The Lost Years
The Greatest Story Never Told
a television series by Joshua M Swenson
And after he was 12, Jesus “Advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” — Luke 2:52
But where did he go? What did he do? And who did he become along the way?
THE LOST YEARS is a television series about the eighteen years missing from the greatest story ever told, the silent gap between Jesus at twelve, debating temple elders, and Jesus at thirty, working miracles on the road to the cross.
Before he became the Christ, he was Yesh, a twenty-five-year-old desert wanderer haunted by a power he doesn’t understand, and hunted by the empire that wants it destroyed. Alongside his cousin Yochan, a hard-headed, smooth-talking young John the Baptist, he slips into Heliopolis, Egypt. It’s a city choking under Roman occupation, where a secret mystery school has been waiting for someone exactly like him.
But a fallen Magus races Yesh and Yochan to an ancient rite inside the Great Pyramid, one that could damn, or deliver, all of humanity.
This isn't scripture. It's a supernatural adventure about the rebellion against the earthly and cosmic forces that would enslave the human soul.
Haunted
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Hunted
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AWAKENED
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Haunted ⦁ Hunted ⦁ AWAKENED ⦁
YOCHANON BEN ZECHARIAS
Cousin. Guardian. Brother in arms.
IMPERATOR TEREK
Head of Rome’s elite mystic hunters.
MARYAM MAGDALA
Initiate in the Order of Isis. Spy against Rome.
QUAESTOR BALTHAZAR
The First Magus.
The Vision
Biblical epics are having a moment. House of David brought battle scenes on the scale of Lord of the Rings to Prime Video, and it proved something else along the way: blending traditional filmmaking with AI can put the ancient world on screen at a scale and cost that wasn't possible a few years ago.
The Lost Years is built for that model. Real actors, real sets, and real performances at the heart of every scene, with AI expanding the world around them: Heliopolis in its full height and glory. A mystery school temple floating in the starry void of the Pleroma. The Escher-like four-dimensional space within the Great Pyramid. This proof-of-concept trailer was made at the beginning of 2026 with exactly that model in mind. And the tools continue to improve by the day.
Now I'm calling in the people who are inspired to bring this story to life:
Producers and production partners eager to dramatize the Nag Hammadi corpus
Investors and financial patrons hungry to reimagine the world’s most influential myth
Directors and experienced screenwriters ready to build a new kind of epic
VFX and AI filmmaking collaborators who believe the ancient world was far stranger and far more exciting than we have been led to believe
If that's you, then let's talk.
SERIES BIBLE and PILOT SCRIPT available upon request.
Why this Show? Why Now?
We are living through a time of profound upheaval, what some call the metacrisis, where a new world-ending headline seems to arrive every other day. In times like these, humanity reaches for new myths to navigate the dark.
The Lost Years takes up one of the most pivotal figures in history and one of its greatest unsolved mysteries: the eighteen years that vanished from his story. For centuries that silence was an inheritance of suppression, shaped by an empire that decided what we were allowed to know. This show steps into the gap, not to tear down anyone's faith, but to welcome believer and seeker alike to meet this figure fresh.
It arrives as we're rediscovering the ancient world: the pyramids, the forgotten cultures, the knowledge we were told to forget. And in reclaiming that buried past, it dares to imagine a different kind of future.
Tune in to the conversation
Doomsday Dance Party! with Molly Baskette
The Lost Years: What Was Jesus Up To?
What happens when an idea won't let you go? Joshua and Molly talk Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert's take on ideas that come looking for a collaborator, and the dark night of the soul that came with saying yes to this one. They also dig into the questions that sparked the series. Did Jesus have powers before his baptism? Did he ever mess up or fall in love? Not the Sunday school version, not the theological construct. The person.
Listen on SUBSTACK
The Resonant Man Podcast
New Stories of Initiation for the Metacrisis
Traditional cultures had rites of passage to turn boys into men. What happens to a world that's lost them? Joshua joins the Resonant Man's "Metacrisis" series to talk about initiation, men's work, and why we need new myths for a world coming apart at the seams. He makes the case for The Lost Years as an initiation story at its core, and for AI as a creative partner that can help visionary stories get made outside the gatekeepers.
Meet the Creator
JOSHUA M SWENSON
Storyteller | Filmmaker | Lifelong Seeker
Joshua was born into a world of certainty, but questions kept breaking through the cracks.
What is consciousness? How do we meet the sacred? What are we becoming together in this age of great unraveling?
Those questions carried him out of a high-control religious upbringing, through studies in psychology and religion, to meditating beneath the Bodhi Tree in India. When his daughter was born, Joshua cracked open into grief for a world in unprecedented upheaval. Through grief he found ceremony, men’s work, expanded states of consciousness, and fasting in the wilderness. Now he holds space for others through their own journeys of rupture and renewal. He writes and speaks about this work through the Gospels of Rupture substack and podcast.
Three years ago, Joshua discovered the Gnostic Gospels, and the questions carried him somewhere he never expected: into a relationship with Jesus. Not the savior of empire, but the troublemaker, the psychonaut, the desert mystic. The man who walked out of the story for eighteen years.
The Lost Years is the show he needed and couldn't find. Thirty drafts and a proof-of-concept trailer later, he’s ready to bring it to the screen. Because it won't be finished until it's filmed.