(no subject)

[changeyourstars8]

ursulav, with her thoughts on the Gospel of Judas and the editing of the Bible. . .

Since humans are the same the world over, I would lay money that some of the proto-gospels were crappily written and full of Mary Sue disciples who all had green eyes and Jesus fell madly in love with them and...wait, was that the Last Temptation of Christ? Well, anyway, the point stands. We're probably better off with a lot of them hitting the junk heap. Christianity would not be notably improved by inclusion of a gospel where Jesus turns into a teenage girl with a telepathic unicorn pet.

Fortunately, many of the writers were dead by the time the editing got involved, so flame wars were difficult to conduct, but I suspect that the discussions at said synods still resembled a highly literate, solemn, and dignified version of the sorts of fights that erupt in any fandom's literature. I wonder how you write "This suxxx! Snape is MINE!" in Aramaic?

Comments

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

Were you already an Ursula fan, or did I just make a convert? (So to speak.)

I once went through and noted how Sueish

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

the book that Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was based on, that "Dolorous Passion" by Sr. Ann Emmerich, how *extraordinarily* Sueish it was.

--There's character torture. There's extreme dwelling on the details of clothing, particularly the female characters (you didn't know that what Pontius Pilate's *wife* wore was so critical to the faith, did you?) down to the embroidery. There's more character torture, by Eeeeville villains. There's discussion of the respective chest hair and tans of Jesus and his cousin John the Baptist. (I kid you not.) There's virtual self-insertion by Ann (who was a serious cutter herself) as an eyewitness to it all. And of course, character death, with the opportunity as self-insert and vicariously through the mourning women to get as maudlin-gory as she pleases.

It was kind of disturbing, in fact, to sit down for hours at a stretch and work through so much devotional lit and realize that while Ann Catherine Emmerich was kind of extreme, *most Christian devotional writing is actually fanfic*, and fanon has supplanted canon even in the existing remnants in popular imagination (Veronica's veil comes completely from a 2nd century fanfic!) and a lot of it is not just fanfic, and not just badfic, but contains *nearly* all the most common excesses of ffnet.

Okay, there isn't much slash. But h/c, and RP romances, by authors who consider themselves wedded to the main charas? If Ann Catherine had lived in this century instead of the 18th, she would have been calling herself "Krystalia" or "BoromirsLover"...