Jesus Christ

Jesus of Nazareth, originally known as Joshua-bar-Joseph according to the Roman Gemellus, was the central figure of Christianity. According Gemellus, he lived during the time of the Caesars Augustus and Tiberius in the regions of Judaea and Syria. (PROSE: Byzantium!)

The Tenth Doctor claimed to have been present at Christ's birth (TV: Voyage of the Damned) and to remember what really happened at his death. (TV: Planet of the Dead)

Gemellus maintained that he was a carpenter's son, a child prodigy, and "extremely handsome, charismatic and persuasive". He was able to amass great audiences when he spoke, and his lectures often attacked Judaism as inadequate to inform the rigours of daily life.

Those who came to follow Jesus as a deity believed he was the messiah, "Christos" meaning "saviour" in Greek. Others thought of him as "a maverick rabbi", or a "false prophet".

Eventually, betrayed by Jewish religious leaders who had become jealous of his abilities, he was nailed to a stauros, or cross. In the 21st year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the Pharisees, leaders of the Jewish community, influenced the Roman procurator of the area, Pontius Pilate, to have Jesus executed for heresy.

Gemellus also knew of a story, of which he was no great believer, that Jesus' body, after death, had somehow vanished after its entombment. Christians, he said, believed that he had come back to life, resurrected by the Jewish God.

Christians from just after the time of Christ believed they were being systematically suppressed by the same combination of Jewish and Roman interests who had killed Jesus. The First Doctor once met a man named Daniel who insisted that the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem was conspiring to discredit Christianity. (PROSE: Byzantium!)

Mentions
On 3 March 1215, Kamelion, disguised as King John, sang a chant about the liberation of Christ's tomb in Palestine from the Saracens in the Crusades. (TV: The King's Demons)

Jack Harkness implicitly compared Jesus' conception to how a Nostrovite exobiologically implanted its eggs into Gwen Cooper. (TV: Something Borrowed)

Owen Harper compared himself to Jesus, as both came back from the dead. (TV: A Day in the Death)

After the Eleventh Doctor helped capture the Atraxi's prisoner in 2008, he called the Atraxi back to Earth. The Atraxi displayed an image of the Corcovado statue, the iconic statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, when the Doctor asked, "Is this world a threat to the Atraxi?" (TV: The Eleventh Hour)

Behind the scenes
Jesus was played by Kenneth Colley in the 1979 film Monty Python's Life of Brian and John Hurt in the 1981 film History of the World Part I.