{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Me: *thinking about Christian memes* What if Jesus had come in 2017 instead of back during Roman times? Would He, instead of...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/177334203399/", "html": "

discoursedrome:

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warpedellipsis:

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annoyingtastemakerpeanut-blog:

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redfoxflying:

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earthly-chairs:

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mudbloodedslytherin:

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Me: *thinking about Christian memes* What if Jesus had come in 2017 instead of back during Roman times? Would He, instead of using parables, have spoken in memes?
\nRoommate: I hate you. You aren\u2019t allowed to have any more thoughts about Jesus.
\nMe: It\u2019s not like its heresy! It isn\u2019t insulting!
\nRoommate: Yes, it is! Memes are inherently sin, a sign of the Devil\u2019s influence on this fallen world!

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Satan: turn these stones into bread

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Jesus: bold of you to assume that man can live on bread alone

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#satan: yeet yourself from this high place for the angels will surely catch you#jesus: i think the fuck not you trick ass bitch

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Townsperson: Lazarus is dead

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Jesus: fake news

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crossing yourself would be a pose like planking

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ok so this is a joke obviously but it\u2019s adjacent to something I think about a lot, which is that so much of our religion and Christianity in particular is expressed in terms meant to be accessible to farmers and pastoralists, and it\u2019s so completely removed from modern experience (even modern farming experience in most cases) that we have to learn these parables and metaphors like learning a foreign language, with these dense layers of mediation that didn\u2019t exist for the intended audience. It\u2019s sort of like reading writers from periods when English was notably different but still intelligible, and coming to understand things that were natural to their audience but unnatural to us as aesthetic signifiers of that genre of work.(Even Marxist rhetoric has this problem, in that it\u2019s tied to this industrialist workerism that\u2019s become fetishized for its anachronistic appeal, but it\u2019s really noticeable in religion.)

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If this stuff was aimed at modern audiences in an otherwise similar context, we\u2019d have a lot more parables and metaphorical sermons about people who live in apartments or men\u2019s shelters, and\u00a0 at retail, warehousing or call centres. And a genuine localization would I think have to take that tack \u2013 it\u2019d have to be wholly transformative in its substance in order to preserve the intended reading. But the value people place in tradition is mostly invested in its visible markers, so that concept is a hard sell \u2013 the more anachronistic and removed from daily experience something becomes, the more \u201ctraditional\u201d it feels, and so the same weight that makes these old-ass metaphors unweildy also makes them lasting.

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