“The bible was an acid testament.”
Twelve “heretics” that were seemingly normal citizens (academic, philosopher, poet, shepherd, butcher etc…) arrive at a Roman sanitarium on a far flung island. They have just been ripped from their lives with no warning; their families told that each man was an “enemy of the empire.” But they actually have been recruited for an ancient acid test because of their secretly-tracked-from-birth intelligence abilities. Their lead doctor’s name is Janus. He gives the twelve men crude lsd and opium and peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms that the Romans have cultivated and/or brought back from travels around their empire.
Janus is in all of their hallucinations as “Jesus.” He eventually sees the evil that he is doing, but the experiments begin to open doors that question the Roman authorities and the primacy of their gods. Unable to quell his curiosity, Janus begins to experiment on himself. He also realizes that all other religious texts were the result of similar experiments. Word of the “new light” gets out via the warden’s mistress, Marlena (whom Janus is secretly in love with), and Janus is ordered to overdose the twelve prisoners. He carries out these orders on eleven inmates, but he allows the twelfth and youngest, Marcus, to escape with the project’s scribe, Prochorus. The transcript scrolls of the apostles’ acid tests then make their way into the world to spread peace and love and are eventually rewritten as the bible’s “new testament.”
“tune in turn on drop out” = “jesus saves”
Spartacus + Midnight Express + Drugstore Cowboy