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The site I found that explains why he was called Simon in one part of the bible and Judas elsewhere says:
“Names back then were more closely linked to the person’s identifying traits than they are today, and people received additional names as their identifying traits changed and/or were recognized”
So I grew up Catholic and I STILL had to come to the comments, because my parents believed in a more, shall we say, historically likely accurate representation of Jesus and all the people in the bible? By which I mean all the pictures I had of Jesus growing up, he was a brown/black man, Mary was brown/black, everybody except I think a few of the later saints were distinctly middle eastern/north african.
To the point where when I was 9 or so and finally ran across an Evangelical Jesus, I asked which saint it was to my friend’s parents. They said “Why that’s Jesus honey! Don’t you know Jesus?” and I went “That’s NOT Jesus!”. I then got an hour and a half lecture on learning who Jesus was, and it was torture because I had been in bible study since I was able to read, I was very much aware of who Jesus was and how the blonde blue eyed dude was definitely not it. That was obviously someone’s horny interpretation of some european later adorned saint.
I also had a more sympathetic view of Judas, more than most, as I figured if Jesus needed to be crucified to forgive us our sins, wasn’t Judas destined to “betray” him? Was it really betrayal if Jesus knew it would happen?
My point being, I sat here going “Well, it could have literally been any of them? Who the fuck would…*checks comments* oh. Oh no Joyce.”
Re: adorned saint, yeah the artistic depictions of Jesus started I think in the early Byzantine, where attempts to spread the religion to the illiterate majority meant that Jesus was drawn with artistic license featuring allusions to more well-known religious figures at the time like Apollo and Zeus, who likewise had flowing hair, sandals, robes, etc. Hell, even Jesus’s halo is actually a feature that’s borrowed from northern-European sun gods.
There were no northern European sun gods; the closest you get is Helios, not so much Greek in general as specific to the isle of Rhodos in the southeastern corner of the Aegean.
Long hair comes from early medieval kings of western & northern Europe: they got to keep their long hair, everyone else was shorn.
No northern European Sun Gods??? Every culture has a sun god or goddess. There’s Sunni (Germanic), Saule (Lithuanian and Latvia), Sol (Norse and Roman), Paivatar (Finn), Beaivi (Sami), Grian (Irish)….. Plus tons more.
Those names are from Indo-European root-word sōwulō, represented in the runic alphabet by ᛊ (an ancestor of the letter “S”), and it is where we get the English word for sun.
Regarding Judas’ unfortunate destiny, I highly recommend the film The Last Temptation of Christ as it touches on this. Also just a great movie in general.
Yep. This. Required viewing at my home (along with Dogma), every Blasphemy Season. Which falls roughly around the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
It might have been Thomas – who doubted Jesus had risen until he put his fingers into the crucifixion wounds, or even Peter, who denied Jesus thrice while He was being examined by the high priests – although maybe not so much, since Peter was later told “You are the rock on which I will build my church” given charge of “the keys to the kingdom of heaven”, and became what us Catholics consider to be the first Pope.
Read a story in college that was kind of an alt-timeline in which Peter, racked with guilt after denying Christ the first two times, switches and stands up and declares himself an apostle on the third time. He gets arrested immediately, gives up the names of the other apostles, and it ends up with all of them sitting around in a cell with JC, who is grumbling about how the whole plan got fissked up.
Turns out, “You will deny me three times before the cock crows” was an ~instruction~, not a prediction….
Yep. That is a reason much of the old guard and leadership of the German Party during the ’30s and ’40s straight rejected Christianity. The only reason Christianity wasn’t straight outlawed under their regime was pragmatic, and even then they still used aesthetics as propaganda within Christianity
one of the twelve diciples is judas, who is mostly remembered for having betrayed jesus which lead to the crucification by romans – the implication being that he’s the only one joyce depicted as a man of color.
Judas Iscarot is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, noted for being the one to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The implication is that, of all 12 disciples, only the Evil Bad Traitor was drawn as a person of color.
I’m amazed, I grew up Christian and I definitely wouldn’t have pegged Judas as being the one drawn as a POC, though that makes sense cause I went down the list like “crap who else is important”… I also grew up watching Passion of the Christ and that version of Judas (as well as his final fate) was uh… pretty seared into my kid brain so I would never think of Judas as anyone other than that actor who was probably white. Now I wonder of Joyce was ever shown Passion of the Christ…
Depends on a lot of stuff TBH. Some media depicts him as Jewish(in the ultra-racist stereotype sense), but it’s fully possible that she drew that art young enough that she only had 2 crayons that qualified as flesh-tone and he got the dark one. Or she might have made him black because she’d absorbed “all bad people are black” that early. We will likely never know any more detail than that.
Crayola LOL. Joyce would have had a ‘flesh’ crayon — now renamed as ‘peach’. But then they came out with a ‘Colors of the World’ box. How woke is that?
Look, one way or another, she drew Jesus and the other 11 apostles as Aryan Ideal White Dudes and the nefarious traitor not. Whether as a stereotypical caricature Jew clutching his 30 silver, or as middle-eastern brown, or as black… There is no version of this that isn’t set-it-on-fire category.
Ahh see that’s why I wasn’t sure! I was assuming Middle Eastern, but based on today’s comic it sounds like he’s probably drawn as a Jewish stereotype – and don’t forget Joe is Jewish
Of course, the irony of Judas is that, were it not for his actions, Christianity likely wouldn’t have taken hold, as Jesus would never have been martyred.
Eh, that’s a stretch. There’s a bazillion ways Jesus could have been martyred without Judas’s specific betrayal, and there’s a bazillion ways Christianity could have taken hold without Jesus being martyred.
Jesus certainly could have been martyred in other ways, but the martyrdom is so central to Christianity that even if Jesus’s message had caught on with more years to teach it, what resulted wouldn’t have been anything like what Christianity became, even by the late first century.
I mean..a bunch if people have said it already so I’ll just say it will be interesting to speculate where in Joyce’s upbringing did the racism sneak in? Was that intentional on the Brown’s part or just a side effect of the religious media used?
Based on many wacky racist comments around Sarah, I bet Joyce’s folks and entire community mainly had the death-by-a-thousand-cuts very unexamined style of racism, which is just everywhere all the time in this country, and which could totally show up in Joyce’s kid-drawings this way.
We’re all swimming in it, we must all continually find it in our own minds, we must all set it on fire.
Ah. Yeah, a lot of Christian artwork pulls that particular bit of bullshit. I should really look at the illustrated abridged Bible I had as a kid to see if it did that.
I’ve seen only a few minutes of JC Superstar, and the only two things that stuck with me were that I think it was musical, and the anachronisms in the version I saw part of.
Several Romans marching, carrying spears. At least one of them has an M-16.
JC Superstar is always a musical, and the movie version is explicitly framed as a bunch of people in the modern day putting on a show, rather than a depiction of historical events. They show up in a bus.
Though it’s uh …. interesting that the actor playing Jesus is absent when they get on the bus to go home
They sometimes cast a black actor to play Judas, yes—most notably in the movie version from the 70s. They cast a white actor just as frequently (including another movie from the 2000s)—most notably the actor in the original production. JCS is also the most sympathetic, complex, and forgiving treatment of Judas I’ve ever seen in media, so (A) I don’t think the casting is particularly problematic, and can even work really well depending on the set design and staging (the themes of JCS are timeless, and directors have been known to dress the actors like modern protestors and corporate suits), and (B) I doubt Joyce’s parents would have shown her the film version on purpose—which itself portrays Jesus & co. as loving hippies—given that evangelicals tend to reject the notions of “Jesus was a socialist” and complexity in their “good guys vs. bad guys” version of these stories.
In the production of Jesus Christ Superstar that I saw as a kid the only non-white performer was Marcia Hines. She sang the part of Mary Magdelene, and became a national rock star on the strength of her success.
The part of Judas was sung by Jon English, far the biggest star in the cast. Except maybe for Reg Livermore, who turned his bit part as Herod into a seven-minute show-stopper of song and dance.
The 1972 version does have Carl Anderson as black, which I will defend by saying that he absolutely killed the role and was the best part of the movie (loaded with a lot of great singing and choreography.) Carl Anderson was a god-tier singer and I would not replace him for anybody. Also Simon the Zealot is black, Mary Magdalene is Native American I think.
But all of the characters raceswap often in the different plays that have been put on throughout the years. In the 2000 movie, Judas was white (and awful), and in 2018 the production had John Legend as Jesus and some of the apostles were even played by women. Still waiting for the day they’re looking for a chick Judas, because I will be there and I will be waiting.
The first movie is the best production though, because it’s the only one which has the second song which actually explains the motives of the Pharisees, and thus is the only one that treats *everyone* as people. Later productions omit it (and I don’t think it was in the OG play), but I cannot emphasize how very important that one song is to understanding that this isn’t the “Jesus Jesus” movie or the “Jesus LOL” movie, it’s the “Everyone in these stories were allegedly people with wants, motives, and fears” movie. Atheist or Christian, I highly recommend the 1972 movie (though it definitely does have problematic moments), the music is great, the take on the story is interesting, and the scenery is just drop dead gorgeous.
