Mel Gibson Reveals Where Jesus Went in the Three Days After the Cross — Joe Rogan Was Speechless

Mel Gibson sat across from Joe Rogan and he said something that stopped the room. He was there to talk about a film, a sequel, two of them actually, but then halfway through the conversation, almost as if he was thinking out loud, he said this, “To tell the story properly, you have to start with the fall of the angels.

 You need to go to hell, not because the Gospels tell you to, the Gospels barely mention it, not because Christian tradition demands it, most Protestants haven’t preached it in 100 years, not because it’s dramatic, it’s the least dramatized episode in the entire Passion.” And yet Mel Gibson, one of the most obsessively Catholic filmmakers alive, has just spent 134 days filming exactly that, the three days between the cross and the empty tomb, the three days the four Gospels leave almost entirely blank.

 Two films, one releasing in 2027, the next in 2028. A story the church argued about for a thousand years, then quietly stopped teaching. And now a filmmaker whose last Jesus film pulled $600 million and reduced audiences to silence is about to put it back on screens for 100 million people.

 Stay with me, because by the end of this video, you’ll look at those three days very differently, and you’ll understand exactly why Joe Rogan, of all people, went quiet. Let us start with what actually happened on that podcast, because the framing matters. And if you like this kind of thing, where a modern conversation quietly reopens something ancient, consider subscribing, because we do this every week.

 Gibson had come on to talk about the sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, as he’s been calling it. Rogan asked the obvious question, “What is the sequel actually about?” And Gibson answered in a way that sounded, at first, almost casual. He said, “You can’t just tell the resurrection. You have to tell what came before it.

 You have to tell what happened underneath it.” He described it as, in his words, “an acid trip.” He said the scope was enormous. He said he needed two films to hold it. And then he said the line, “To tell this story, you have to start with the fall of the angels. You have to go to hell.” Rogan paused. You can watch it back. And there was a beat of genuine silence.

Then he asked, “Are you actually filming that?” And Gibson said, “Yes.” That’s the moment. That is the moment the conversation became something other than a press tour. Because Rogan is not a theologian. He is not a churchgoer. But he understood in that pause that Gibson had just described filming something that the New Testament does not actually describe.

 Something that most modern Christians, if you ask them on the street, could not tell you the church ever taught. Something that, if Gibson gets it right, will drop into the culture like a stone into a still pond. Now, before you dismiss that as marketing, as Gibson being Gibson, consider the receipts. He’s just wrapped a 134-day shoot across Italy, Southern Italy mostly.

 Matera, again, the same city that stood in for Jerusalem in the first film. Roman sound stages, locations chosen for their weight, not their convenience. The reports out of the production describe cave systems, underground sets, entire subterranean cities built to camera. He is on record saying that the two films will release one after the other in 2027 and 2028. He is not speculating.

 He has already shot it. So, the question stops being whether Gibson is filming the three days. He is. The question becomes what he thinks is in them. First, let us understand exactly what the Gospels say about the three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Because this is the part that surprises most people the first time they really look. The answer is almost nothing.

 The four Gospels give you the crucifixion in extraordinary detail, hour by hour, the words from the cross, the tearing of the temple veil, the Centurion’s confession, the wrapping of the body, the stone rolled across the tomb, and then, on the third day, the women arriving at dawn and the stone already moved.

 The angel, the empty linen. Between those two moments, across four separate accounts, you get almost nothing. Matthew mentions a guard placed on the tomb. Luke tells you the women rested on the Sabbath. John says nothing at all. Mark says nothing at all. The tomb is sealed on Friday evening. It is opened on Sunday morning.

 In between, the Gospels are silent. Pause on that for a moment. Because for the central figure of Western civilization at the most theologically loaded moment of his story, the four biographies declined to tell you where he was. That is not an oversight. It is a shape in the text, a gap that the earliest readers noticed immediately. And they filled it.

 Or rather, they read it against another single line buried in a letter that the entire doctrine hangs on. The line is in the first letter of Peter, chapter 3, verse 19. It says that Christ, having been put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison. It is one sentence.

 It is buried inside a paragraph about baptism. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the more obscure verses in the New Testament. And on that single line, uh the church built a doctrine that dominated Christian imagination for a thousand years. They called it the harrowing of hell. The idea is this: During those three days, while the body lay in the tomb, the soul of Christ did not rest. It descended.

