Suffering is moe.
Crucified on the cross, Jesus Christ knew profound suffering.
Therefore, Jesus Christ is profoundly moe.
This, along with a few other propositions of dubious logical merit, forms the basis of Let’s Bible, a tale of Biblical proportions that toes the line between being bizarrely funny and simply wrong. Perhaps, as James Wood said, the Creator cannot be reified, but in Let’s Bible, Jesus is certainly moefied.
The story, as such, is that Jesus of Nazareth is taking a vacation on earth. Just as with Fate: Stay/Night‘s Arturia Pendragon, it seems that history got her gender wrong. Along comes a fisherman determined to make her his, and rounding out the cast are a disciple and a demon – not the originals, but their descendants. Civilian extras appear as well, but have no substance or continuity.
What Let’s Bible lacks in coherence and dignity, it makes up for with irrepressible enthusiasm. Unnecessary panty shots? Sure. Showing Jesus groped by a horny, teenage boy? Why not? Even as Sekirei mocked modern dating habits by proposing that women are treated as collectibles, to be gathered up like so many Pokémon, Let’s Bible suggests that a male presented with a female Jesus would see her as a desirable conquest, rather than an object of genuine devotion. While in a realistic setting this might go over as vile or repugnant, such extreme lechery is depicted here as heroic and manly, or simply as a funny personal quirk.
Let’s Bible is not going to win any awards for theological accuracy. Still, if you want to watch a man monologue about why he wants to lose his virginity to Jesus, or a demonic flamenco guitarist make vending machines and billboards rain from the sky, In-Wan Youn and Kyung-Il Yang have produced the manhwa for you.
What does Anime Diet’s Seminary graduate make of the religious content of this post?
I’ve never been a big fan of genderbending to begin with but this is wrong on so many levels.
I just read the one shot and I had to laugh, mostly. It was too unlike anything resembling, you know, Christian theology to really be offended by it, though as it gets closer to the end it started getting uncomfortable with the notion that Lucifer was somehow just as powerful. (Sadly, many Christians behave as if this were true too, but I digress.) Nevertheless you could have substituted the names of the characters with something totally different and it would have made just as much sense.
My guess is that the use of Biblical names and references was to attract controversy/outrage–I’m not surprised that this was Korean rather than Japanese in that regard. Korea is a far more Christianized, evangelical even, society than Japan (almost half of the students at my seminary are Korean!) and this reads like a response to that context. An immature, rather adolescent one I might add. It’s the theological equivalent of mooning your opponent.
My sense is that God is more worried about his self-proclaimed people misusing his name for their own ends than with silly concoctions like this. It’s a work of fiction and human imagination and I’ll let someone smarter than me have the last word on that:
The human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols. –John Calvin
To make genderbent Jesus moe, they have to make her the protected rather than the protector. So they make her helpless (and she isn’t shown doing anything directly.) The disciples are the ones fighting, and the devil is more powerful than them (but not so much that they are irrelevant.)
All of this is, of course, quite possibly more thought than the authors themselves put into it.
I’m more curious how the very Christian nation of South Korea reacted to this.
Cool info! Haven’t read any Korean manhwa yet but this looks very interesting. Mel Gibson’s Jesus was going thru sadistic torture the entire film. Passion of Christ. Passion is moe? Thus, Moe of Christ is what Let’s Bible about? Let me bible it to find out! lol