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Clone Jesus

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Cloned via blood and foreskin? Pretty sure that's not kosher.
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 "screw this." Alternately, they might not even have any powers.

Contrast with You Cloned Hitler!.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Sankt Kaiser/Sei'ou Olivie Sägebrecht. 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. She has, by Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, gotten used to it, accepting it as a term of respect and affection. For their part, the Saint Church has lived up to their name, treating her as her own person rather than a copy of their Jesus analogue and letting her live her life as she and her mothers see fit. Officially, they've declared Vivio to be a "descendant" of their religious figure, rather than a reincarnation. The manga also gives more information about Olivie, making it clear that while both she and Vivio are Kung-Fu Wizard heroines, they each have their own personality.
  • This was the aim of the Adam Project in NEEDLESS.

    Comic Books 
  • During Marvel's Civil War (2006) crossover, Tony Stark, Reed Richards, and Hank Pym use a single hair to create a clone of Thor. He was basically a cyborg killing machine loosely under their control - one of the first things he did was kill Bill Foster. Hercules considered him an insult to the real deal, and when Thor got back he outright curb-stomped Tony for the move.
  • A DC Vertigo miniseries called Punk Rock Jesus deals with a Clone of Jesus being raised on reality television, rebelling against the show and then using his fame to form a punk rock band.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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 found the wreckage were able create a clone from the few remaining cells with all of the original's memories intact, and her capacity for badassery and fanservice. There's a Hand Wave for this: Leeloo's DNA is shown to have multiple helices, and one of the scientists describes it as having 200,000 "memo groups" (a made-up term) compared to the 40 in human DNA. The implication is that her DNA contains memory and acquired traits as well as basic growth instructions.
  • Used in the 2001 film Revelation (no relation to the film from the Apocalypse series), where The Knights Templar attempt to clone Jesus from DNA left on the four nails used to crucify the original in hopes of using the clone as a puppet messiah to rule the world. It's implied at the end of the film that the cloned Jesus is The Antichrist while the baby born from Mira and the late Jake's union is the true messiah since Mira was Mary Magdalene's descendant and Jake was Christ's descendant via the Merovingian dynasty. As predicted by Revelation 12.4, the baby is kept a secret from the order until he can oppose them and the Grand Master's puppet Christ.

    Literature 
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • This is pretty much the entire point of the 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 Antichrist.
  • 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.
  • The Robert Rankin novel The Brentford Chainstore Massacre had Jesus cloned from DNA found on the Turin shroud. He actually plans to clone multiple Jesuses so that every religion can have one (no, it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context), but only does two to start with who turn out to be a good Jesus and a bad Jesus.
  • 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.
  • Obviously used in the Christ Clone Trilogy by James Beauseigneur, except he's the Antichrist. Like the example above, this also uses the Shroud of Turin as the source of DNA.
  • In one story in the Church of the SubGenius's anthology Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", "Bob" Dobbs stops the Deroes from cloning Hitler with a little sleight of hand to replace the bloody cloth they were using as a DNA source with a scrap of the Shroud of Turin.
  • 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."
  • The Genesis Code: This is the sin Dr. Ignazio Baresi confessed to that kicked off the chain of child murders committed by Umbra Domini, including that of Lassiter's nephew. The end of the book says he succeeded.
  • In "The Gospel According to Jimmy", by French writer Didier van Cauwelaert, a 32-year old pool cleaner in L.A. finds out he's a clone of Jesus.
  • In Charles Pellegrino and 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.
  • According to an article in "New York Magazine," (April 5, 2004), "Stories about cloned Jesuses (Jesi?) 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 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.
  • 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.
  • Downplayed in Robin Cook's Seizure where a conservative U.S. senator suffering from Parkinson's disease is undergoing a therapy (which he was about to ban in the first place) in which a patient with an incurable disease is returned to health through the injection of cloned stem cells. He wants the stem cells injected into his brain to come from the Shroud of Turin. Afterwards, he indeed experiences some messianic visions but it turns out that they were temporal lobe epilepsy-seizures caused by dislocated injection, not by the origin of cells. So, no copy of Jesus in this book, only His cells.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Outer Limits (1995): The episode "The Shroud" has a religious zealot try to recreate Jesus via artificial conception. It's implied that he succeeds, but the surrogate mother and her husband run off with the baby in classic Mary and Joseph-style to prevent the minister, who is also the mother's father, from raising the child and twisting him to his own ends.
  • A religious cult in ReGenesis tries to clone Jesus from some blood on one of the nails used to affix him to the cross.
  • Star Trek:
    • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Rightful Heir" has 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". When Worf finds out, the monks ask him how he knows that's not how the prophesy of Kahless' return was supposed to be fulfilled. The episode ends 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 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Worf figures out how powerless Kahless II actually is. 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, who survived years longer than Klingon mythology holds and dies taking the knife for Kahless. The knife from which the blood used to clone "Kahless" was extracted.