Also, there is NO way that Joyce would have ever seen it lol. It is a pretty controversial and hated movie among most extreme Christians.
TLDR; I have complicated feelings on the casting because I can see how they were racially problematic, but the people who played those roles did them SO FANTASTICALLY WELL that it is really hard for me to just say “well then it shouldn’t have been cast this way” because I can’t imagine anyone else doing their roles better. Nobody cast since has ever been able to out sing the originals. Nobody’s ever come close. And frankly, I don’t want people to walk away thinking Carl Anderson as Judas was just a racist casting moment when I cannot express how fantastic of a singer and actor that man was back in the day.
I was raised in a household that wasn’t Christian and I have to admit the 1972 version of Jesus Christ Superstar was basically my canonical understanding of the Jesus story for a long time. I have never had an understanding of Judas that wasn’t really deeply shaped by that film. The writing of that musical in general and Carl Anderson in particular depict that character with such a degree of relatable humanist rage at the injustices of the world and the way that people twist their stories to let them perpetuate those injustices. I don’t think anyone ever asked me who my favorite biblical character was as a kid or teen (because again I was not raised religious), but I think if anyone ever had I probably would have answered Judas up until the point somewhere in my mid-teens when I properly understood what the optics of that would have been.
Ah, good old childhood racism! You know, you don’t really know a person until you’ve seen their problematic, childhood artwork! They’ve just unlocked a relationship achievement!
I really adore that Joe isn’t pulling his punches with her, though it does help that they talked about aspects of faith prior to dating, and that he’s been consistent in his disdain for Christian fundamentalism and particularly its mangling of Jewish concepts and teaching for their purposes, among other criticisms. Even as an atheist, Joe still considers himself Jewish and is proud of that identity.
Also just kind of hit me, Ethan and Joe are both broad-shouldered, tall Jewish guys. Never let it be said Joyce doesn’t have a type.
So… I purged my head of basically all biblical knowledge through strategic use of alcohol and blows to the head. As a result, I don’t get what is going on. Can someone please explain it to me?
Oof. Not expecting that one out of Baby Joyce. Did this involve one of the descendant splinters of those white nationalist churches who decided that the “mark of Cain” was Black skin?
I’d think so, but it depends partly on when she drew it. How old she was and what level of artistic skill. It’s a lot easier just to color in one figure with black, than to create a recognizable Jewish caricature.
Much more likely the Hamitic Curse, wherein all black people are said to be descendants of Noah’s son Ham (also called Canaan for whatever reason). I still remember a reference to the ‘resettlement’ of the Children of Ham in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
And I only just realized that the literal acceptance of the story of Noah is an endorsement of incest. Which, naturally, they pin on the daughters. Oy.
In the account of Noah, each of Noah’s kids had spouses with them on the Ark. That would indicate cousin marriage, but not really incest (as I think of it).
I believe you’re thinking of the account of Lot, who escaped Sodom and Gehmorah with his daughters, but they left their husbands behind and his wife turned back, cursed into a pillar of salt. Then his daughters, believing the whole world to be destroyed (although it hadn’t), got Lot drunk and took turns sleeping with him, so they could have children. Which was called out as wrong.
Still a terrible story, but not one held out as an example to follow, or even implicitly condoned.
Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan was initially offered the role of Judas in the film (Having sung the part on the original recording) but asked for too much money and that the band be payed for their interrupted schedule.
Let’s not forget that US fundies are only a tiny minority of Christians world=wide, so that the “average Christian” is a lot more Latino, sub-Saharan, Southern-European, West Asian, Indian, Korean, Phillipino, Papuan, and Pasifika than you might imagine at first.
This reminds me two funny things. Did you know that Aladin’s story is supposedly taking place in China? But the story’s writer being who he was he just made China look like his own place XD
Another comes from my College Translation class. Apparently the missionaries changed the Biblical stories a bit when presenting them to the Inuit people. Instead of using bread in the stories they opted for Fish to make the stories more appealing to the Inuit.
@Da Boy
Interesting detail about Aladdin and one i went toWikipedia to fact check, especially since “the author” when it comes to the 1001 Nights and adjacent texts is not a simple matter. This was a total rabbit hole. Quoth wikipedia: “The opening sentences of the story, in both the Galland and the Burton versions [Galland’s source is a storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab, who was long thought to be voiceless himself until his autobiography was found in the Vatican vaults in the 1990’s! Here’s a great piece about this incredible story], set it in “one of the cities of China”.[12] On the other hand, there is practically nothing in the rest of the story that is inconsistent with a Middle Eastern setting. (…) In early Arabic usage, China is known to have been used in an abstract sense to designate an exotic, faraway land.[15][16]”
Regarding the missionaries and their global effort to adapt christianity to the local culture, replacing bread with fish here, fig trees with banana trees there: that’s just one colonial/imperial strategy though, which came out of a specific, historical intersection of theological and material constraints and affordances. The Islamic expansion, for instance, took a very different approach with very different effects, in part because the letter of the Arabic scripture is divine and thus essentially untranslatable, and also the prohibition of figurative iconography.
@Tomn wow that’s so interesting, thank you! Some of these are gorgeous. Will forward this to my theologian dad who’s maybe-writing a book about the scriptural importance of jesus’ face. It’s a polemic he’s co-writing with some priest guy who he has a (mostly-)civil disagreement with, can’t remember the specifics now tbh. Something about whether the disciples recognize Jesus based on his specific facial features, or whether it’s more of an aura of divinity type of thing. The Turin shroud is involved, as well as the thorny problem of historical specificity vs. universality: to espouse the human condition god had to become a single human individual with a distinct face (and gender, and ethnicity, and language, etc). to what extent does it matter then who this individual was, and what – for instance – he happened to look like? i imagine this discussion has a name in christian theology.
For the Islamic expansion, I suspect a lot of the difference is that Islam expanded through conquest very early on, while Christianity took centuries to gain the political power to do so – not really expanding through conquest until after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since Rome wasn’t doing much expansion after it Christianized.
That Islam spread by conquest in the earliest years meant that Arabic language and culture spread with it. That allowed it to spread without translation. Christianity grew within the Roman Empire as the common language shifted from Greek to Latin and thus the texts were translated to be accessible. (And then were locked down in Latin for centuries to come as the language of learning and the Church.)
For sure! Representational traditions and dogma are completely entangled in the political history of these religions. I think the minimal takeaway is that @Tomn’s conclusion that people think of god in their own image, maybe needs to be historically contextualized. (Now they did say “the son of god” which is a christian-specific figure. I’m not disagreeing, it’s just interesting to put in a wider perspective)
Mind you, some people take it a little further than others – Hong Xiuquan ended up claiming to have had holy visions and declared himself to be Jesus’s younger brother, sent to create the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. He ended up launching one of the biggest, bloodiest civil wars in Chinese history before the Qing dynasty were able to put him down.
The Taiping did try to ask the West for help, since we’re all Christians here, aren’t we, but the Western powers were pretty weirded out by their interpretation of Christanity (all goods and families held in common, no more single marriages or children raised only by parents, among other things), not to mention the whole “Younger brother of Jesus” thing. Plus of course the geopolitics that made it more convenient to support an ailing dynasty than to raise up an unpredictable new theocracy.
*pops out of rabbit hole* oh shit, that sounds fascinating. i’ve also been learning chinese for a couple years. this is so up my alley in so many ways. thank you very much and good bye *plunges head-first into another rabbit hole*
Yes, Aladdin lived in China (plausibly meant to be Xinjiang, which was Muslim), and the sorcerer who claimed to be his uncle was from the Maghreb (Morocco, western North Africa). For a Syrian storyteller those would have been the opposite extremes of the Muslim world, and the sorcerer’s long journey a subtle indication of how important the lamp was.
Yeah, historically people always tended to adapt any old or foreign stories into their own culture/image. It’s not really a big deal.
Those holding onto it today are much more questionable.
As are those, especially in the European Middle Ages, who depicted Jesus (and the apostles) in their own image, while portraying Judas and the Pharisees as Jewish caricatures.
Is it a romance. Does Jesus date them all?or do they all date one lucky christian girl? and she can’t decide if she wants to date Judas or not because she fears he’ll betray her.
Oh damn that’s hot. So Jesus goes on dates with each of The Twelve and at the last supper he announces: “tonight one of you is boys going to kiss me”. Everyone looks at him, asking “is it me? is it me, lawd?” And Jesus is like “he knows who he is” and “accidentally” goes to help himself in the dish just as Judas does and their hands brush and their eyes meet…..
