The New Testament is a massive tome filled with numerous parables, vast spiritual knowledge, and a sprawling narrative that have served as the basis for most of Western civilization and a sacred guide for many lives for centuries. Incredibly, a major advancement has been made when it comes to teaching the word of the Bible: This meme on Facebook condenses its entire 1,200-page message down into a digital graphic of a bloodsoaked Christ with the words “He is the Jesus.”
Whoa! How the hell did they pull that off?!
Biblical scholars and institutions have for hundreds of years poured over the Bible’s nearly 800,000 words seeking to gather and comprehend the wisdom found therein, but now a Facebook page called “Jesus Whispers” has managed to capture the entirety of the Bible’s scriptures on hope, love, discipline, creation, life, and death in a single image. The meme, which has been badly degraded by being shared so much and bears multiple watermarks including “jesushome.io” and “Jesusly,” sums it all up by showing a tortured computer-generated Jesus and boldly declaring in 30 point Impact font that “He is the Jesus.”
The post has over 140,000 shares and 800,000 comments, most of which say “amen,” making it clear that its succinct, carefully crafted distillation of the most-read book on the planet is resonating with the public. It’s pretty clear that the heavy, bulky, wordy, hard-to-understand actual Bible is no longer anywhere nearly as important as it once was, and most Bibles will surely serve merely decorative purposes soon.
Sorry, Christian theologians, but you might want to start looking for a new line of work, because you’re no longer needed.
Whether Jesus Whispers will be able to create similar memes that express the entire belief system of other religions through a single JPEG remains to be seen. It was surely a challenge to sum up such a massive amount of spiritual wisdom in one pixelated, gory image like this one, but if they did it once, they can do it again Amen, Jesus Whispers! He is the Jesus indeed.
