About

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

Origin

The painting used in the series is The Parable by American painter Lars Justinen^[8] (shown below, left). The first instance of the image macro series was posted to the /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit^[1] by iamhusband on February 1st, 2012. The captioned image (shown below, right) retells the biblical account of Matthew 14:22-33,^[2] which describes Jesus' miracle of walking on water, in a more modern fashion. The thread was positively received by the Reddit community, receiving 696 upvotes, 461 points overall and 16 comments before being archived. In less than a week, at least 40 additional instances were shared on Reddit^[7] and more than 146 instances were submitted to Quickmeme.^[3]

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

Precursor

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

Spread

On February 2nd, Redditor fouzzz posted another instance in a thread titled "Story-time Jesus' party miracle,"^[4] which received nearly 1,000 points overall with a net score of 4,943 upvotes and 3,952 downvotes. 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, shown below), which accumulated more than 5,100 reblogs and likes in the first five days.

That month, Story Time Jesus was featured on a number of internet culture and humor blogs including Uproxx^[9], Blame it On the Voices^[10] and International Business Times.^[11] Throughout 2012, additional instances were posted on We Know Memes^[12], Cheezburger^[13], Christian Funny Pictures^[14] and The Meta Picture.^[15] In July 2012, a Facebook fan page^[16] for the series was created, gaining 86 likes as of August 2013.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References