I was actually it would be more like one of those cheesy supernatural mystery shows based loosely on bible tales involving Jesus with modern era spin, packed with plenty of flimsy excuses for Jesus and the twelve to have their shirts off, so that the troubled girl sidekick can secretly swoon while fronting as a damaged, “bad girl” with a heart of gold who just needs to find her calling. Packed with plenty of unintentional (or very intentional) homoerotic subtext! This is a million dollar idea actually!
the gay angle *has* to be the thin layer of a plot in some old gay porno or other. how could it not be.
(couple minutes later)
found it (SFW-ish) (it’s a Vice article about the film & interview of the director, there’s some blurred-out stills)
however, and the article does begin by saying that, i first went on The Tubes and found a shocking absence of jesus-themed porn, except for a bit of blasphemy kink. the article does mention one reason why this might be the case, pointing out at the risk of a backlash against the gay community from pissed-off Xian conservatives. i mean, sure; i guess. they’ll always have a reason for being murderously mad at the gays, but i can see how if you’re a gay actor or director, whether of porn or romcoms, the thought of your personal safety at least would give you pause.
Hopefully a question that’s not too weird; would Joe be considered ‘white passing’? His skin tone is darker than Joyce or Danny, and even darker than fellow Jewish person Ethan. But it also doesn’t seem different enough that he would get scrutinised just based off the colour of his skin.
I’d say with the way he is drawn in this comic, the closest real life equivalent would likely be that Ethan is meant to have an olive complexion. Whether that’s white passing probably depends on who you ask. My mom had a brother with olive complexion and when he picked her up from work, her coworkers assumed she was cheating on my dad because they refused to believe that my mom, who was a pale skinned redhead, could be half sister to him due to his olive tone.
I get what you mean but if somebody ever called me that to my face I’d be kinda offended and not entirely sure why Like, on literal skintone, what do you mean “provisionally”? But also I tend to tick “white – other”… Like, on one genealogical root, I’m at least 4th generation British, I think? Third on another, not sure if 3rd or 4th on another, and 1st on the other (but that parent became a British citizen in their 20s and surrendered dual nationality so is just British… Just not by birth). These days I tend to go with “my heritage kinda averages out as Mediterranean” but when I was a teen and didn’t realise it sounded wrong I’d say things like “I’m kinda a mongrel – descended from people from all over”
But yeah, usually have passing privilege. Don’t not look Jewish, but kinda also maybe look like I might be French or something (but not in a chic stylish BCBG way)…
Bigotry in America is almost easiest to understand with “How close are you to Andy Griffith” and “how obvious are your deviations from that mold”? The actual logical definitions of race etc matter less than the vibes of them.
We also can’t forget that there are Jews of non-European descent who often have to deal with the same prejudices and microaggressions in Jewish spaces that they do in the rest of the world. Which is why I really think if Joe had meant antisemitic, he’d have just said “antisemitic.”
Yeah, that was puzzling me. I can’t remember the iconographic attributes of any of the apostles except for Judas and Peter, and would be surprised if Joe ever knew them. In fact, I didn’t think that Carol’s sort of church went in for that sort of thing, so wondered that Joyce knew them.
Okay, in Joyce’s defense, Judas is black in Jesus Christ Superstar and is easily the most compelling character in the movie. So, you know… maybe she saw the movie as a kid?
Or maybe I’ve been missing out on a lot of racist subtext all this time because the musical wrote the most interesting version of Judas I saw in all my time as a christian and I was just fixated on that part instead of potential stereotypes. Could be either, I grew up in small town Alberta, it’s basically Canada’s version of Texas. Probably all kinds of racist shit that went over my head growing up.
I’ve never seen Jesus Christ Superstar, but am I understanding right that this movie likewise chose to portray Judas as the only Black disciple? If so, gonna go out on a limb here and declare that this movie definitely counts as racist shit going over your head growing up.
No, several of the apostles are black in that film. Judas is the only apostle people my age remember from the film because he’s the primary POV character, he gets the best songs, he gets the best action shots, and he’s the only really sympathetic character in the show.
Oh good! I’m glad I misunderstood what the Armadillo was describing. My bad for jumping to conclusions; I return to knowing nothing about that musical.
Actually, it’s inclusionism in its earliest form. Like someone else said, he got one of the three best songs of the whole damned opera – the other ones being “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “King Herod’s Song” (sample lyric – “Prove to me that you’re no fool, wont’cha walk across my swimming pool?”)
It’s not a beacon of diversity what with being made in the 70s and all, but there are multiple Black apostles in the JCS movie! Aside from Judas being the biggest role (arguably bigger and inaugurably more sympathetic than Jesus), Simon (one of the two other apostles to get a song) and some of the seat fillers at the last supper are Black.
It also has a Judas who thinks Jesus is too preoccupied with telling his followers about afterlife-heaven-divine stuff when he should be helping the poor and suffering in the here and now. Humanist icon? Idk. But he’s easily the co-protagonist.
The villains (white for the record) have tanks at one point. Wild movie. Sick bass riffs.
Someone linked Judas singing Heaven on Their Minds up above.
“Listen, Jesus, do you care for your race?
Don’t you see we must keep in our place?
We are occupied!
Have you forgotten how put down we are?
I am frightened by the crowd
For we are getting much too loud
And they’ll crush us if we go too far
If they go too far”
Having character singing that be black in the 1970s had to be intentional.
Yep. The opera was controversial at the time, and not for using Rock musical. The opening night of the Sydney production was sabotaged by an affronted Christian.
JC Superstar was written by two atheists from England. It shows that in places. It was a follow up to Joseph and the amazing technicolor dream coat, which was written as a high school play. Though the composer wrote a very good Requiem later after a friend died.
I don’t think it’s unusual to pick up basic Christian story elements if you live in a Christian country, even if you’re a lifelong Jewish atheist (like me).
My AP Lit class made us read the Book of Luke as part of our summer reading so we’d have a frame of reference for all the allusions in other works. I’m not sure whether that’s relatively standard or because they knew students at our school in particular might not already be familiar with the source material.
In the movie “Dogma” there is the 13th Apostle Rufus, who was written out of the Bible because he was a black man. Played by Chris Rock. He is one of the major characters helping the protagonist prevent the retroactive end of the universe.
Judas, either the guy who really died (in two different ways at once) and went to Hell for your sins, or the only companion of Jesus who he trusted with his secret plan to… uh, be murdered by cops.
Last Temptation has a good version of Judas, iirc. A revolutionary who, when Jesus said, “if we don’t have enough guns swords, sell your coats and buy some, shit’s about to get real,” took the initiative, only for Jesus to be all like “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, let me miracle this cop’s ear back on rq before they torture me to death for rabble-rousing during our ‘death to empires’ holiday.”
Story time: my family is not and never had been religious in any way whatsoever, but when my sister went through a difficult period of being bullied in our local public school she and mum decided it’d be best for her to go to the nearest private school which happened to be a Christian school (idk what flavour). One day she comes home not sure whether to laugh or cry as she handed her art project that had gotten a fail. The instruction was to draw one of the disciples. She chose Judas. She did not know that Judas is a man’s name. Judas was a very busty lady. I hung that picture on my wall for years.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Well, there is in mainstream Christianity — all those saints have features called “attributes” that were used to identify them in iconic representations. I have some odd photographs of Salisbury Cathedral (which is covered in statues of saints) showing e.g. a saint carrying his severed head, a saint accompanied by a little dog, a saint holding up the hem of his tunic to show off his knee.
But I don’t think US Fundie Christianity includes that bit.
Orthodox does saints, too. Also I seem to recall that the Church of England (Anglican, Episcopalian) mob still does saints days — and they consider themselves Protestant. However, maybe the Anglican churches with all the icons are and inheritance from before the Reformation.
Not on saints, but still big on at least some of the Apostles.
The traditional iconography would probably be too papist for them though. Instead we get Joyce’s imagery from the Picture Bible. Not sure how they portrayed Judas though.
Judas Iscariot usually looks shady and shifty next to the other disciples. Sometimes he’s the only guy in the picture with stereotypical Jewish features (google up “ken welsh judas” for an example) Judging from Joe’s reaction, that’s probably what Joyce drew ^^u
Apart from that, in Catholic art the disciples are often depicted with some visual clues to their identity: Peter is holding the keys to the Kingdom, James the Greater is dressed as a pilgrim with a scallop shell on his hat, etc, etc. But if I recall correctly that’s usually in portraits or sculptures, not in scenes from the life of Jesus.
During the Dark Ages, pretty much only the clergy knew how to read. And any art was commissioned by the nobility. So people apparently needed common visual references as to who was whom. And, it should go without saying, The Goodest Guys would look as the customers did.
This naturally contined through the more (*snrk*) enlightened periods.
To be fair each culture that Christianity was introduced to made their own versions of Biblical people. You’ve got Asian Jesus, you’ve got African Jesus, you even have Inuit Jesus I think.
Thanks for this. My favorite short one from Frost.
For a surprising take from Ogden Nash, try thus one:
People expect old men to die, They do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look At them with eyes that wonder when… People watch with unshocked eyes; But the old men know when an old man dies.
