is a little guy and his face might be pocked up. And that is bad if you are trying to be an influencer. Because Jesus would be the influencer. But he would probably want to come back in a bigger body without scars.

What else? John—in the mosaic I am restoring—John is wearing green and red. And then I looked at some other depictions of them hanging out. This is a standard arrangement of people in religious art: John, Mary, Jesus. And it turns out Mary is very often shown in blue (often a blue mantle), and John is very often in red, with green showing up frequently in some traditions, though his color scheme is not as fixed as Mary’s.

And Mary wearing blue is not only “royal” in the modern sense; it is also tied to long-running iconographic symbolism and, historically, the fact that blue pigments (especially ultramarine from lapis lazuli) were costly and often reserved for elevated figures.

I also learned that, to mock Jesus, the Romans dressed him in a robe. The gospels vary on the color language—some describe it as purple, another as scarlet—but the point is consistent: it is meant as mocking “royal” dress.

There is not a lot of historical evidence of Jesus. He is mentioned in a small number of non-Christian sources, and the earliest surviving Christian writings are Paul’s letters, written in the 50s CE—within a couple of decades of Jesus’ death, not generations later. The gospels are later than Paul and are commonly dated to a few decades after Jesus’ death.

And “Bethlehem or some damn place?”—the tradition places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, but he is associated above all with Nazareth, and that is why he is “Jesus of Nazareth.”

Also, the idea that Jesus was not worshipped as divine until the end of the first century is too late. Whatever one thinks theologically, devotion to Jesus and “Son of God” language show up very early in the movement; by the early second century, a Roman governor is already describing Christians singing to Christ “as to a god.”

So anyway, I know a little bit about Jesus now.

And since there is not that much of a historical record, you mostly have the New Testament plus later traditions. He is a kind of blank slate if you want to play with different narratives, which people have done. Scorsese did The Last Temptation of Christ.

I want to do a TV show called Old Jesus. Jesus is nailed up there. He is not dead. His disciples decide, “This is bullshit. Let’s save Jesus.” So they pay off the centurions who are guarding him. They bribe them. They go to a local morgue, find a lookalike guy, pull down Jesus, and put up the lookalike. They take Jesus away. Then God turns out to be pissed: “You are defying your destiny.” And as punishment, he makes Jesus live on earth indefinitely.

There is a real, later legend-adjacent shape to that “cursed to live until the Second Coming” idea, but it is not a centurion in the Bible; it is a medieval Christian folklore figure often called the “Wandering Jew.”

Anyway, we join Jesus 2,000 years later, where he is still on earth hanging out. He is kind of like a one-man A-Team. He is still a good guy. And since he has been around for 2,000 years, he is good at getting things done. Mostly he likes to hang out until he finds a problem. Like The Equalizer. He does not look for trouble, but trouble comes to him. People look for him; there are rumors he is around. And then every week he has an adventure where he uses his Jesusy knowledge and maybe mild miracle-making. Anyway, you get a cool guy like Jeff Bridges to be Old Jesus, because he has aged. It is 2,000 years later.

There was a show called Preacher that had the return of Jesus. It turns out that a secret organization has preserved the bloodline through centuries of inbreeding, and the descendant they present is severely impaired. So anyway, people have fun with Jesus.

All right. Do you want to go to bed? It is five in the morning, or do you want to listen to more techno? OK. One more thing. We will probably talk about tomorrow, when it is not five in the morning.

There are new videos that surfaced showing Alex Pretti scuffling with federal officers in Minneapolis 11 days before he was killed by federal agents. It is being argued over politically: some are pointing to it to smear him; others are arguing that, whatever is in it, you do not deserve to be killed for vandalism or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So anyway, that is what is going on. Talk to you tomorrow.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

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