Clone Jesus

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Someone has gotten ahold of a DNA strand of Jesus or his equivalent and has decided, hey, let's make another! Maybe they actually want to speed along the Second Coming a little, or maybe they want to throw in a little Mad Science with Religion.

If said scientists really do end up with Jesus Part Two, expect the baby to be spirited away by protagonists to be raised in a more wholesome manner, with the implication that the Big Guy Upstairs is moving this operation to more traditional pastures.

Of course, since cloning doesn't make the same person again one might end up with someone who uses their powers For Evil or giving a collective "screw this."

Contrast with You Cloned Hitler

Examples of Clone Jesus include:


Anime and Manga

  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Vivio Takamachi was cloned by the villains from the genetic material of the messiah figure of the Saint Church, the Saint King Olivie. The villains just wanted her so they could overcome the genetic lock on the Messiah's personal spaceship, though. After she is rescued, those in The Church who know about her heritage call her by her full title, which she's extremely embarrassed about.
  • The manga Bremen includes this trope as part of its climax. Kasuga Romio is the Clone Jesus whose charisma is sent to others via rock music.
  • This is part of the plot underlying Amazing Nurse Nanako, a six-episode series that mixed X-Files with I Love Lucy and served it with a healthy side order of Fan Service.
  • Whether God or just channeling him, Mokona from Magic Knight Rayearth visited Clow Reed and Yuuko of ×××HOLiC and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. They were allowed to make copies.
  • This was the aim of the Adam Project in NEEDLESS.
  • Monstrous and alien though they may be, the Evas of Neon Genesis Evangelion are, in the end, clones of Adam. Though NERV did have a more recent genetic sample than those in other examples.

Comics

Film

  • Accidentally invoked in the movie The Fifth Element, the Embodiment Of Love was sent to Earth to protect us from a Big Ball Of Darkness. Ended up getting vaporized, but the forensics who cloned her material to find out what was going on happened to accidentally create a perfectly functional replacement (but with more Fan Service).

Literature

  • According to an article in "New York Magazine," (April 5, 2004), "Stories about cloned Jesuses first surfaced in 1988 when the sci-fi novel 'Children of the Shroud' was published." That novel, by Garfield Reeves-Stevens, had dozens of teenage Jesus clones being hunted by a televangelist on behalf of a U.S. president eager to start the war of Armageddon. Each clone was slightly different because of the DNA reconstruction technique used to create them, with the kicker being some of them were female.
  • The Robert Rankin novel The Brentford Chainstore Massacre had Jesus cloned from DNA found on the Turin shroud.
  • A major subplot in the Chuck Palahniuk novel Choke involves the main character discovering that he may have been created as a clone from Jesus' foreskin. Which may or may not explain why he's such a prick.
  • The novel The Return by Joe de Mer features an apparent Second Coming investigated by the Vatican as a possible hoax and/or cloning of Jesus.
  • Bill Myers' Blood of Heaven features a lighter version, in which the dried blood on a religious artifact (a thorn preserved in a wax cube) is discovered to contain foreign chromosomes (specifically, the Y). Replicating the blood through genetic engineering and transfusing it into first animals, then humans, has... interesting results.
  • Obviously used in the Christ Clone Trilogy by James Beauseigneur, except he's the Antichrist. Like the example above also uses the Shroud of Turin as the source of DNA.
  • In George Zebrowski's novel The Killing Star, one of the few groups of humans who survived an alien attack against Earth is a habitat orbiting Jupiter, led by a clone of Jesus and his best friend, a clone of the Buddha, who were created by a cult some years earlier.
  • In American Desert by Percival Everett, this doesn't quite work out, and most of the clones are horribly deformed physically and mentally. One researcher on the project appears in-story, despairing at his failure—until the main character asks how one mouthless clone can eat, and the researcher realizes that it's survived without anyone ever feeding it.
  • This is pretty much the entire point of 1993 novel The Blood Of The Lamb, as the protagonist Peter Careza grapples with the implications that he is Christ on Earth. By the end of the book, it's fairly clear that he's the Anti Christ.
  • The Riverworld series is set on a world populated by clones of everyone who ever lived, into which their dead spirits have been transplanted. A short story based on the novels reveals what happens to the Riverworld's re-created Jesus.
  • In "The Divinity Gene", a short story by Matthew J. Trafford, the DNA sequence of Jesus is used to create numerous Jesus clones or "Jesi."
  • In "Born-Again Jesus," a short story by Robert Flynn, a secret group plans to clone Jesus so that he can preach a gospel more in line with current American values.


Live Action TV

  • The Outer Limits episode "The Shroud" has a religious zealot try to recreate Jesus via artificial conception...it's implied he succeeds, but couple run off with the baby in classic Mary and Joseph-style.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation had a Klingon religious caste try to use cloning and memory construction to recreate their local Messiah Kahless, so that they (with Kahless as their puppet) could take over the Klingon Empire and "restore it to greatness". The episode ended with the truth being revealed and a compromise being reached: Kahless II is allowed to become the figurehead Emperor (a previously vacant position).
    • Half-way into Deep Space Nine Worf figured out how powerless Kahless II actually was. The figurehead Emperor thing was also his idea.
    • One book in the Expanded Universe implies that history didn't go exactly as recorded, and the blood used to create the clone actually came from Kahless's brother.
  • A religious cult in Regenesis tries to clone Jesus from some blood on one of the nails used to affix him to the cross.

Video Games

Webcomics

  • FLEM Comics had an arc about a mutant Jesus Clone, with many tentacles. They had him have sex with a prostitute, and she used the wrong tentacle
  • An odd version in Homestuck: Karkat's ancestor, The Sufferer, is a Crystal Dragon Jesus, and while he isn't meant to be an exact clone of the Sufferer in terms of purpose, they're genetically (and presumably physically) identical and he was heralded by the Sufferer as his second coming.

Western Animation

  • Jesús Christo, a Mexican clone of Jesus, appears on Clone High and is a carpentry student who talks like Cheech Marin.
    • "God has a plan for all of us. A painful, painful plan."

Julius Caesar: Be careful with that nailgun, Jesús!

Real Life