It went down into the realm of the dead. It confronted whatever was there. It broke something open. And it brought something back. The text describe it as a rescue. The text describe it as a battle. The text describe it as a legal transaction, a ransom, a debt paid in a place no living person had ever been.

But the texts consistently describe it as something. The three-day silence in the Gospels was not a silence to the early church. It was the loudest chapter of the story. That alone should make you pause. Because if you were raised in most modern Protestant churches, you have almost certainly never heard this preached. And there’s a reason for that.

But we will get to it. The escalation here is not the doctrine itself. The doctrine is one thing, but the sheer volume of early Christian material devoted to it is something else entirely. This is not a fringe claim. The Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest confessional statements in Christianity, contains the phrase “He descended into hell.

” Christians have recited that line out loud for at least 1,600 years. In Catholic and Orthodox churches, they still recite it every Sunday. Most Protestants who say the Creed pass over the line quickly or use a version that softens it to the dead. But the line is there. It has always been there. Now the texts describe more.

 There’s a document called the Gospel of Nicodemus, sometimes called the Acts of Pilate, dating from around the 4th century. It is not in the Bible, but it circulated widely. And it contains an extended, almost cinematic account of what the early church believed happened during those three days. Christ arrives at the gates of the underworld.

 He confronts the powers holding the righteous dead. He breaks the gates. He leads Adam and Eve, the patriarchs, the prophets out of the darkness. It reads, honestly, like a screenplay. The texts describe it. The icons depict it. If you walk into any Orthodox church at Easter, you will see it.

 The standard resurrection icon in Eastern Christianity is not Christ walking out of the tomb. It is Christ standing on the shattered gates of hell, pulling Adam and Eve up by the wrists. That is the image. That is how they have painted the resurrection for over a thousand years. The texts describe it. The liturgies enact it. The Catholic Easter Vigil, the most solemn service of the entire church year, contains an ancient homily read every Holy Saturday.

It is called the Ancient Homily on Holy Saturday. It begins, “Something strange is happening. There is a great silence on earth today.” And it describes, in the voice of the risen Christ, going to find Adam. Different sources, different centuries, different languages, all converging on the same claim.

 Something happened during those three days. And the first Christians could not stop writing about it. So, how does a doctrine this central, this ancient, this visually saturated quietly disappear from most modern Christian preaching? Because it did. And this is where the story becomes something other than a straightforward theology lesson.

Here’s where it gets genuinely strange. The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century did what reformations do. It went back to the text. And the text, as we have already established, is almost silent on the three days. The reformers looked at 1 Peter 3:19, and they were, to put it mildly, unsure what it meant. Some read it literally.

Some read it figuratively. Some argued the verse was about Christ preaching through Noah to the pre-flood generation spiritually before the incarnation ever happened. That reading is grammatically strained, but it existed, and it gave preachers a way to talk about the verse without talking about the descent.

 Over the following 400 years in most Protestant traditions, the harrowing of hell quietly slid off the pulpit. Not officially condemned, not formally rejected, just gradually not preached. The line in the creed was kept but softened. He descended to the dead rather than into hell. The image on the wall changed. The homily fell out of the calendar.

And a thousand years of Christian imagination went dormant, which brings us to Mel Gibson standing in Matera filming apparently the exact chapter of the story that most of the audience walking into the cinema in 2027 will have never been taught. Now, let’s talk about the translation problem because this is where the argument sits underneath everything.

The word in question is hell, or rather, the words that get translated as hell. In the Hebrew Bible, the word is Sheol. Sheol is not hell. Sheol is the place of the dead. It is a shadowy, undifferentiated realm where everyone goes when they die. The righteous, the wicked, kings and beggars. It is closer to the Greek Hades than to anything a modern reader thinks of when they hear the word hell.

It is not a place of torment. It is a place of stillness, of waiting, of gray silence. In the Greek New Testament, when the writers want to talk about that same place, they use Hades. When they want to talk about the place of final judgment, of fire, of separation, [snorts] they use a different word, Gehenna.