Getting too close in age to enjoy visiting this one, though.
Okay, I wasn’t raised Christian, but I got the joke right away, but then I wondered how it was that it was clear that particular disciple was Judas? Like… I assume there are common placements of him in art, but I don’t know what they are. I could probably tell which one was supposed to be Jesus in a picture, and then I’m out.
I think the most direct answer would be that Joyce labeled that particular picture. I’d think there could be other ways for it to be obvious, too, but I’m not sure how they’d fit with Joyce’s style of Biblical accuracy and all that.
I fell into the same trap that Joe recognized the apostles by their traditional attributes in iconography when this is a child’s drawing of the twelve apostles. Probably smiling stick figures with name captions and one with an evil face drawn with black crayon
It could also just be deduction. Judas is fairly common knowledge in the US cultural zeitgeist and, considering how right-wing evangelism typically goes hand-in-hand with racism (and, as others have pointed out above, antisemitism), it makes sense to me that Joe would see a picture of Jesus and the apostles and immediately clock that the one non-white guy is most likely the “bad guy” of the group, given what he knows of Joyce’s upbringing
Everyone looking like goody-2-shoes except this one naughty boy glowering in the corner. Everyone else is blonde and straight-nosed, except him. And it’s like, you might not know all that much about christian iconography, but you know an antisemitic caricature when you see one, and unfortunately you know the old “Jewish deicide” narrative. It’s not subtle usually, and in a child’s drawing it’s probably even less subtle
Joe has a point: this is probably not a good time for Joyce to be deciding what to keep from her childhood. She’s going to throw out a few things that she will wish she had kept.
People mentioning Jesus Christ Superstar and how Judas and Simon were cast as black men.
It goes back much farther than that, though. Da Vinci painted “The Last Supper” over 600 years ago and it portrays both Judas (to Jesus’ right, holding a bag of coin, leaning on the table) and Simon (last person at the end of the right side of the table) as black men.
burning probably isn’t a good idea, but definitely shred or otherwise destroy those things before chucking them lest someone find it in the trash, this is the physical equivalent of having to delete your browser history
Question: How does Joe know which of the 12 bearded dudes that a much younger Joyce doodled (I’m picturing something close to stick figures) is supposed to be Judas?
if you're ever sad alone silently, consider this:
- i hold a copyright on being like that
- you are encroaching on my intellectual property
- i will send you a cease & desist
- i will possibly take you to court
so please make yourself legally distinct by talking to someone about it
Take the fictional character quiz and post the first four you know: openpsychometrics.org/tests/charac...
What this should tell you is that I'm always down to cause chaos and good trouble
Would you like to take a survey? Do you like to eat beans? Do you like George Wendt? Would you like to eat beans with George Wendt? Would you like to watch a movie about George Wendt eating beans?
so i'm thinking, okay, i took some extra photos of this set of doors this year so i could draw some other angles, it's an important set of doors, so let's pull up my new reference photos...
....and do you see a problem, do you see an issue
Well, Lizard is here, and I've been telling myself for... years that I'd take down my Endgame shelf and put up Spider-Man:No Way Home once the final villain was out.
So.
That's a thing I gotta do.
okay okay -- spider-man reboot idea
the lizard is still dr connors, but he's dr PHIL connors, and he wakes up every day and it's groundhog day and he's a lizard
is this anything
Alina Pete @alinapete.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Sean Thomason @seanthomason.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Rolling Stone @rollingstone.com ⋅ 2d
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Barb O. Saur 
⚧️
burn the lot
burn the bins
burn the dorm
send all the ashes to Carol for good measure
You’ve done well, now you know what you must do, burn it, burn it all.
Burn it! BURN IT ALL!
And then BURN THE ASHES AGAIN, for good measure!
Are we stopping short of burning Carol?
WAS IT JUDAS
Yes but weirdly Judas the Greater, not Judas Iscarot
The best answer I could have gotten, unexpected and earned a guffaw
Obscure Bible character jokes are COMEDY GOLD
Haha, I totally understand this joke
hang on I gotta google something
jesus christ
Well didn’t have to deep dive for that name
no thats a different guy
The site I found that explains why he was called Simon in one part of the bible and Judas elsewhere says:
“Names back then were more closely linked to the person’s identifying traits than they are today, and people received additional names as their identifying traits changed and/or were recognized”
Huh, says the transwoman.
So I grew up Catholic and I STILL had to come to the comments, because my parents believed in a more, shall we say, historically likely accurate representation of Jesus and all the people in the bible? By which I mean all the pictures I had of Jesus growing up, he was a brown/black man, Mary was brown/black, everybody except I think a few of the later saints were distinctly middle eastern/north african.
To the point where when I was 9 or so and finally ran across an Evangelical Jesus, I asked which saint it was to my friend’s parents. They said “Why that’s Jesus honey! Don’t you know Jesus?” and I went “That’s NOT Jesus!”. I then got an hour and a half lecture on learning who Jesus was, and it was torture because I had been in bible study since I was able to read, I was very much aware of who Jesus was and how the blonde blue eyed dude was definitely not it. That was obviously someone’s horny interpretation of some european later adorned saint.
I also had a more sympathetic view of Judas, more than most, as I figured if Jesus needed to be crucified to forgive us our sins, wasn’t Judas destined to “betray” him? Was it really betrayal if Jesus knew it would happen?
My point being, I sat here going “Well, it could have literally been any of them? Who the fuck would…*checks comments* oh. Oh no Joyce.”
Re: adorned saint, yeah the artistic depictions of Jesus started I think in the early Byzantine, where attempts to spread the religion to the illiterate majority meant that Jesus was drawn with artistic license featuring allusions to more well-known religious figures at the time like Apollo and Zeus, who likewise had flowing hair, sandals, robes, etc. Hell, even Jesus’s halo is actually a feature that’s borrowed from northern-European sun gods.
As one particularly favorite depiction of Jesus once said: “So the Romans murder me, and then they get to pretend to be me”.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/safely-ethnic
There were no northern European sun gods; the closest you get is Helios, not so much Greek in general as specific to the isle of Rhodos in the southeastern corner of the Aegean.
Long hair comes from early medieval kings of western & northern Europe: they got to keep their long hair, everyone else was shorn.
No northern European Sun Gods??? Every culture has a sun god or goddess. There’s Sunni (Germanic), Saule (Lithuanian and Latvia), Sol (Norse and Roman), Paivatar (Finn), Beaivi (Sami), Grian (Irish)….. Plus tons more.
Why would a sun god have a name related to the sun? Sunni? Sol? You definitely made these up to lead us away from Jegus.
Those names are from Indo-European root-word sōwulō, represented in the runic alphabet by ᛊ (an ancestor of the letter “S”), and it is where we get the English word for sun.
Regarding Judas’ unfortunate destiny, I highly recommend the film The Last Temptation of Christ as it touches on this. Also just a great movie in general.
Yep. This. Required viewing at my home (along with Dogma), every Blasphemy Season. Which falls roughly around the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
Although for historical accuracy, Willem DaFoe was kind of a stretch.
Ok, a lot of a stretch.
In fact, whatever it is one stretches in that metaphor, snapped.
Oh, you grew up with Shortpacked Jesus. Neat.
It might have been Thomas – who doubted Jesus had risen until he put his fingers into the crucifixion wounds, or even Peter, who denied Jesus thrice while He was being examined by the high priests – although maybe not so much, since Peter was later told “You are the rock on which I will build my church” given charge of “the keys to the kingdom of heaven”, and became what us Catholics consider to be the first Pope.
Read a story in college that was kind of an alt-timeline in which Peter, racked with guilt after denying Christ the first two times, switches and stands up and declares himself an apostle on the third time. He gets arrested immediately, gives up the names of the other apostles, and it ends up with all of them sitting around in a cell with JC, who is grumbling about how the whole plan got fissked up.
Turns out, “You will deny me three times before the cock crows” was an ~instruction~, not a prediction….
i mean, would they not all be brown/middle eastern looking? but yeah good thing no one else is sorting through it to blackmail joyce with lol
Only really yes.
But that doesn’t mean that any white supremists are going to worship a bloke who would get selected for special attention by the TSA.
Yep. That is a reason much of the old guard and leadership of the German Party during the ’30s and ’40s straight rejected Christianity. The only reason Christianity wasn’t straight outlawed under their regime was pragmatic, and even then they still used aesthetics as propaganda within Christianity
Maybe it was the 13th Apostle: Rufus?
Don’t know what you’re talking about. Rufus Shinra is pale and blonde.
Not in Dogma he wasn’t
13th was Matthias though.
Or Biff
It only gets worse the deeper you go…
*plays “Meinya” from Made in Abyss OST on hacked muzak*
When in doubt
Burn it down
ope
Once again, a joke I do not have the religious upbringing to understand.
one of the twelve diciples is judas, who is mostly remembered for having betrayed jesus which lead to the crucification by romans – the implication being that he’s the only one joyce depicted as a man of color.
i presume she drew judas, the traitor who turned in jesus to the authorities to ultimately be executed, as the only one not drawn white.
