Without them, Jesus would not have been born in a manger, and Mary would not have had a father called Joachim. Without them, there would be no Joseph. Without them, no story of Christ’s childhood, no anecdotes, no scenes from the life of the Virgin or adoration of the Magi, Jesus would not have had a childhood and Mary Magdalene no existence, no one would have recounted the life of the Apostles: the Christian apocrypha have fed the Western imagination for centuries…

Who were they, what remains of their work that has been the subject of debate for millennia? Their texts allow us to take another look at the Christians of the first centuries and to show that in their time, at the beginning of our era, the intellectual debates in a Church in the making were powerful, vigorous and tense.

The fathers of the church, Irénée of Lyon or Athanase of Alexandria in particular, knew how to sort out the naivety of the early days and dangerous deviations, to establish a definitive list of accepted texts and let survive some inaccurate flourishes, like the Nativity crib, which made so many pretty dreams … Through the evocation of the apocryphal writings and those of their detractors, along with exegetes, historians, theologians and contemporary philosophers, this film takes us to the roots of the history of Christendom.