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…Oh, and By the Way… when the Christ Child Grew Up, He took a Wife and Made Her a Disciple

I find the news striking that our favorite former Jew, Jesus Christ, was, in fact, married, and we have the paper to prove it!  The papyrus tells us so, and if we believe in one Holy papyrus, then we must have enough faith to believe in other verified bits of writing, right?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

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Jesus Magnets

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to the “Rusty Midwest Bible Belt” and gave me two refrigerator magnets he bought in a Church store.

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Wired Covers a Chocolate Urban Jesus

We love the re-gifting ability of the Internet.  It was our delight and surprise to learn today Wired.com liked our Urban Semiotic article — What to Do With a Naked Chocolate Jesus — enough to link it from their article on Bioartists… way back on December 13, 2007 as you can see in the screenshot below.  The Urban Semiotic.com link from April 2, 2007, is the last words in the last sentence:

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Electric Erotica: How to Turn On Jesus

Who knew you could “turn on” Jesus with the flick of your finger?  I can’t decide if this Jesus-Light-Switch-With-Children semiotic is more or less offensive than our previous winner, The Unholy Blow Job.

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Assassinating the Quadroon Messiah

The “Calaca Obama” cartoon seen below is frightening on several levels.  First, “calaca” is a colloquial term for “skeleton” in Spanish.  Calacas — human skulls representing joyous dead figures in “Day of the Dead” celebrations — are supposed to suggest that even the dead deserve a celebration of their lives. Next, we need to understand in Guatamala, “calaca” means death and there is no mistaking graves for happiness in that cultural context.  Finally, for those who have no idea what a “calaca” is — we all recognize a skull is not a living soul and so we must wonder what insidious semiotic is being spent on us in the name of Barack Obama.  Halloween is tomorrow in the USA, but do we really want to be making disconnected, editorial cartoon, attributions of death against Barack Obama any time during the year?

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An Ordinary Jesus

We already know Jesus was found dead in his grave — but the recent news that the entire Jesus “resurrection miracle” may have not been anything terribly special in light of a new discovery of a stone scroll extolling the common practice of dead people arising from their eternal slumber in order to live again decades before our favorite Jewish Messiah made his move — leaves some of us wondering what’s left in the Jesus trunk of miracles.

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Jesus Christ, Something Offends Somebody

When you create art, or when you write something, you always risk offending someone somewhere.

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