Jabbering Jesus Action Figure
This morning, Tom Tomorrow hosted a particularly funny link to a talking Jesus action figure along with the following note :
Actually, and this is no joke, there’s already a company which makes Talking Jesus dolls. And what I particularly like is that their version of Talking Jesus recites–the Ten Commandments. I assume that even this site’s largely secular audience will understand what’s wrong with that.
I knew he’d end up having to clarify that statement, so it’s no surprise that he ended up adding the following update :
…various nitpickers are insisting that this would not be theologically inconsistent, because Jesus, as a Jew, would have been intimately familiar with the Commandments. Well, sure, and Abraham Lincoln was undoubtedly familiar with the writings of Thomas Jefferson, but if you’re making a talking Abe Lincoln action figure, trying to convey the essence of the man with a few ounces of molded plastic and an embedded thirty second sound chip, are you going to have him reciting excerpts from the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address?
Memo to the nitpickers : He’s right and you’re wrong. The idea of having a Jesus action figure reciting the ten commandments isn’t just ludicrous because he’s covering one of Moses’ greatest hits, but because the whole point of the Jesus story was to reject the sort of legalistic crap in the Old Testament. Hell, just look up the word “testament”1 . The New Testament, by definition, is God’s2 way of saying “Let’s forget all those crazy rules and simplify things a bit”.
But if you’re one of those who thinks every letter in the Bible was typeset by divine authority, let’s just skip all of the history and quote the Bible itself :
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself3.” Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.”
“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.”
“Which ones?” the man inquired.4
Jesus replied, ” ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”
You’d have to be a damn fool to believe that Jesus would parrot the Ten Commandments verbatim. If he didn’t do it in the gospels5 (even when prompted to do so), why the hell would it make any sense for him to do it as a talking doll? You’ve gotta wonder about the true motives behind someone who would literally put words into their god’s mouth.
1 : I knew you’d be too lazy to look it up. Testament, in the Biblical sense, means “A covenant between humans and God”. Or to put things in political terms, the New Testament is essentially Judaism’s New Deal (though Paul did a damn good job of stripping all the Judaism out of it, huh?).
2 : Assuming you believe all that stuff (which I don’t).
3 : I’m sure I don’t need to point this out or anything, but “Love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t one of the Ten Commandments.
4 : Notice that Jesus doesn’t say “All of them, dumbass”. Obviously Jesus isn’t as big a fan of all Ten Commandments as people like Judge Roy Moore would have us believe.
5 : In fact, the Ten Commandments don’t appear anywhere in the New Testament.
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I bet “Judge Not…” is nowhere in his repetoire.
Comment by Mad Matt — April 14, 2005 @ 1:12 pm
Anybody want to develope a plastic Lucifer to temp the plastic Jesus in the desert?
Comment by kamachanda — April 14, 2005 @ 1:51 pm
Great Post.
Comment by joe — April 14, 2005 @ 3:23 pm
Other than Revelation it doesn’t seem like fundamentalist Christianity has all that much to do with Jesus. I think they tend to look at him as that longhaired cousin who only stops by during Christmas and Easter.
Comment by jimmarquis — April 14, 2005 @ 5:24 pm
How about “Thou shalt not create craven images…”
Comment by FreedomByChoice — April 14, 2005 @ 7:06 pm
Craven images? Is it a statue of a cowering Jesus? I think you mean “graven”. 8-)
Comment by Dick Berg — April 14, 2005 @ 11:03 pm
Given that we’re currently engaged in a war rooted in religious differences, can a “G. I. Joseph” doll be far behind?
Comment by RDJ — April 15, 2005 @ 7:20 am
Sorry to piss on your parade. The doll is ridiculous, for obvious reasons, but your analysis of jesus’ teachings is weak. The formula ‘they may all be summed up in this…’ is a common rabbinic one. Amongst Rabbis contemporary and prior to Jesus you will find statements such as:
‘all the commandments are equivalent to ‘you shall love the lord your god with all your heart”
‘…are equivalent to this “do not do to others that which is hatefull to yourself”‘
and
‘…are equivalent to “love your neighbour as yourself”‘
These Rabbis were involved in the propagation and development of the Jewish religion that keeps the laws of the Hebrew Bible. Most critical scholars also argue that Jesus kept (or at least tried to keep) all 613 of the biblical commandments, and considered them to be binding on all Jews. Like many Jewish teachers of the day, he sought to educate people in what commandments should be given priority.
The statement that Jesus came to get rid of that ‘old testament crap’ is silly, and also implicated in a particularly nasty narrative in which christians care for the ’spiritual’ and those course jews are only interested in the ‘legalistic’ and the ‘external’, which has been superseded.
Sorry, I know you are just having fun, but it is at the expense not just of tacky doll manufacturers, but of historical accuracy. And you are unwittingly propagating some rather nasty stereotypes about the differences between Jewish and Christian cultures.