Judas Iscarot is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, noted for being the one to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The implication is that, of all 12 disciples, only the Evil Bad Traitor was drawn as a person of color.
I’m amazed, I grew up Christian and I definitely wouldn’t have pegged Judas as being the one drawn as a POC, though that makes sense cause I went down the list like “crap who else is important”… I also grew up watching Passion of the Christ and that version of Judas (as well as his final fate) was uh… pretty seared into my kid brain so I would never think of Judas as anyone other than that actor who was probably white. Now I wonder of Joyce was ever shown Passion of the Christ…
When you say person of color, I assume Middle Eastern? asking genuinely as a Jew unfamiliar with Christian picture books.
Depends on a lot of stuff TBH. Some media depicts him as Jewish(in the ultra-racist stereotype sense), but it’s fully possible that she drew that art young enough that she only had 2 crayons that qualified as flesh-tone and he got the dark one. Or she might have made him black because she’d absorbed “all bad people are black” that early. We will likely never know any more detail than that.
Crayola LOL. Joyce would have had a ‘flesh’ crayon — now renamed as ‘peach’. But then they came out with a ‘Colors of the World’ box. How woke is that?
Yeah I left it vague because I assume whatever indoctrinated racism young Joyce did wasn’t necessarily historically accurate.
Look, one way or another, she drew Jesus and the other 11 apostles as Aryan Ideal White Dudes and the nefarious traitor not. Whether as a stereotypical caricature Jew clutching his 30 silver, or as middle-eastern brown, or as black… There is no version of this that isn’t set-it-on-fire category.
Ahh see that’s why I wasn’t sure! I was assuming Middle Eastern, but based on today’s comic it sounds like he’s probably drawn as a Jewish stereotype – and don’t forget Joe is Jewish
Of course, the irony of Judas is that, were it not for his actions, Christianity likely wouldn’t have taken hold, as Jesus would never have been martyred.
Eh, that’s a stretch. There’s a bazillion ways Jesus could have been martyred without Judas’s specific betrayal, and there’s a bazillion ways Christianity could have taken hold without Jesus being martyred.
Jesus certainly could have been martyred in other ways, but the martyrdom is so central to Christianity that even if Jesus’s message had caught on with more years to teach it, what resulted wouldn’t have been anything like what Christianity became, even by the late first century.
I mean..a bunch if people have said it already so I’ll just say it will be interesting to speculate where in Joyce’s upbringing did the racism sneak in? Was that intentional on the Brown’s part or just a side effect of the religious media used?
Well, she had feelings for a certain mouse, so I’m going to assume a source closer to home.
Given her fixation on the picture Bible, that’s one possible source. Or it could be artistic license picking up on cultural biases.
Based on many wacky racist comments around Sarah, I bet Joyce’s folks and entire community mainly had the death-by-a-thousand-cuts very unexamined style of racism, which is just everywhere all the time in this country, and which could totally show up in Joyce’s kid-drawings this way.
We’re all swimming in it, we must all continually find it in our own minds, we must all set it on fire.
My guess it was the emphasis on “all” when they said things like “not all Black people are gangstas and welfare queens”.
Jesus the way God intended,
Blonde, Blue Eyed, and totally ripped:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZAkVbZVPTg
Ah. Yeah, a lot of Christian artwork pulls that particular bit of bullshit. I should really look at the illustrated abridged Bible I had as a kid to see if it did that.
JC Superstar does, doesn’t it?
I’ve seen only a few minutes of JC Superstar, and the only two things that stuck with me were that I think it was musical, and the anachronisms in the version I saw part of.
Several Romans marching, carrying spears. At least one of them has an M-16.
JC Superstar is always a musical, and the movie version is explicitly framed as a bunch of people in the modern day putting on a show, rather than a depiction of historical events. They show up in a bus.
Though it’s uh …. interesting that the actor playing Jesus is absent when they get on the bus to go home
They sometimes cast a black actor to play Judas, yes—most notably in the movie version from the 70s. They cast a white actor just as frequently (including another movie from the 2000s)—most notably the actor in the original production. JCS is also the most sympathetic, complex, and forgiving treatment of Judas I’ve ever seen in media, so (A) I don’t think the casting is particularly problematic, and can even work really well depending on the set design and staging (the themes of JCS are timeless, and directors have been known to dress the actors like modern protestors and corporate suits), and (B) I doubt Joyce’s parents would have shown her the film version on purpose—which itself portrays Jesus & co. as loving hippies—given that evangelicals tend to reject the notions of “Jesus was a socialist” and complexity in their “good guys vs. bad guys” version of these stories.
You might want to take a look at I, Judas.
In the production of Jesus Christ Superstar that I saw as a kid the only non-white performer was Marcia Hines. She sang the part of Mary Magdelene, and became a national rock star on the strength of her success.
The part of Judas was sung by Jon English, far the biggest star in the cast. Except maybe for Reg Livermore, who turned his bit part as Herod into a seven-minute show-stopper of song and dance.
The 1972 version does have Carl Anderson as black, which I will defend by saying that he absolutely killed the role and was the best part of the movie (loaded with a lot of great singing and choreography.) Carl Anderson was a god-tier singer and I would not replace him for anybody. Also Simon the Zealot is black, Mary Magdalene is Native American I think.
But all of the characters raceswap often in the different plays that have been put on throughout the years. In the 2000 movie, Judas was white (and awful), and in 2018 the production had John Legend as Jesus and some of the apostles were even played by women. Still waiting for the day they’re looking for a chick Judas, because I will be there and I will be waiting.
The first movie is the best production though, because it’s the only one which has the second song which actually explains the motives of the Pharisees, and thus is the only one that treats *everyone* as people. Later productions omit it (and I don’t think it was in the OG play), but I cannot emphasize how very important that one song is to understanding that this isn’t the “Jesus Jesus” movie or the “Jesus LOL” movie, it’s the “Everyone in these stories were allegedly people with wants, motives, and fears” movie. Atheist or Christian, I highly recommend the 1972 movie (though it definitely does have problematic moments), the music is great, the take on the story is interesting, and the scenery is just drop dead gorgeous.
Also, there is NO way that Joyce would have ever seen it lol. It is a pretty controversial and hated movie among most extreme Christians.
TLDR; I have complicated feelings on the casting because I can see how they were racially problematic, but the people who played those roles did them SO FANTASTICALLY WELL that it is really hard for me to just say “well then it shouldn’t have been cast this way” because I can’t imagine anyone else doing their roles better. Nobody cast since has ever been able to out sing the originals. Nobody’s ever come close. And frankly, I don’t want people to walk away thinking Carl Anderson as Judas was just a racist casting moment when I cannot express how fantastic of a singer and actor that man was back in the day.
I was raised in a household that wasn’t Christian and I have to admit the 1972 version of Jesus Christ Superstar was basically my canonical understanding of the Jesus story for a long time. I have never had an understanding of Judas that wasn’t really deeply shaped by that film. The writing of that musical in general and Carl Anderson in particular depict that character with such a degree of relatable humanist rage at the injustices of the world and the way that people twist their stories to let them perpetuate those injustices. I don’t think anyone ever asked me who my favorite biblical character was as a kid or teen (because again I was not raised religious), but I think if anyone ever had I probably would have answered Judas up until the point somewhere in my mid-teens when I properly understood what the optics of that would have been.
Is the 2000 version the one with Jerome Pradon? Because yeah, dude can’t sing, but he acted the hell out of it.
Yeah Judas, apart from the Pharisees, is the only Jew in the Bible
Ah, good old childhood racism! You know, you don’t really know a person until you’ve seen their problematic, childhood artwork! They’ve just unlocked a relationship achievement!
I… audibly went “OH…”
Well the important thing is she understands how messed up it is to do that
And yet, Carol was so proud to be able to say her daughter “wasn’t racist”.
I really adore that Joe isn’t pulling his punches with her, though it does help that they talked about aspects of faith prior to dating, and that he’s been consistent in his disdain for Christian fundamentalism and particularly its mangling of Jewish concepts and teaching for their purposes, among other criticisms. Even as an atheist, Joe still considers himself Jewish and is proud of that identity.
Also just kind of hit me, Ethan and Joe are both broad-shouldered, tall Jewish guys. Never let it be said Joyce doesn’t have a type.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/04-but-dont-give-yourself-away/ohhh/
Even her mom can recognize this girl’s got A Type.
Jacob is tall and broad-shouldered, too (and has a Jewish name, if that counts for anything?)
And let’s not forget Jacob, clearly Joyce likes classicly handsome
I’d imagine she probably thinks Henry Cavills a bit of all right
Yep. She thought Walky was cute when she was younger, but after that, she likes ’em built like superheroes.
So… I purged my head of basically all biblical knowledge through strategic use of alcohol and blows to the head. As a result, I don’t get what is going on. Can someone please explain it to me?
