If the New Testament were to be adapted to accommodate the somewhat common-place possibility that one can die and rise from the dead, it might save the Christians a lot of stress even if it might deprive the film makers of some opportunities to win the Oscars.
How many documented instances are there of people who were buried alive and then rose from the dead...and others who prophesised about 'a close brush' with death? Watch Channel Discovery!
Many years ago' the Eastern peoples practised levitation or the art of raising oneself from the earth against the force of gravity and then floating about.
Houdini and the ancient tradition of magic have demonstrated the art of escape - or the deception of escape - over centuries so that disappearance from the tomb that held Jesus should not have been beyond the capabilities of man or his imagination.
Disappearance without trace, man and the police have learnt over many years, is by no means anything of a monopoly of Christ.
Of course, Christ would have had to perform a few more miracles so that the idea, or the deception intended by the writers of the Bible, should have stuck.
On one occasion he served multitudes on two or three fish and an equally small number of loaves of bread. The fellows in New Orleans, Katutura, Old Naledi, Makhkhoba, Soweto and Bombay (Mumbai) have perfected this trick into something of a nightly routine haven't they?
Not so long ago the Jews were infuriated by Mel Gibson's pointed insinuations about the cruelty they brought upon Christ on the eve of his death.
Many other filmmakers have stood on the receiving end of unkind words of the believers because they dared to update the world about some scientific discoveries that have been made and continue to be made about not so much the birth but the death of Christ.
I say, if we must believe in spirits and avoid undue stress, let us stick with our very own ancestors whom we know by name and according to the teachings of the Griots.
At worst what the African will need is a photographic mind and no cameras at all.
There is plenty of idle time in Africa so there will be no payment for producers and directors who will want to turn the whole thing into a business, as did Alex Haley and Roots.
There will be no need to prove and corroborate evidence because you shall have lived with the people who will graduate to the status of ancestors when they die.
In the 1970s when I lived as a young man in New York, news broke that a luminous cross had appeared at the centre of a church in Harlem signalling the return of Christ.
Black folk, most of them miserably poor, almost killed each other with everyone wanting to have personal sight of this glorious event.
It took one mischievous fellow to discover that it was in fact a trick of the light rays that shone through the artistically painted windows, crossing at the centre of the church near the pulpit, that gave the impression of a star-like cross at a particular time of evening.
It will take much more scientific evidence and stress among the Africans to dissipate the biblical story of Jesus.
