Visalia preacher appears on History Channel's Jesus doc

How do you go from a Chicago rapper to a Biblical expert sought out by the History Channel to go to the Holy Land to do an Easter Sunday special on the DNA of Jesus?

It’s been a long, incredible road for Joe Basile, lead pastor of both the Encounter Road Church in Visalia and the Encounter Church in Clovis.

Suffice it to say, he was chosen by the History channel to work with Oxford University geneticist George Busby, combining faith and science to search for Jesus’ DNA.

“The History channel really wanted accuracy,” Pastor Joe said. “We used the Bible as a map combined with science. My role was to make sure we didn’t get out of bounds.”

The two experts used the latest scientific advances in DNA to investigate the world’s most famous holy relics, including the Shroud of Turin, The Sudarium of Oviedo and the newly discovered bones of Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist.

The result is “The Jesus Strand: A Search for DNA,” a two-hour special airing on Easter Sunday.

Trip of a lifetime

“Getting chosen for a project like this sounds too good to be true,” said the tattoo-covered Pastor Joe. “I even told the church, this probably isn’t real, but they’re interested in me.”

After being interviewed and chosen as the Biblical expert for the show, he spent 25 days with Busby and a film crew going to holy sites from Spain and Italy to Israel and the shores of the Black Sea.

By extracting and analyzing samples of holy relics at each site, they hoped to retrieve a sample of DNA that possibly belonged to Jesus or a member of his family.

The goal was to see if they could find a strand of Jesus’ DNA, which could help identify descendants of Jesus and provide new insight into the man many consider to be the most important person in history.

“We were able to go to places no one else gets to and look at artifacts that are pretty incredible,” Basile said. “It was a life-changing moment for me.”

They looked at some of the oldest Bibles and ancient texts at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, one of the most celebrated libraries in the world.

In Turin, Italy, they were allowed to do tests on the Shroud of Turin, recorded in the Bible as the burial shroud that wrapped Jesus.

“The Vatican has only allowed two tests of it,” Basile said. “They allowed us access to their testing, and we did some tests ourselves.”

In northern Spain, they viewed the Sudarium of Oviedo, the cloth that both tradition and scientific studies claim was used to cover and clean the face of Jesus after the crucifixion.

On St. John’s Island off the coast of Bulgaria in the Black Sea, they tested the bones found in 2010 believed to be those of John the Baptist.

“Crossing the Black Sea to the Island of St. John was incredible,” Pastor Joe said.

Of course, the entire trip was an amazing experience for him.

“The big joke was watching me react,” he said. “I cheered; I laughed. I said I’m going to cry a lot. This was very personal for me.”

What is honest

Science and religion do not always agree on historic artifacts. “George and I had to discover—me from the Bible, him from science—what is honest,” Basile said.

John Verhoff, programming executive producer of the History channel, explained the challenge.

“Because of the tremendous leap in DNA technology in the past few years, there was a discussion to see if we could access some of the most famous religious relics and test for DNA. The idea was to see if we could reveal new information about the relics as well as find something that might point to the historic Jesus. We wanted to see if science could deepen our understanding of Jesus, the man.”

The channel wanted to show a balanced view.

“Joe has a strong faith as well as genuine curiosity. He was open to investigating the historical Jesus. Joe is someone who could balance the religious aspect of this journey along with the historic and scientific.”

It was an exhausting process.

“Every night, I was studying on whatever the experts were going to talk about the next day—scriptures, history, location, languages,” Basile said. “I saw all my studies come to life. The entire journey surprised me.

“My goal was for Jesus to come off the pages and come to life. I think we found some interesting things.”

Basile wouldn’t reveal any of those things, saying people would have to watch the show to learn their discoveries.

From rap to Jesus

Basile grew up in a large Italian-American Catholic family in Chicago, the youngest of 10 children.

After having what he described as a "powerful moment in an evangelical Protestant church," he went on a  spiritual journey, Basile said.

He enrolled at Trinity International University as Biblical studies major, becoming the first person in his family to graduate from college, Basile said.

"Honestly, it was a tremendous thirst for answers. It started with my first Bible. I created my own concordance in the back of my Bible of passages that provided clear answers to pressing questions," he said. "Every time I filled up the back, I gave that Bible to a new Christian and I created a new one.”

Basile started a church in his hometown, moved to L.A. to start a church and was approached to host three reality shows on religion, which were never sold.

More recently he came to Fresno as pastor of the Fresno First Baptist Church, and two years ago started his church in Clovis. When the pastor of The Road Church in Visalia retired, the two churches merged.

Basile has been on the Jim Franklin show on KMJ radio multiple times and was asked to defend the resurrection from an intellectual perspective. His church is on TV on the CW channel every Sunday morning.

So he was a logical choice for the History channel’s exploration.

During the trip, the unconventional pastor was able to have fun and laugh at himself.

“I’m Italian but had never been to Italy," he said. "They’re all slender, handsome and tall. What happened to me?”

But mainly he hopes this show will spur more investigation.

"I grew a lot. My heart is full. The people were wonderful. I’m honored,” Basile said. “It shows that for a guy who lives in the Valley, God can use me to do pretty cool stuff.”

How to watch 

“The Jesus Strand: A Search for DNA” A two-hour special airing on the History channel at 9 p.m., Easter Sunday, April 16