Judas
I assume she drew only Judas (the betrayer) as non white
Judas was the only disciple not drawn as white
Ah, that makes sense. Thank all 3 of you for responding.
lol sorry for the dogpile
Huh, is that how they handled it in The Picture Bible? That’s Joyce’s main visual baseline right?
It doesnt seem like it (if Im looking at the right one? Andre LeBlanc?) but ive personally seen quite a lot of …telling paintings of Judas and whatnot
Oof. Not expecting that one out of Baby Joyce. Did this involve one of the descendant splinters of those white nationalist churches who decided that the “mark of Cain” was Black skin?
Possibly, but I’d say it’s more likely she drew him as an anti semitic Jewish caricature rather than black
Oh no that is so much worse in this context!
I’d think so, but it depends partly on when she drew it. How old she was and what level of artistic skill. It’s a lot easier just to color in one figure with black, than to create a recognizable Jewish caricature.
Much more likely the Hamitic Curse, wherein all black people are said to be descendants of Noah’s son Ham (also called Canaan for whatever reason). I still remember a reference to the ‘resettlement’ of the Children of Ham in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
And I only just realized that the literal acceptance of the story of Noah is an endorsement of incest. Which, naturally, they pin on the daughters. Oy.
In the account of Noah, each of Noah’s kids had spouses with them on the Ark. That would indicate cousin marriage, but not really incest (as I think of it).
I believe you’re thinking of the account of Lot, who escaped Sodom and Gehmorah with his daughters, but they left their husbands behind and his wife turned back, cursed into a pillar of salt. Then his daughters, believing the whole world to be destroyed (although it hadn’t), got Lot drunk and took turns sleeping with him, so they could have children. Which was called out as wrong.
Still a terrible story, but not one held out as an example to follow, or even implicitly condoned.
By “they left their husbands behind,” I actually meant that the husbands refused to go with them. Not that they slipped out in t the night.
In her defense, Carl Anderson *was* a black guy…
and has some of the best songs, IMO.
Kinda doubt she’s seen that movie.
Certainly not. Far too many queer subtexts for that household. And, also, queer texts.
For those as confused as I was he played Judas in several showings of Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway, in other tours, and in the 1973 movie.
Not a musical I think her parents would have approved of, but something they might have rented based on having Jesus Christ in the title.
Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan was initially offered the role of Judas in the film (Having sung the part on the original recording) but asked for too much money and that the band be payed for their interrupted schedule.
As opposed to – if any of them actually existed, none of them should be white?
Good luck convincing the average christian that all their favorite bible characters were anything other than white dudes though.
And also true
Let’s not forget that US fundies are only a tiny minority of Christians world=wide, so that the “average Christian” is a lot more Latino, sub-Saharan, Southern-European, West Asian, Indian, Korean, Phillipino, Papuan, and Pasifika than you might imagine at first.
True.
In fairness, this isn’t constrained to white dudes alone. Behold, Chinese Jesus:
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1011968
Turns out people like to think that the Son of God looked, sounded, and dressed like them no matter how widely improbable that would be, who knew?
This reminds me two funny things. Did you know that Aladin’s story is supposedly taking place in China? But the story’s writer being who he was he just made China look like his own place XD
Another comes from my College Translation class. Apparently the missionaries changed the Biblical stories a bit when presenting them to the Inuit people. Instead of using bread in the stories they opted for Fish to make the stories more appealing to the Inuit.
@Da Boy
Interesting detail about Aladdin and one i went toWikipedia to fact check, especially since “the author” when it comes to the 1001 Nights and adjacent texts is not a simple matter. This was a total rabbit hole. Quoth wikipedia:
“The opening sentences of the story, in both the Galland and the Burton versions [Galland’s source is a storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab, who was long thought to be voiceless himself until his autobiography was found in the Vatican vaults in the 1990’s! Here’s a great piece about this incredible story], set it in “one of the cities of China”.[12] On the other hand, there is practically nothing in the rest of the story that is inconsistent with a Middle Eastern setting. (…) In early Arabic usage, China is known to have been used in an abstract sense to designate an exotic, faraway land.[15][16]”
Regarding the missionaries and their global effort to adapt christianity to the local culture, replacing bread with fish here, fig trees with banana trees there: that’s just one colonial/imperial strategy though, which came out of a specific, historical intersection of theological and material constraints and affordances. The Islamic expansion, for instance, took a very different approach with very different effects, in part because the letter of the Arabic scripture is divine and thus essentially untranslatable, and also the prohibition of figurative iconography.
@Tomn wow that’s so interesting, thank you! Some of these are gorgeous. Will forward this to my theologian dad who’s maybe-writing a book about the scriptural importance of jesus’ face. It’s a polemic he’s co-writing with some priest guy who he has a (mostly-)civil disagreement with, can’t remember the specifics now tbh. Something about whether the disciples recognize Jesus based on his specific facial features, or whether it’s more of an aura of divinity type of thing. The Turin shroud is involved, as well as the thorny problem of historical specificity vs. universality: to espouse the human condition god had to become a single human individual with a distinct face (and gender, and ethnicity, and language, etc). to what extent does it matter then who this individual was, and what – for instance – he happened to look like? i imagine this discussion has a name in christian theology.
For the Islamic expansion, I suspect a lot of the difference is that Islam expanded through conquest very early on, while Christianity took centuries to gain the political power to do so – not really expanding through conquest until after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, since Rome wasn’t doing much expansion after it Christianized.
That Islam spread by conquest in the earliest years meant that Arabic language and culture spread with it. That allowed it to spread without translation. Christianity grew within the Roman Empire as the common language shifted from Greek to Latin and thus the texts were translated to be accessible. (And then were locked down in Latin for centuries to come as the language of learning and the Church.)
For sure! Representational traditions and dogma are completely entangled in the political history of these religions. I think the minimal takeaway is that @Tomn’s conclusion that people think of god in their own image, maybe needs to be historically contextualized. (Now they did say “the son of god” which is a christian-specific figure. I’m not disagreeing, it’s just interesting to put in a wider perspective)
Mind you, some people take it a little further than others – Hong Xiuquan ended up claiming to have had holy visions and declared himself to be Jesus’s younger brother, sent to create the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. He ended up launching one of the biggest, bloodiest civil wars in Chinese history before the Qing dynasty were able to put him down.
The Taiping did try to ask the West for help, since we’re all Christians here, aren’t we, but the Western powers were pretty weirded out by their interpretation of Christanity (all goods and families held in common, no more single marriages or children raised only by parents, among other things), not to mention the whole “Younger brother of Jesus” thing. Plus of course the geopolitics that made it more convenient to support an ailing dynasty than to raise up an unpredictable new theocracy.
*pops out of rabbit hole* oh shit, that sounds fascinating. i’ve also been learning chinese for a couple years. this is so up my alley in so many ways. thank you very much and good bye *plunges head-first into another rabbit hole*
Yes, Aladdin lived in China (plausibly meant to be Xinjiang, which was Muslim), and the sorcerer who claimed to be his uncle was from the Maghreb (Morocco, western North Africa). For a Syrian storyteller those would have been the opposite extremes of the Muslim world, and the sorcerer’s long journey a subtle indication of how important the lamp was.
Yeah, historically people always tended to adapt any old or foreign stories into their own culture/image. It’s not really a big deal.
Those holding onto it today are much more questionable.
As are those, especially in the European Middle Ages, who depicted Jesus (and the apostles) in their own image, while portraying Judas and the Pharisees as Jewish caricatures.
Fun article, thanks for sharing!
A lot of that art kinda slaps though, religiousness aside.
@tomm
thank you, very interesting
To me the image of Jesus appears sort of half way between the two cultures
Well if you think about it. Judas is the sexy badboy of the Bible.
Who would play Judas in the CW teen drama about a modern day Jesus and his Twelve Apostles? Working title would be “The Twelve” coming Fall 2024!
Is it a romance. Does Jesus date them all?or do they all date one lucky christian girl? and she can’t decide if she wants to date Judas or not because she fears he’ll betray her.
Oh damn that’s hot. So Jesus goes on dates with each of The Twelve and at the last supper he announces: “tonight one of you is boys going to kiss me”. Everyone looks at him, asking “is it me? is it me, lawd?” And Jesus is like “he knows who he is” and “accidentally” goes to help himself in the dish just as Judas does and their hands brush and their eyes meet…..
I was actually it would be more like one of those cheesy supernatural mystery shows based loosely on bible tales involving Jesus with modern era spin, packed with plenty of flimsy excuses for Jesus and the twelve to have their shirts off, so that the troubled girl sidekick can secretly swoon while fronting as a damaged, “bad girl” with a heart of gold who just needs to find her calling. Packed with plenty of unintentional (or very intentional) homoerotic subtext! This is a million dollar idea actually!
the gay angle *has* to be the thin layer of a plot in some old gay porno or other. how could it not be.
