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No. No, no, no, no, no.
May. 28th, 2014 03:12 pmSo I just came across an "interesting" piece of meta about Superman as a 20th Century Messiah. I get cranky about this, because the religious symbolism of Superman is quite obviously MOSES, not Jesus, as befits a character who was created by a couple of nice Jewish boys. (Seriously. His people were in jeopardy, so his parents put him in a little vessel/basket/ark and sent him off, so that he could survive and be raised by foster-parents. Moses in the Nile getting raised by Pharaoh's daughter, anyone?) Most of the other points of Superman that get pointed out as being analogous to Jesus either apply to Moses or other Hebrew Bible figures even more or are actually, er, not really applicable to Jesus.)
This one, however, takes the cake. It starts off by talking about the Jesus/Superman/Messiah thing (complete with a Sacred Heart of Jesus painting right next to an image of Superman stripping off his suit to reveal the iconic S). Then it mentions that Siegel and Shuster were Jewish, and this was the 30s and horrible things were happening to Jews, and that's why they needed a Messiah so they wrote Superman!
Problem: besides the fact that Superman is way more like Moses than like Jesus, if two nice Jewish boys were going to make a Messiah-like character, he would not be like Jesus. No, really, Jesus does not fit the ideas that Jews have, now or at any time in the past, about the promised Messiah. That's why, you know, they didn't follow him. Over the milennia, Jews have had a wide variety of expectations about what the Messiah was going to be like, but the comparisons that come up the most often in such discussions are Moses, Elijah, and David. It was at that point that I shook my head and stopped reading.
If you want to talk about Moses and Superman, I am all over that. Jesus and Superman ... no.
(Yes, I get that Siegel and Shuster haven't had creative control for seventy years, and that Christians have added in various Jesus-like actions and attributes, but by and large those haven't become a part of the core character. Everybody knows about Superman being sent off as a child from Krypton to be kept safe from the dangers that threatened his people, you will find that backstory in every single Superman incarnation ever. Things like the Superman Returns ending where Superman sacrifices himself to save the world from Lex Luthor's plot and lies in a coma in the hospital for a few days, on the other hand, are not part of the core mythos.)
This one, however, takes the cake. It starts off by talking about the Jesus/Superman/Messiah thing (complete with a Sacred Heart of Jesus painting right next to an image of Superman stripping off his suit to reveal the iconic S). Then it mentions that Siegel and Shuster were Jewish, and this was the 30s and horrible things were happening to Jews, and that's why they needed a Messiah so they wrote Superman!
Problem: besides the fact that Superman is way more like Moses than like Jesus, if two nice Jewish boys were going to make a Messiah-like character, he would not be like Jesus. No, really, Jesus does not fit the ideas that Jews have, now or at any time in the past, about the promised Messiah. That's why, you know, they didn't follow him. Over the milennia, Jews have had a wide variety of expectations about what the Messiah was going to be like, but the comparisons that come up the most often in such discussions are Moses, Elijah, and David. It was at that point that I shook my head and stopped reading.
If you want to talk about Moses and Superman, I am all over that. Jesus and Superman ... no.
(Yes, I get that Siegel and Shuster haven't had creative control for seventy years, and that Christians have added in various Jesus-like actions and attributes, but by and large those haven't become a part of the core character. Everybody knows about Superman being sent off as a child from Krypton to be kept safe from the dangers that threatened his people, you will find that backstory in every single Superman incarnation ever. Things like the Superman Returns ending where Superman sacrifices himself to save the world from Lex Luthor's plot and lies in a coma in the hospital for a few days, on the other hand, are not part of the core mythos.)