    Theatre 
  • The Tsukino Empire universe features extremely powerful beings that are very close to gods, though they reject that label. Two of those we see are main characters who are gods in other parts of The Multiverse. The others take the forms of the Four Gods.
    • A lab exists that tried to create a copy of their Suzaku. It didn't go as they hoped, so they sealed it, only for it to break out 3000 years later as the antagonist of Machine Elements zwei.
    • Of those two godlike main characters, someone, somewhere in the multiverse tried to make a copy of one of them — Shun, the one who's a spirit of endings and death. This copy-Shun felt lonely, so he inadvertently created a world just by wishing for someone to play with him — a post-apocalyptic video game world that the other characters, brought there in their dreams, believe to be real. This became the world of Zanshin. It has yet to be revealed whether or not these are from the same lab.

    Video Games 

    Web Comics 
  • 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 (in fact, he's his own clone), they're genetically (and presumably physically) identical and he was heralded by the Sufferer as his second coming. However, because of how paradox cloning works, the Sufferer is their clone and also qualifies for this trope.
  • In Sister Claire, it turns out that Claire is a clone of Clementine, the "witch queen". Since many of the main cast members knew Clementine "back in the day", this has caused quite a bit of conflict and confusion. Claire's "birth" was accidental, since Catherine was just trying to give Clementine's remains a decent burial.
  • In Shortpacked!, one of Galasso's many inexplicable deeds was to add clones of Ronald Reagan and the historical Jesus to his army, i.e., the staff of his toy store. Historical Jesus (Jeshua Ben Joseph) is shorter and darker than most people expect and is generally sullen about modern society in general and toy store customers and coworkers in particular.

    Web Original 
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-2782 is the aftermath of a number of religious zealots' attempt at creating a Reality Warper who has the ability to replicate all of Jesus' miracles, with the assumption that this would bring about the Second Coming.

    Western Animation 
  • This trope was parodied in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, when Frylock uses his cloner with a strand of what a museum claimed was Jesus' hair. He ended up with a very effeminate man in a too-short toga, who reveals he's actually Jesus' hairdresser.
  • 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!
    • For that matter, main characters Gandhi and Joan were also cloned from important religious figures.

    Real Life 
  • The Real Life Jesus-cloning conspiracy theory is discussed here. and parodied here.
  • The practical difficulty with cloning Jesus of Nazareth - even if the technology was advanced enough to do this - would lie in getting a tissue sample allowing DNA to be retrieved. However, The Bible informs us that following the Resurrection, Jesus was bodily taken into Heaven and did not leave behind a body. Discounting any blood traces left behind on whips, thorns, nails, etc, which at the time would have carried no significance whatever to the Romans and which might have been cleaned or recycled for the next crucifixion (thus removing or contaminating the traces at the very least), this poses a problem. However, imaginative thinkers have pointed out that Jesus would have left one small part of his physical body on earth. As a Jewish boy, on the eighth day after birth, he would, of course, have been circumcised. On this basis, at least three churches in Europe claim to be the sole Eglise de la Saint Prepuce - the Church of the Holy Foreskin. This suggests either Jesus was not as other men (or He healed himself three times..), or else there were some genius-level pardoners peddling holy relics in mediaeval times. But if one of those three churches turns out to have the real deal... cloning may be a possibility.
    • And of course there is the fact that clones are only genetically identical, and are entirely different people from the original. So a clone of Jesus would look and sound like he did, but wouldn't actually be Jesus. He would be a brother. Then there's the issue- and we're going to assume Jesus truly is the son of God born to a virgin for the sake of the argument- that Jesus had no DNA from a human father. In fact, it's not even clear he would have DNA from Mary, given the Bible's vague description of Jesus' conception as, "the Holy Spirit came upon her, and she conceived".

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