Kicking ass and talking flames
A bunch of sites I read regularly are all excited about this post on (Mad Magazine knockoff) Cracked’s website about the 9 most badass Bible verses. That is because parts of the Bible are actually pretty hilarious, and if you’re inclined enjoy jokes about video games, action movies, and Smokey Bear, these writers have made it even more hilarious.
I saw one site link to this with a comment that it was funny yet theologically suspect, but honestly, I was struck by how genuinely informative this was. No, seriously. I mean, sure, there’s some exaggeration in there, but I think the difference is pretty clear between stuff that was actually in the Bible (e.g., Moses killing an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew) and the stuff that’s embellished (e.g., Pharoah had been using the Hebrew slaves to build a giant robot).
This may not be a lesson in theology and world religion, but hey, the Bible has some surprising stuff in it that plenty of people don’t realize. Just teasing out those little bits and bringing them to light is a good way to encourage some discussion and reflection on what this text is supposed to mean for us. You’ve got to consider the good alongside the bad, the well-known alongside the utterly bizarre.
Humor is a fine way to do this, I think. Back in high school (maybe college?), I would occasionally get into conversations with friends and family members about some Bible story or another. I have no idea what brought these conversations about, but there you go. I found that the easiest and quickest way to get everyone else up to speed with how I was interpreting those stories was to paraphrase them using modern slang. One of my friends dubbed these “Ghetto Bible Tales.” This is probably because during high school, my friends and I ironically appropriated the slang of the popular crowd, who in turn had unironically appropriated it from Black youth culture. We did not mean to actually make phrases like “word,” “wack,” and “this shit is ill, yo” part of our daily vocabulary as anything but a joke, but somehow they kind of stuck.
Anyway, the result was that a quick summary of a Bible story put some words into Jesus’ mouth that don’t generally get attributed to Jesus, and that’s funny.
Sometimes I have thought that it might be worth writing up some of these for a blog or a publication of some sort, but I suppose I have other things to do, and I’m not sure how comfortable I’d be sharing that kind of joke with people who don’t know me personally. Fortunately for us all, sometimes people who know the Bible in greater detail than I go where sensitive liberals (like myself) fear to tread.
