Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bed2”, is an oldie, as it came with this note:
“A resurrection from 2008 today. It’s been a while since Christianity got a kicking.”
And yes, the artist boots Christianity in the tuches. But he also raises many questions that theologians are obligated to answer.
Easy – the devil did it.
Demons
Temptation
The serpent
That apple…
… you see what this is shaping up into….
Adam’s damned rib.
…. maybe God’s orthopedic medical practice insurance was expired that day….
It was really the bone from Adam’s penis that God made Eve from. That’s where the missing bone is. That’s urology’s turf. The eye-witness was resorting to euphemism. The orthopods are off the hook.
Did you know your testicles are how you swear your testimony is true? Not a coincidence. There are Biblical passages where a man says things like I swear with my hand “on my thigh” I will help you smite the Philistines…or let you marry my daughter or whatever. His hand is really on his testicles. Or it may be on the testicles of the other party to the testament. After all, when you’ve got ‘em by the balls…
I suppose when men started to wear trousers — yes, even codpieces became the [] brackets — it was inconvenient to display one’s testicles in Court, so they switched to swearing on the Bible, it having got thick enough by then to be suitably imposing.
(Most of the above — the good bits — purloined from Mark Forsyth in The Etymologicon.)
“purloined”
I’ll say!
😆
Yes, Christianity is very lazy… god did and is responsible for everything! “put to bed” is the best place for it, along with all the other dangerously lazy fairytales.
We should be so lucky…
A very trenchant comment on the J&M site:
My only quibble with this is that the superhero inflation occurred long before the Middle Ages, during the Babylonian Captivity (8th century BCE). The captive Hebrew exiles had a serious theological problem: if their tribal god YHWH had been defeated by the Babylonian false gods, then WTF. Their solution, elegant at the time but with long-lasting unintended consequences, is that this was fake news: YHWH had not been defeated, but was so wise and so powerful that he himself had orchestrated the entire thing, including his apparent defeat. Why? Because it was a 3-D chess move to punish the Hebrews for not being sufficiently obsequious to him. (Why he didn’t do something less elaborate, maybe smiting the disobedient with thunderbolts, is not addressed.)
The outline of this is convincingly documented by contemporary sources and later rabbinical analysis.
8th/7th century BC would be the Assyrian captivity of Israel (Judah fended them off successfully). The Judean prophets ascribe the Assyrian victory over Israel to exactly these principles, mind you, which were then repeated during the 6th century Babylonian captivity.
The latter is more important since that one resulted in putting this principle into a coherent narrative and was a personal experience, whereas the Assyrian captivity… I dunno, might’ve influenced the Samaritans (which weren’t recognised as Judaic after the Babylonian captives returned)?
Although the power creep relative to neighbouring deities makes sense since Yahweh did absorb the old canaanite pantheon in the southern levant – power creep presumably had been his thing for a while.
Though tellingly, this contrasts noticeably with passages in earlier times (e.g. 2 Kings 3, tentatively dated to the late 9th century BC), when foreign gods clearly still hold great power of their own and can check Yahweh through the appropriate sacrifices. Although Yahweh may or may not have started absorbing the native pantheon by then (I lean towards ‘may’), the switch to Yahweh as all-powerful, including over foreign gods (for chunks of the priesthood; the general populace, including the kings, were a different matter, as the prophets’ constant bitching about kings worshipping, false gods demonstrates neatly) must’ve been later than that.
How much later is difficult to say on account of editorial work applied to the tanakh, but in all honesty – the tanakh is shockingly honest about defeats and moral failings relative to the Israelites’ neighbours, so I tend to lean towards its timeline (Yahweh starting to be considered all-powerful by part of the priesthood by the 8th century BC; this belief doesn’t permanently penetrate the general population and political leadership until after the fall of Israel, but before the Babylonian exile) being loosely correct.
Ancient Israel is an interesting case in that there was a noticeable difference between state and religion that neighbouring states didn’t have, and the tanakh’s relentless bitching at its own kings shows it.