Story Time Jesus

About

Story Time Jesus is a LOL Jesus-style image macro series featuring a painting of Jesus teaching a group of disciples and various captions narrating gossipy, modern interpretations of famous Biblical accounts.

Origin

The artwork used in the series is The Parable by American painter Lars Justinen^[8]. The original instance based on the iconic painting of Jesus with disciples was posted by Redditor iamhusband on February 1st, 2012 in a AdviceAnimal subreddit thread titled “Introducing, Story Time Jesus.”^[1] The captioned image depicted the biblical account of Matthew 14:22-33^[2], which describes Jesus’ miracle of walking on water:

But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
“Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” he said.
- Matthew 14:22-33

The original thread was positively received by the Reddit community, receiving 687 upvotes and 230 downvotes in the first five days. In less than a week, at least 40 additional instances were added onto Reddit^[7] and over 146 instances were submitteed via Quickmeme page.^[3]

Precursor

Humorous parodies of Christian iconography have been previously seen with LOL Jesus image macros and a variety of GIF animations on internet humor sites like SomethingAwful and YTMND as early as since 2005. Some of the more notable subsets in the LOL Jesus category include Jesus is a Jerk, Raptor Jesus" and Guido Jesus.

Spread

The following day on February 2nd, Redditor fouzzz posted another instance in a thread titled “Story-time Jesus’ party miracle,”^[4] which received over 991 points with a net score of 4,943 up votes and 3,952 down votes. The image macro series quickly spread onto Tumblr^[6] when L.A.-based artist Mike Mitchell^[5] posted an instance describing Jesus’ healing of a paralyzed man (Mark 2:1-12), which accumulated over 5,100 reblogs and likes in the first five days.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

[not available]

External References