Comment by resterson — April 15, 2005 @ 10:13 am
I decided to go over and check out the action figure, had a little time to waste. Good News, Talking Jesus is white with blue eyes. Maybe the next company to come out with one can make it blond. Talking Jesus just isn’t as much fun as a brunette.
Comment by kamachanda — April 15, 2005 @ 10:50 am
My use of words like “legalistic” is in no way an attempt to elevate Christianity. As an atheist, I don’t really find either faith to be more spiritually enlightening than the other.
That said, I don’t think it’s historically inaccurate to point out that the great appeal of Christianity has been its simplicity (especially in comparison to orthodox Judaism). Compared to the seemingly endless string of laws in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the laid-back hippy Jesus telling everyone to love each other would obviously be a breath of fresh air. I hadn’t heard similar quotes attributed to his contemporaries, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Then again, perhaps I’m attributing too much to Jesus and not enough to the people who have spent the last two thousand years twisting his life into a religion that all but ignores its Jewish roots. While I say that Jesus appeared to “reject the sort of legalistic crap in the Old Testament”, I should have made clearer that this interpretation is based on the fact that the Christian Bible is bisected into Old and New Testaments and not based on Jesus’s teachings directly.
After all, the Christian Bible is essentially a really long, meandering novel that takes a few hundred pages to get to the point of it all. The way things are now,a the only reason for the continued inclusion of the Old Testament it to buoy fairytale-like beliefs (Jonah swallowed by a whale, Noah’s ark, garden of Eden, etc.), establish “prophecies” that pop up later as “proof” of Jesus’s divinity (as if we’re supposed to forget that the New Testament writers/compilers weren’t familiar with this stuff when throwing together their sequel), and serve as a prologue to the gospels. The Old Testament makes Jewish life seem pretty goddamn dreary, but that’s probably the whole point.
Going back to the “legalistic” stuff, while I find the strict adherence to some religious laws to be archaic, at lest those people have more than a passing familiarity with their religion’s orthodoxy. By contrast, I have little respect for the beliefs of someone so ignorant about their own religious traditions that they don’t know what their god did or didn’t say, aren’t familiar with the basic history of their religion, and can’t explain why their religion is more appealing than someone else’s. Like I said before, I don’t think sticking to a series of religious codes makes someone more or less spiritual, so I hope my post wasn’t interpreted as an attempt to boost Christianity or malign Judaism in any way.
The only point I was trying to make is that having a Jesus doll recite the Ten Commandments is fucking retarded.
Comment by greg — April 15, 2005 @ 11:19 am
Yeah, “graven,” derr. chalk it up to posting pre-caffeinated from memory.
I just listened to the talking jesus at Vicale, and long about the 4 second mark, he says, (in deep, reverberating English – not Aramaic. Apparently Gibson got it wrong) “you shall not make yourself an idol or misuse the name of the Lord.” What.. a load.. of CRAP
Comment by FreedomByChoice — April 15, 2005 @ 11:27 am
dear talent show:
your 4/15 postings are nice–a little of that ole time religion.
but for a more secular discussion of what’s going on, please visit us at:
velvelonnationalaffairs.blogspot.com
Peace,
rkent@mslaw.edu
Comment by robert kent — April 15, 2005 @ 12:01 pm
I noticed that Black Star Ops is a division of the Vicale corporation that makes the second Jesus doll mentioned. blackstarops.com
They have the mysterious address of “Black Star Ops at an undisclosed location know only as Black Ledge”. A super hero hide out, no doubt. I imagine they while away the hours, manufacturing their own armor piercing bullets, and talking jesus dolls. Let’s just hope that when those pesky feds come a knockin’, the good people at Black Ledge remember which pocket holds the talking jesus, and which holds the Luger. “Was it my left or my right?”
Comment by St. Michael — April 15, 2005 @ 1:42 pm
My good Resterson, You could possibly expect Christians to be familiar with the Talmud? Most of them don’t even know it exists.
Comment by Marcus — April 15, 2005 @ 3:48 pm
Sorry, I know you are just having fun, but it is at the expense not just of tacky doll manufacturers, but of historical accuracy.
This makes me giggle.
Comment by Oneiros Dreaming — April 16, 2005 @ 1:06 am
The Week in Blog
Well, I’ve been saving up good links and stories all week, but haven’t gotten around to sharing them. So, for your edification and reading pleasure, here goes: A tip of the hat to information junkie extraordinaire Avedon Carol, on whose…
Trackback by Pacific Views — April 16, 2005 @ 1:56 pm
“the New Testament is essentially Judaism’s New Deal (though Paul did a damn good job of stripping all the Judaism out of it, huh?”
… I guess you don’t know much about Second-Temple Judaisms…
Comment by sara — April 20, 2005 @ 12:37 am
Except that, the article doesn’t say Jesus recites the 10 commandments. It says the Moses doll does. Jesus recites 5 Bible verses.
All that excitement over nothing.
Comment by KathyF — April 21, 2005 @ 2:05 pm