 Two different words, two different concepts. And in 1 Peter 3:19, the word is neither. The text just says the spirits in prison. That is all it says. a prison, somewhere. For most of Christian history, that ambiguity was carried by the doctrine the descent was into Sheol, into Hades, into the realm of the righteous dead who were waiting for redemption.

It was not, in most theological traditions, into the fiery gehenna of final judgment. It was into the gray holding place to bring the waiting ones home. But, when the English Bible translated all of these words, Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, sometimes even the grave with the single word hell, the distinctions collapsed.

 And modern readers, hearing the creed say he descended into hell, picture a place the original doctrine was never describing, which is not folklore. That is philology. So, the question becomes which one is Gibson filming? And this is where it gets genuinely difficult to guess, because Gibson is a devout Catholic.

 He grew up in a traditionalist Catholic movement. He would have been catechized in the harrowing. He would know better than most Hollywood filmmakers alive that the church he belongs to teaches the descent as a rescue of the righteous dead, not as a tour of the damned. But, he described it to Joe Rogan as an acid trip.

 Now, before you take that phrase the wrong way, understand what a devout Catholic filmmaker means by that. He is not being irreverent. He is being descriptive. He is signaling that what he is filming is not a naturalistic scene. It is not two men talking in a garden. It is a visionary landscape. It is closer to the Book of Revelation than to the Gospel of Mark.

 It is the fall of the angels. It is the gates of the underworld. It is, in the language of the ancient homily, a great silence on the earth broken by something walking through it. And here is where it becomes genuinely difficult to shrug off, because Gibson has already had to recast his lead. Jim Caviezel, who played Christ in the first film, is now more than 20 years older.

 Gibson has hinted, without confirming, that different aspects of the resurrection may require different physical presentations. What does the body look like coming back? What does the descended Christ look like in the underworld? These are not questions the Gospels answer. These are questions that only get asked when you actually try to put the doctrine on screen.

 The two-part structure is telling. Gibson has said the story is too big for one film, but when you look at where the natural breakpoint sits, it becomes obvious. The first film ends, most likely at the resurrection itself. The second film covers what comes after. The appearances, the ascension, the founding of the church, which means the descent, the harrowing, the fall of the angels, all of it sits in the first film.

 In 2027, that is the part audiences will see first. Now, the researchers found something interesting when they went back through Gibson’s public statements over the last decade. He has been talking about this project for at least 15 years. And in every interview, going back to the earliest ones, the same phrase keeps recurring. He does not describe it as a resurrection film.

 He describes it as a film about what happened in between. That is the phrase, in between. The three days. That has been the shape in his mind apparently from the beginning. Not the empty tomb, the interval. And here is the detail that perhaps, more than any other, makes this project impossible to easily categorize. Gibson has told interviewers that he’s been reading for years the visions of a 19th century German nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich.

 Emmerich claimed to have received detailed mystical visions of the life of Christ, including the descent into hell. Her accounts run to thousands of pages. They are strange, vivid, unsettling documents. They describe the underworld in visual terms, gates, levels, encounters, rescues. Gibson used Emmerich’s visions extensively as source material for the first Passion film.

 The scourging scenes in particular closely follow her descriptions, which means whatever Gibson is putting on screen in 2027, it is almost certainly filtered through the same source. A 19th century mystic’s visionary account of the harrowing of hell translated into modern cinema by a director whose last religious film became one of the highest-grossing R-rated films in history.

 Pause on that for a moment. Because whatever you think of Emmerich, whatever you think of Gibson, that is genuinely unusual pipeline for a mainstream 2027 release. Now, step back and consider what this actually looks like when it lands. The Passion of the Christ in 2004 did something to audiences that studios still study.

 People walked out of screenings silent. Confessions in Catholic churches spiked. Protestant pastors reported congregants coming back to services they had abandoned for years. The film was violent, uncompromising, in Aramaic and Latin with subtitles. And it made over $600 million against a $30 million budget. It was, by any measure, a cultural event that Hollywood did not see coming and could not replicate.

 The Resurrection films will land into a very different landscape. Streaming, fragmentation. A generation of viewers who have no baseline Christian catechesis at all. Many of them will walk in not knowing that the Harrowing of Hell was ever a doctrine. They will encounter it for the first time as cinema. Which is a very strange way to encounter a thousand-year-old theological argument.

