No. No, no, no, no, no.

[beatrice_otter]

So 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.)

Comments

[staranise]

Somebody seems to have actually believed their eighth-grade English teacher, who told them, "You can't have a wrong opinion about a book."

[beatrice_otter]

Yes, exactly. It's not that there's only one right interpretation; there are many interpretations that have varying degrees of rightness. But that doesn't mean that all interpretations are right. And, certainly, there are many iterations of Superman that you can talk about Jesus symbolism--notably Superman Returns, as I said, and also there's some interesting meta to be written about Superman II and Clark Kent becoming Human as compared and contrasted to Jesus' incarnation. But if you're talking about the core Superman mythos, especially the core Superman mythos as conceived by Siegel and Shuster ... it's about Moses, not Jesus, and all the meta in the world isn't going to change that.

[chordatesrock]

More like somebody seems to have believed the eighth-grade English teacher who told them all the characters were Jesus and if you don't think so, you're wrong and also not cultured enough.

Off the Latest Things page

[needled_ink_1975]

I started reading your post and got to the Messiah bit and was like, Moshi'ach? WTF,*no*. He's totally Moshe. And then there's your all caps agreement and...

Sorry, I have nothing of value to add to this incredibly correct post (I'm not even into this fandom. Terrible. Sorry), except to say, I *really* needed that laugh.

Thanks

–N

Re: Off the Latest Things page

[beatrice_otter]

Yes. Baby in the ark, it's Moses. As a Christian, the fact that so few people seem to get that tells me mostly that they don't actually know the Bible. Which, if one is going to make literary comparisons to a source one doesn't actually know much about, of course one is going to look stooooopid to those who are better informed.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Totally Moses. I think I wrote a paper at some time about that. Blanket! Kansas after the vastness of space.

[beatrice_otter]

The Moses parallels are so completely obvious, the only way you can really make the Jesus argument is if you just ... don't know much about Moses, or really any other major Hebrew Bible figure.

[lilacsigil]

And don't know all that much about Jesus either...