(couple minutes later)
found it (SFW-ish) (it’s a Vice article about the film & interview of the director, there’s some blurred-out stills)
however, and the article does begin by saying that, i first went on The Tubes and found a shocking absence of jesus-themed porn, except for a bit of blasphemy kink. the article does mention one reason why this might be the case, pointing out at the risk of a backlash against the gay community from pissed-off Xian conservatives. i mean, sure; i guess. they’ll always have a reason for being murderously mad at the gays, but i can see how if you’re a gay actor or director, whether of porn or romcoms, the thought of your personal safety at least would give you pause.
I know you joke, but the CW IS gonna be airing a Jesus bioseries.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/jesus-drama-the-chosen-the-cw-1235511664/
I’m just gonna wait until the series is over and watch only the clips featuring Satan on YouTube.
“The Bible is the biggest IP of all time”
Jesus bustin open those CW doors bein like
“I SMELL COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT”
Kinda depends on who we’re claiming the author is. Current US copyright lasts for life of the author + 70 years.
Although I would watch the heck out of a copyright trial claiming that the christian god wrote the bible.
Nietzsche pronounced God dead in 1882. It has been more than 70 years since.
The copyright infringement thing was intended as a joke, hahaha, but okie.
He’s almost as popular as the Beatles!
You don’t know what I would kill to see Riverdale but the Bible
Well that’s a pretty good point he was a total sexbomb in Jesus Christ Superstar
https://youtu.be/pqoeM18vCaU?feature=shared
“Sickness must be cleansed!” – Ser Charibert, before setting the boss fight arena on fire.
Hopefully a question that’s not too weird; would Joe be considered ‘white passing’? His skin tone is darker than Joyce or Danny, and even darker than fellow Jewish person Ethan. But it also doesn’t seem different enough that he would get scrutinised just based off the colour of his skin.
I’d say with the way he is drawn in this comic, the closest real life equivalent would likely be that Ethan is meant to have an olive complexion. Whether that’s white passing probably depends on who you ask. My mom had a brother with olive complexion and when he picked her up from work, her coworkers assumed she was cheating on my dad because they refused to believe that my mom, who was a pale skinned redhead, could be half sister to him due to his olive tone.
Light-skinned Jews like me are often called “provisionally white”. It’s a distinct and weird thing to be! but I’m too sleepy to explain it right now.
I get what you mean but if somebody ever called me that to my face I’d be kinda offended and not entirely sure why
Like, on literal skintone, what do you mean “provisionally”? But also I tend to tick “white – other”… Like, on one genealogical root, I’m at least 4th generation British, I think? Third on another, not sure if 3rd or 4th on another, and 1st on the other (but that parent became a British citizen in their 20s and surrendered dual nationality so is just British… Just not by birth). These days I tend to go with “my heritage kinda averages out as Mediterranean” but when I was a teen and didn’t realise it sounded wrong I’d say things like “I’m kinda a mongrel – descended from people from all over” 
But yeah, usually have passing privilege. Don’t not look Jewish, but kinda also maybe look like I might be French or something (but not in a chic stylish BCBG way)…
Your gut reaction is 100% correct — the situation is rather offensive, and it can be hard to name why!
Race in America, using the “eyeball it” method, has as much to do with facial features and hair as skin color.
With that said, Jews are white when convenient and not-white at other times. And the convenience here is rarely theirs.
Bigotry in America is almost easiest to understand with “How close are you to Andy Griffith” and “how obvious are your deviations from that mold”? The actual logical definitions of race etc matter less than the vibes of them.
We also can’t forget that there are Jews of non-European descent who often have to deal with the same prejudices and microaggressions in Jewish spaces that they do in the rest of the world. Which is why I really think if Joe had meant antisemitic, he’d have just said “antisemitic.”
I go with “eggshell”, depends who’s around me.
Hell, we didn’t even classify the Irish as being ‘white’ for the longest time, IIRC.
It was Rufus, right? …Right!?
Eeey Rufus! The BEST apostle! Hope Jesus eventually paid him back…
I’m amused that early-Joyce must’ve also labeled which disciple was which, so that her eventual Jewish boyfriend could spot the problem.
Yeah, that was puzzling me. I can’t remember the iconographic attributes of any of the apostles except for Judas and Peter, and would be surprised if Joe ever knew them. In fact, I didn’t think that Carol’s sort of church went in for that sort of thing, so wondered that Joyce knew them.
I found a list on Wikipedia. It doesn’t include Judas Iscariot, whose attribute (I remember) is a purse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_symbolism#The_Apostles
And one hell of a hooknose. Which he probably chalked up to playing rugby as an undergrad.
Or one of them is holding a bag of money. ($)
Haha, also possible. I’m kinda glad to never find out the exact horrible way(s) that this childhood drawing went.
Or they’re just all sparkling white and beatific-looking and shit, and there’s this one shifty-looking brown guy and it’s like. You just know
(Also this is probably an actual drawing made by actual kid-Willis.)
Okay, in Joyce’s defense, Judas is black in Jesus Christ Superstar and is easily the most compelling character in the movie. So, you know… maybe she saw the movie as a kid?
Or maybe I’ve been missing out on a lot of racist subtext all this time because the musical wrote the most interesting version of Judas I saw in all my time as a christian and I was just fixated on that part instead of potential stereotypes. Could be either, I grew up in small town Alberta, it’s basically Canada’s version of Texas. Probably all kinds of racist shit that went over my head growing up.
I’ve never seen Jesus Christ Superstar, but am I understanding right that this movie likewise chose to portray Judas as the only Black disciple? If so, gonna go out on a limb here and declare that this movie definitely counts as racist shit going over your head growing up.
(Sorry to be the one to tell you. And, comment section of a comic, what a wacky place to find out!)
No, several of the apostles are black in that film. Judas is the only apostle people my age remember from the film because he’s the primary POV character, he gets the best songs, he gets the best action shots, and he’s the only really sympathetic character in the show.
Oh good! I’m glad I misunderstood what the Armadillo was describing. My bad for jumping to conclusions; I return to knowing nothing about that musical.
I will fully admit I couldn’t remember what the rest of the disciples looked like.
(Sorry, clicked “flag” by mistake for “reply”).
Apart from Peter and Judas, the rest of the Disciples are just a chorus. (And drunk or inattentive, besides being lazy and ambitious.)
Oh, and then there is Simon the Zealot, who also has a solo urging Jesus to armed rebellion.
Actually, it’s inclusionism in its earliest form. Like someone else said, he got one of the three best songs of the whole damned opera – the other ones being “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and “King Herod’s Song” (sample lyric – “Prove to me that you’re no fool, wont’cha walk across my swimming pool?”)
It’s not a beacon of diversity what with being made in the 70s and all, but there are multiple Black apostles in the JCS movie! Aside from Judas being the biggest role (arguably bigger and inaugurably more sympathetic than Jesus), Simon (one of the two other apostles to get a song) and some of the seat fillers at the last supper are Black.
It also has a Judas who thinks Jesus is too preoccupied with telling his followers about afterlife-heaven-divine stuff when he should be helping the poor and suffering in the here and now. Humanist icon? Idk. But he’s easily the co-protagonist.
The villains (white for the record) have tanks at one point. Wild movie. Sick bass riffs.
Judas is the main sympathetic viewpoint character in Jesus Christ Superstar. Mary Magdalene is the other. It is not a pre-Christian opera.
That was supposed to be “pro-Christian”, not “pre-Christian”. Stupid fat typing fingers!
To be fair that still wasn’t incorrect though.
What a relief!
Someone linked Judas singing Heaven on Their Minds up above.
“Listen, Jesus, do you care for your race?
Don’t you see we must keep in our place?
We are occupied!
Have you forgotten how put down we are?
I am frightened by the crowd
For we are getting much too loud
And they’ll crush us if we go too far
If they go too far”
Having character singing that be black in the 1970s had to be intentional.
that movie most likely have been deemed heretic by Joyce’s mom and prevented any watching
Yep. The opera was controversial at the time, and not for using Rock musical. The opening night of the Sydney production was sabotaged by an affronted Christian.
JC Superstar was written by two atheists from England. It shows that in places. It was a follow up to Joseph and the amazing technicolor dream coat, which was written as a high school play. Though the composer wrote a very good Requiem later after a friend died.
Maybe it’s a drawing of the Penultimate Supper. Plenty of dramatic license to be taken there.
With a conjurer and a Mariachi band.
My mind is clearer now
At last, all too well
I can see where we all
Sooooon will beeeeee
I’m impressed that Joe picked up the black judas given that probably no one specifically told him about these things. or I am wrong?
About what things?
This charming man? He knows so much about these things.
I don’t think it’s unusual to pick up basic Christian story elements if you live in a Christian country, even if you’re a lifelong Jewish atheist (like me).
My AP Lit class made us read the Book of Luke as part of our summer reading so we’d have a frame of reference for all the allusions in other works. I’m not sure whether that’s relatively standard or because they knew students at our school in particular might not already be familiar with the source material.
Rufus!
