Paul Verhoeven, Zwartboek (Black Book) aside, is perhaps known for sex, gore, aliens, robots and satirical looks at America, not so much religious icons such as Jesus Christ. Apparently, according to heavy rumours, he's making a film about Christ.

The rumour is over at WENN through Cinema Blend, and Josh at CB quite rightly points out that WENN have been known to be unreliable with their rumours before, so bucket of salt with this one. However, if it's true it sounds set to be controversy galore.

The working title once rumored for it was Christ, the Man, and apparently there’s now some movement on the whole thing again. The current incarnation is supposed tell Jesus’s story as if he’s not a god made man flesh but instead just a dude.

It seems that Verhoeven is planning to be ultra controversial by avoiding all his usual traits and bringing a film to the screen about a normal man who doesn't do anything god like at all. Now that will have bags of controversy associated with it, the idea that Christ was just an average man has long been touted and equally as long been drastically cut down by the Christian movement.

According to the story Verhoeven is a member of the Jesus Seminar, who according to Wikipedia are...(over the page)...

...a research team of about two hundred academic New Testament scholars founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk under the auspices of the Westar Institute.[1] The seminar's purpose is to use historical methods to determine what Jesus, as a historical figure, may or may not have said or done. They produced new translations of the New Testament plus the Gospel of Thomas to use as textual sources. They published their results in the books The Five Gospels (1993) and The Acts of Jesus (1998).

The seminar's reconstruction of Jesus portrays him as a wandering sage who did not found a religion or rise from the dead, but preached in startling parables and aphorisms, often turning common ideas upside down and confounding the expectations of his audience.

The story says that he told Empire Magazine:

"My scriptwriter told me not to do the movie in the United States because they (Christians) might shoot me. It's not a joke at all. I took that very seriously. So I took his advice and decided to write a book about it first."

I think he's going to be getting a lot of focus and heat over this, if it's true, and there will be groups who will be protesting quite heavily against this.

Do you think it's an interesting tale for a film? Is Verhoeven the one to tell it, or should it be handed elsewhere, and should the controversy be allowed?