Build-A-Jesus: Make a Savior Who Works for You!

By now, almost everyone has heard of Build-A-Bear, which has taken the traditional Teddy Bear to new levels. At Build-A-Bear, you can “choose, stuff, stitch, fluff, and dress” a bear all your own. A bear that bears the stamp of your own unique identity. You can pick the hue of your teddy’s fur; dress it in almost any

Build-A-Bear

style and color; give it a hat or not; shoot, you can even make a recording that the bear will play when you press his little paw.

Did you know that you can do the same thing with Jesus? That’s right, you and your buddies can Build-A-Jesus to make him suit your fancy.

Building your own Jesus is not a new practice at all. In fact, for almost two millennia, people have been “choosing, stuffing, stitching, fluffing, and dressing” Jesus to fit their fancies.

The other day, I was looking around WordPress to see what was happening. I saw that a blog called Everfaith was among the fastest-growing here at WordPress. So I checked it out.

In the midst of what was mostly evangelical drivel, Everfaith recounts a little skirmish between herself and an anonymous commenter over Jesus’s attitude toward socialism (16 October 2008).

Arguing that Jesus was an anti-socialist, Everfaith cites the parable of the talents as told in Matthew’s Gospel. “Wow”, writes Everfaith. “There we have […] the biggest argument against socialism I have ever seen.” Milton Friedman would object. (Unfortunately, Everfaith does not explain what it means for an argument to be “big”. Is the argument tall or fat or lengthy?)

What I find interesting about this otherwise banal exchange is that the socialist argues that Jesus was a socialist and the anti-socialist argues that he was anti-socialist. Coincidence? Well, anything’s possible!

More probable than a coincidence, however, is Build-A-Jesus. As I said above, this is a process by which you gather all of your most cherished political, social, economic, and moral ideals and project them onto Jesus, because he has become a figure of authority. This way, your values receive a high-end endorsement. Indeed, the agreeement of the Son of God is almost as effective a marketing tool as Lebron James’s smile.

Build-A-Jesus is not the only game in town, either. In fact, it’s a branch of an older and larger human project which can be called Build-A-God. Indeed, five hundred years before Jesus was even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes observed that “men create the gods in their own image”. He writes further that

if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men do, the horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.

In this respect, little has changed in 3000 years. Socialists cobble together a socialist Jesus, anti-socialists a capitalist Jesus. Black Muslims revere an African Jesus, Dutch Protestants a cracker Jesus of the Warner Sallman variety (he looks like a cross between a Ken doll and a member of the Swedish Ski Team). Beleagured militants indulge themselves in a rebel Jesus who is more like Che Guevara than the hyper-effeminate Jesus on offer in most Sunday School classrooms, who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Build-A-Jesus

Then there is Hippie Jesus, depicted primarily as wearing sandals and communing with nature. And that’s just a sampling of the Jesus Smorgasboard. (For an extensive treatment of the various Jesuses built in North America, see Stephen Prothero’s book, “American Jesus”.)

So what are we supposed to make of all this? Are the gospels (and I won’t even delve into the apocryphal ones here, which offer entertaining variations of their own) just a kind of theological Rorschach test, where one will see what one is determined to find?

It would seem so. After all, Jesus lived (AND died!) long before Saint Simon and Marx, indeed long before capitalism. And yet we find people arguing over whether or not he was a socialist. Jesus could not have had an opinion on socialism any more than he could have had a favorite television show.

For so long, people have been less concerned with who Jesus was than with what sort of Jesus they could build. My Jesus hates abortion, your Jesus recognizes women’s right to choose. My Jesus is a peacemaker, yours carries a sword.

There are a couple of serious problems here. First, no one really knows who Jesus was. In fact, he is an altogether literary phenomenon. Texts are the only indication we have that the man ever existed at all. Significantly, those texts were not authored by him but by his followers, roughly 75 to 120 years after he had died. Even these texts cannot be entirely trusted to give accurate accounts of Jesus, because they were written by people whose parties stood to gain in portraying a Jesus who emphasized certain attitudes and practices over others. Biblical scholars have long recognized the disparities among the 4 canonical gospels and tied them to disparities in the communities to whom they were written.

Second, no matter who Jesus was, he was not a twenty-first century Gentile. He was, in fact, a first-century Jew. This salient fact is genially overlooked by the millions of twenty-first century Gentiles, like Everfaith and the socialist commenter, who do not hesitate to attribute to Jesus informed opinions which he could not possibly have held about social phenomena about which he could not possibly have known. This is like speculating about how Socrates or Gautama would vote on stem-cell research: it can be done, but all in vain.

A shining example of this tendency was the late, great “WWJD?” fad, in which people would ask what Jesus would do in a given situation, having erroneously concluded that Jesus – a denizen of the ancient Middle East – would actually know what to do in uniquely modern, Western moral dilemmas.

Jesus is dead. We should let him rest in peace. Any deity you worship under the name of “Jesus” is an abstraction of your own crafting. To make Jesus white, or black, or Pro-Choice, or a Communist, or anti-Jewish, or the third Person of the Trinity, is unfair to the remarkable man he must have been.

And if you just have to Build-A-Jesus, at least consult the best Biblical scholarship before doing so.