Man, I sure hope it covers Exodus 4 where Jehovah/Jesus inexplicably jumps Moses in a tavern and tries to kill him.

But I’m pretty sure it won’t.

And what about making movies of Bible stories? The “Jesus” movie has reached millions of people all over the world since it was made in 1980. Every other movie adaptation has taken liberties with the text of Scripture, but “The Passion of the Christ” did so with respect while “The Last Temptation of Christ” did not.

As far as fidelity to the text of Scripture is concerned, we don’t read Cain saying “whassup bro” but it may well be that some idiom is used in the original languages (though I don’t know one way or other). But there are so many paraphrase Bibles out there that really do distort the text.

I personally feel that if God can use Baalam’s ass, He could use of the aforementioned.

brilliant

Never Mind.

(Sorry the temptattion was just too great )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Tezuka

Although I share the dubious feeling over Manga being a good venue for the Bible.

Manga (plural and singular form) are otherwise known as Japanese comics, however they differ greatly in concept, design, and storytelling than the typical American comic. They have been accepted by all ages in Japsn…where almost everyone reads their favorite serial story. And the stories are rarely superhero, but rather specialized stories about tennis, or iron chef cooking, or music, or futuristic sci-fi, etc. Pick a subject, and it’s probably been covered. In America, for the last five years, manga has logistically exploded across the teen market, especially among teenage girls who have mainly shunned the American superhero stories; a great deal of stories are geared towards girls where the heroines are cute, flawed, and demure, while the male love interests are meloncholy, driven, and somewhat approach androgeny=safe (this fits most of the female geared soap stories) Most manga art is less muscular and roman-esque, but more fluid and disney-like…and use a much wider and more believable range of emotion. If you visit your local bookstore(borders, B & B) to the graphic novel section, you will see at least one or two rows dedicated to the thick volumes of manga…and usually see teens slumped on the floor reading them. In the any bookstore’s art section, it is has been taken over by instructionals on how to draw in the asian manga style…it’s really huge…some American artists has tried to emulate the style, but somehow lack the spirit of the art…which is minimalist in style and speech and appeals to emotion that can be successfully freezed framed in the story. Manga had been introduced in the 80’s, but it hasn’t really exploded intil very recently with todays youth who love manga and have been extremely successful at emulating the art style due to the lack of having to unlearn the American style of sequential art. And as the article states, the American market growth is exploding, where American distributers are wrestling each other for rights over titles to translate for Americans, or contract local manga artists to work on original stories. Tokyo-Pop has been hugely successful at marketing budding American manga-artists. Ironically, with all of the hype, manga trends in Japan are slipping due to the more techno-savvy Japanese youth, who all but worship cellphones and their expanding multimedia functions.

I s’pose the same arguments we used to defend Christian rock in the 80s would have to also apply to the Manga Bible — it’s the message, not the medium. If God can use this for His glory, who cares what the naysayers might think?

On one hand, there may be people who never heard the stories of the Bible, and this may be a way to expose them to them. On the other hand, if too many liberties are taken with the text, would it do more harm than good?

My kids have the beautiful David Cook comic book Bible from the 60s which is very faithful to the text and features a lilly-white Jesus and Israelites and other characters. Great for Sunday School but not for reaching the lost. Then there was a comic book Bible series from the 90s that had much inappropriate subject matter, e.g. a lewd scene of Bathsheba bathing. Though the artwork was superb, this project bombed, probably because it turned off Christians while failing to reach people in the world, thereby failing to capture an audience. Then I hear that Michael Pearl of No Greater Joy is working on a comic book Bible. Guess we’ll just have to see whether God will use it.

As for manga becoming the fastest selling medium, on one hand, it’s a sad state, but on the other hand, as Stan Lee always said, “comics are the last hedge against creeping illiteracy.”