Saturday, November 17, 2007

John's Revelation: Just some age-old superhero comics?

Recently, I was guest in a greek TV show where the subject matter was two greek books that argue that “Antichrist”, whose coming is prophesied in Saint John’s Revelation, will appear in 2012 and the “End of the World” will soon follow. The writers of those books (Theodosios Efstathiou and Father Maximos) are strong believers in Holy Scripture’s infallibility, and their views are based on it.

In that TV show were also 6 or 7 theologians along some other people, all of them “strong believers”.

I was the only non believer among them; so whenever I tried to raise any objection, I was interrupted with hostile manner. So, I had to become aggressive. At some point I came to say that the whole issue of “Antichrist” and of the “End of the World” –since it was based solely on the Christian mythology (Scripture) and there wasn’t any observable ties of this with reality– has the same degree of seriousness as super-hero comics have.

You know how it goes: “Antichrist” seems to be the arch-villain who wants to destroy the world and “Christ” is Superman who comes to fight him! Only difference is that today we pay US dollars to read comics by ourselves, yesterday we had to submit fully to some priest to preach his stories to us.

I hadn’t the time needed to argue that today’s comics are as well-written as the Holy Scriptures. Also, I couldn’t show that some comics, such as Marvel’s and DC’s, have fully developed theologies and they introduce powerful and well-thought deities –i.e. “Celestials” or “Galactus”- leading complex hierarchies of super-beings, reminiscing Angels.

All I wanted to say was if comics are discovered after thousands of years by some future archaeologist, I am fully certain he will think that today’s people have superpowers, can fly, and they are in daily contact with aliens and other “higher entities”!

I am very sure that if this future archaeologist will be prone to believe everything he reads, like a lot of today’s people, he would accept Superman and Spiderman as real existing persons who are some kind of supernatural saints!

So, what is there to argue we don’t make the same mistake with Bible?

What is there to believe Revelation isn’t some age-old sort of superhero comics?

It is very easy to make a theology similar to these of the three monotheistic religions (which some people consider to be “theopnefstes” – “given from God”). Sufficient proof to this is that some today’s corporations created their own theologies, with holy persons and saints so inspired and loved as Superman, Batman and Spiderman...

A final observation from this comparison of comics and John’s Revelation: Any comic company that comes through a period of bad sales tries to set up a Big Event, some cataclysmic and “ultimate” showdown of the mega-forces of their universes that will catch reader imagination and boost their sales.

I cannot avoid thinking Revelation as that Big comic Event, written in a period that there were a lot of internal problems in the new-founded Christian Church (that’s why John starts Revelation with some warnings to the seven Churches of his time), a time when the promise of Jesus’ Second Coming also started to seem improbable (Jesus said will return while most of his original 12 Apostles were still alive - clearly he didn’t keep that promise) and some roman Emperors like Nero expressed openly and brutally their hatred against Christian followers…

So, just like “Captain America” beat the hell out of Hitler in 1940’s comics, Jesus also beats the hell out of some amazing beasts with many heads and world-ending powers and their armies of evil henchmen in Revelation.

And you don’t have to be a very wise to think that “Beast” and “Babylon” were just metaphors for the Roman Emperor and Rome itself, metaphors that some holy comics company CEOs thought better be forgotten…


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