Toto

A Brief History

There is a cartoon bank of Bible based New Yorker cartoon prints for sale:

http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/Bi...s_c147192_.htm

mountainman

... the Old and New Testaments make for excellent satirical fodder ....



It should not take too much longer for objective scholars and academics and other objective commentators to understand the idea that the NT (and OT) were historically speaking, often satirical fodder for the docetic heretical gnostics. Other than an intervening sixteen centuries, what's the difference between the Biblical parodies in the New Yorker and the Biblical parodies in the Nag Hammadi Codices?

stephan huller

I don't even know what to say about this. What do you know about 'docetic heretic gnostics'? I thought Eusebius made them all up.

sotto voce

There is no parody here, no ridicule, no spoof. Just simple and apparently respectful humour. Humour is premised on the dignity of humanity; indignity is anomalous. So these cartoons actually reinforce the authority and validity of the Bible.

Or rather, they reinforce the authority and validity of a particular interpretation of the Bible. In quite a lot of cases, the humour is very weak, which is suspicious. There is some other message here, therefore. Indeed, from these cartoons, one might well be persuaded that there really was a global flood. That notion distracts from the Bible's actual message from this story, which is allegoric, concerning atonement. Likewise, the cartoons about the garden of Eden, that is allegory about the moral fall of every child of mother born, may well mislead. The political notion of clergy, of special 'Christian' occasions, both inimical to the Bible, is promoted. However, these distortions are only to be expected from a source such as this.

So yes, these cartoons oppose religious belief; but only one of them, and not in an obvious way.

mountainman

Think again. Eusebius was a canonical insider. The docetic heretical gnostics were the non canonical outsiders. The Gnostics were, for at least a short time, out of the control of the orthodox, and they had the impudence to author their own "Unofficial" gospels and acts. OMFG.

ApostateAbe

The New Yorker article is darned funny. It is a parody of girlfriends and whipped boyfriends, not of the Bible, so I am not sure that it makes the blogger's point, but it is still funny.

sotto voce

Maybe it's funny in America.

ApostateAbe

Yeah, I know, the UK has higher standards for comedy.

DCHindley

Yeah,

Can't beat the late Benny Hill (PBUH) and Monty Python. Some of the other shows, though, are hideous.

DCH

sotto voce

Long before electricity, Britain 'invented' humour because it alone had the assurance to laugh at itself. There are UK TV shows, and there is what goes unremarked in ordinary conversation, which in Britain is often subtle, side-splitting, the height of humour, far better than the telly. The BBC acts as the Beeb almost always does, dumbs down, and makes a great noise about what is not very funny. Which is funny enough, in its own way.

The USA today takes itself very seriously, more than ever. Having said that, modern Americans can be funny. As long as they're Jewish.