 The most extraordinary claim in this entire story is not what Gibson said to Rogan. It is what putting the descent on screen actually does to a doctrinal fight that most people did not know was still going on. Because the fight is still going on. Quietly, in seminaries, in theological journals. There has been, over the last 40 years, a genuine revival of interest in the descent among Protestant theologians.

Some have argued the doctrine should be recovered. Others have argued it should be permanently rejected. There are books, arguments, careful defenses, and careful refutations. All of it happening in a corner of the theological world that almost no one outside it pays attention to. And now Mel Gibson is about to release a film that shows it.

Not argues it. Shows it. Puts an image on it. Gives it a face and a landscape and a soundtrack. And whatever image he chooses is going to be, for a hundred million viewers, the image. The dormant doctrine wakes up. The argument gets a shape. The scholars themselves acknowledge they do not fully understand what happens when a cinematic image lands on top of a theological argument.

What is the image communicating? Gibson has not yet said. He’s holding it back. He has described the scope. He has described the tone. He has described the length of the shoot. But the actual content of the descent, the actual visual he has chosen, he is not describing yet. The texts describe a rescue.

 The icons depict a broken gate. The homily speaks of a great silence. But what Gibson has filmed, no one outside the production has seen. Every one of these elements can be examined individually. The three-day gap in the Gospels has a plain reading. First Peter 3:19 has multiple conventional interpretations. The harrowing of hell has been debated for centuries by people more qualified than any of us.

The translation problem between Sheol and Hades and hell is a well-understood issue in biblical scholarship. Emmerich’s visions can be and have been dismissed by serious theologians as pious imagination. None of this, taken piece by piece, is a smoking gun. But all of it together, converging on this moment, a filmmaker with a proven track record of putting Catholic mystical tradition on screen, spending 134 days filming the exact chapter of the story most modern Christians have never been taught, releasing it into a fragmented culture

that will encounter the doctrine as image before it ever encounters it as argument. That is a different kind of situation. And it is genuinely difficult to predict what happens next. Nothing about the theology is settled. The resurrection films are not, in any sense, peer-reviewed. Gibson could get it wrong.

 He could get it strangely right. He could produce something that reopens a fight that has been dormant for four centuries. Or something that quietly disappears. Now, step back and look at the full picture. What we are left with, after 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the three days, is this. A silence in the Gospels that the early church could not tolerate and filled with a doctrine of descent.

 A single verse in Peter that the entire doctrine hangs from. A line in the Apostles’ Creed that most Christians still recite, but few modern Protestants preach. An icon that Orthodox Christians have painted for a thousand years showing Christ shattering the gates of the underworld. A homily read every Holy Saturday in Catholic churches describing a great silence broken by a rescue.

 A translation problem underneath all of it where the English word hell has been carrying three separate ancient concepts. A 19th century mystic whose visions of the descent Mel Gibson has been reading for 20 years. 134 days of filming in Italy. Two films. One in 2027, one in 2028. And a filmmaker who has already done this once and who told Joe Rogan on camera that to tell the story properly, you have to start with the fall of the angels. That is the shape of it.

 That is what is coming. And here is what I keep coming back to. For 2,000 years, most important three days in Western history have been almost entirely blank on the page. The people who cared most about that story could not accept the blank. They filled it. They painted it. They sang it. They argued about it.

 And eventually, most of them stopped talking about it. And now one man in a moment when very few people are paying attention to the doctrine at all is about to fill the blank again. For 100 million viewers who will not know the argument they are walking into. If you have made it this far and you want to see how this actually plays out when the film drops in 2027, subscribe.

We will be tracking the release, the reception, the theological response, and whatever leaks come out of the production between now and then. There is going to be a lot to follow. In the meantime, tell me in the comments which piece of this you found most striking. Was it the sheer silence of the gospels across those three days? Was it that the Apostles’ Creed has been quietly reciting the descent for 1,600 years? Was it the translation problem underneath the English word hell? Or was it the fact that Gibson is filming from the visions of a 19th century nun most viewers have never heard of? I read the comments. I want to know. Next week, we’re going to the other end of this story. Because there is a first century document discovered in the desert that describes a very different version of the resurrection appearances. And what it says about the missing 40 days between the resurrection and the ascension is in some ways even stranger than the three days we just covered.