Who is this Rufus character?
In the movie “Dogma” there is the 13th Apostle Rufus, who was written out of the Bible because he was a black man. Played by Chris Rock. He is one of the major characters helping the protagonist prevent the retroactive end of the universe.
The more you learn about child joyce, the more you learn to hate young david willis
Judas, either the guy who really died (in two different ways at once) and went to Hell for your sins, or the only companion of Jesus who he trusted with his secret plan to… uh, be murdered by cops.
Last Temptation has a good version of Judas, iirc. A revolutionary who, when Jesus said, “if we don’t have enough
gunsswords, sell your coats and buy some, shit’s about to get real,” took the initiative, only for Jesus to be all like “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, let me miracle this cop’s ear back on rq before they torture me to death for rabble-rousing during our ‘death to empires’ holiday.”Joe’s eyes in the next-to-last panel are hilarious.
This whole scene is a dang intimate look into someone’s life.
Story time: my family is not and never had been religious in any way whatsoever, but when my sister went through a difficult period of being bullied in our local public school she and mum decided it’d be best for her to go to the nearest private school which happened to be a Christian school (idk what flavour). One day she comes home not sure whether to laugh or cry as she handed her art project that had gotten a fail. The instruction was to draw one of the disciples. She chose Judas. She did not know that Judas is a man’s name. Judas was a very busty lady. I hung that picture on my wall for years.
now That would explain a lot of things (not it wouldn’t)
Stupid, sexy, Judas.
Tbf does it say anywhere in the gospel that Judas wasn’t a drag queen?
There will be a LOT of fire, won’t there?
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
– Robert Frost
Aw that’s pretty <3
Hey, it could be anyone of the twelve, really. Wait is there some sort of dressing codification for each of the disciples?
Well, there is in mainstream Christianity — all those saints have features called “attributes” that were used to identify them in iconic representations. I have some odd photographs of Salisbury Cathedral (which is covered in statues of saints) showing e.g. a saint carrying his severed head, a saint accompanied by a little dog, a saint holding up the hem of his tunic to show off his knee.
But I don’t think US Fundie Christianity includes that bit.
Those nutjobs are protestants. As far as my bad memory goes, unlike catholics, they aren’t big on saints.
Orthodox does saints, too. Also I seem to recall that the Church of England (Anglican, Episcopalian) mob still does saints days — and they consider themselves Protestant. However, maybe the Anglican churches with all the icons are and inheritance from before the Reformation.
Not on saints, but still big on at least some of the Apostles.
The traditional iconography would probably be too papist for them though. Instead we get Joyce’s imagery from the Picture Bible. Not sure how they portrayed Judas though.
I’ve seen pictures of him on Willis’ Tumblr. It’s not great.
I went poking around the internet briefly, but didn’t find any. Should have gone straight to Willis’ Tumblr
I’m going to duplicate the link to the list on Wikipedia of the attributes of the Apostles, for convenience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_symbolism#The_Apostles
Joyce must’ve labeled them. Adorable?
In any other context, yes.
Judas Iscariot usually looks shady and shifty next to the other disciples. Sometimes he’s the only guy in the picture with stereotypical Jewish features (google up “ken welsh judas” for an example) Judging from Joe’s reaction, that’s probably what Joyce drew ^^u
Apart from that, in Catholic art the disciples are often depicted with some visual clues to their identity: Peter is holding the keys to the Kingdom, James the Greater is dressed as a pilgrim with a scallop shell on his hat, etc, etc. But if I recall correctly that’s usually in portraits or sculptures, not in scenes from the life of Jesus.
w o w.
lmao god dammit, judas!
Could have been worse, Joyce could’ve followed the python skit (which would have offended Joe for different reasons).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iXNJtNZbds
Revising your bins to filter and get rid of things of 10, 20 years ago is a universal adulthood tradition.
There’s always more old crap to get rid of.
Always. More.
But there’s also some stuff you never get rid of.
“Your house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
– George Carlin
It was Thomas, right? :v
I see so many comments about Judas from Jesus Christ Superstar, but no one is talking about my favorite movie version of Judas: Dracula.
During the Dark Ages, pretty much only the clergy knew how to read. And any art was commissioned by the nobility. So people apparently needed common visual references as to who was whom. And, it should go without saying, The Goodest Guys would look as the customers did.
This naturally contined through the more (*snrk*) enlightened periods.
Oh damn
To be fair each culture that Christianity was introduced to made their own versions of Biblical people. You’ve got Asian Jesus, you’ve got African Jesus, you even have Inuit Jesus I think.
Oh… wait… nevermind. I read it properly now, commenting right after waking up strikes again.
Mexican Jesus died so people could cross the rio grande.
(I hope someone gets this reference)
Thanks for this. My favorite short one from Frost.
For a surprising take from Ogden Nash, try thus one:
People expect old men to die, They do not really mourn old men. Old men are different. People look At them with eyes that wonder when… People watch with unshocked eyes; But the old men know when an old man dies.
Getting too close in age to enjoy visiting this one, though.
Okay, I wasn’t raised Christian, but I got the joke right away, but then I wondered how it was that it was clear that particular disciple was Judas? Like… I assume there are common placements of him in art, but I don’t know what they are. I could probably tell which one was supposed to be Jesus in a picture, and then I’m out.
I think the most direct answer would be that Joyce labeled that particular picture. I’d think there could be other ways for it to be obvious, too, but I’m not sure how they’d fit with Joyce’s style of Biblical accuracy and all that.
I fell into the same trap that Joe recognized the apostles by their traditional attributes in iconography when this is a child’s drawing of the twelve apostles. Probably smiling stick figures with name captions and one with an evil face drawn with black crayon
It could also just be deduction. Judas is fairly common knowledge in the US cultural zeitgeist and, considering how right-wing evangelism typically goes hand-in-hand with racism (and, as others have pointed out above, antisemitism), it makes sense to me that Joe would see a picture of Jesus and the apostles and immediately clock that the one non-white guy is most likely the “bad guy” of the group, given what he knows of Joyce’s upbringing
Everyone looking like goody-2-shoes except this one naughty boy glowering in the corner. Everyone else is blonde and straight-nosed, except him. And it’s like, you might not know all that much about christian iconography, but you know an antisemitic caricature when you see one, and unfortunately you know the old “Jewish deicide” narrative. It’s not subtle usually, and in a child’s drawing it’s probably even less subtle
Going by today’s strip (that is, the one after this strip I’m commenting on right now), the disciples were clearly labeled with names.
Joe has a point: this is probably not a good time for Joyce to be deciding what to keep from her childhood. She’s going to throw out a few things that she will wish she had kept.
As a counterargument: “set it on fire”.
Probably best to do it before even looking at them.
Bach and Michelangelo were 14 when they both received accolades as either near genius or actual genius
I think Joyce is safe unless she wants to recycle the art
Oops! That’s a Judas!
I played Judas in a play at church when I was in college. No one else wanted the role.
It’s funny, because Judas Iscariot is my dream role in Jesus Christ Superstar (or really across most productions).
Not that I’d really have the range to pull it off.
Fuck me, is that a thing?!? I mean, I guess I should have guessed, but it never even occurred to me.
People mentioning Jesus Christ Superstar and how Judas and Simon were cast as black men.
It goes back much farther than that, though. Da Vinci painted “The Last Supper” over 600 years ago and it portrays both Judas (to Jesus’ right, holding a bag of coin, leaning on the table) and Simon (last person at the end of the right side of the table) as black men.
Really? I’ve seen that painting numerous times (as have many) but I’ve never seen any of the disciples as being Black.
Maybe, but looks like he’s in shadows to me, literally and figuratively.
burning probably isn’t a good idea, but definitely shred or otherwise destroy those things before chucking them lest someone find it in the trash, this is the physical equivalent of having to delete your browser history
It’s Peter, isn’t it? His later fate was odd and very Fresh Prince… Yeah to the Recycle Bin that goes.
Plus, when you’ve seen one T-pose, you’ve seen ’em all
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but did anyone notice the drawing of Sarah in the background? Almost like she was overseeing things.
always watching…..
I drew jesus as a furry on the cross with evanescence lyrics floating around him so I mean
idk if that drawing is still floating around or not but I would like to shred it
(not comparing furries to racism lol just that as a young christian I also had odd crucifixion drawings)
was it the traitor or the zealot?
See, I would have drawn Judas like Starscream.
Yay, forget the past! Set it on fire if you have to!
You can tell which one is Judas because he’s kissing Jesus.
i can totally imagine joyce as a religious fujoshi if she had gotten into an anime phase early or so lol
Google “FAGUANG Last Supper” and open the image.
Not one white face to be seen anywhere for miles
ok and
wtf is a F.A.G.U.A.N.G.?
A name.
Question: How does Joe know which of the 12 bearded dudes that a much younger Joyce doodled (I’m picturing something close to stick figures) is supposed to be Judas?
if you read the next strip, you’ll see that joyce labeled them