Superman isn t Jesus. I actually made a whole video about that recently. Maybe you saw it.
Point is, no matter how much directors and artists in recent years like to create Christ
symbolism with old Clark Kent over here it doesn t really fit. And that video got a lot of responses,
a lot of counterpoints, and no small amount of insults throw at it in the comments and across
the internet so today, call me George Costanza, because I m double-dipping. This is Superman isn
t Jesus 2 the re-un-Jesusing. Rebuttals came in many shapes and sizes. I replied to some directly,
but there were so many others that I literally couldn t for all of them especially since a lot
of people were kinda just repeated the same flawed points. So that s what we re doing here looking at
a couple of these oft-repeated justifications for the largely cinematic habit of Jesusing Supes.
The first one is, mainly with regard to Zack Snyder s habit of visually or narratively
casting Clark as Christ, that this isn t Snyder really making this link, not straightforwardly,
it s not that Snyder s going for Superman-as-Jesus no, it s Snyder suggesting that this is how the
world sees him, that the denizens of the DC universe see him as a divine messiah figure,
not Snyder himself, and that this is what Snyder is trying to portray. And you know what? If the
DCEU had started with Batman V Superman, if these parallels had begun with that film,
I d be fine with this. That film does take the public perception of Superman and explore it-
and a lot of the more godly imagery BvS boasts is to be found in scenes where others besides
the viewer are witnessing Clark. But the DCEU didn t begin here, and neither did these parallels. Man
of Steel kicked off the world, and also kicked off this version of the link for the specifics on how,
again, it s something I go into in that first video but crucially? The world s perception
of Superman isn t a major focus here. It is an idea that bubbles up to the surface a little,
from around the halfway mark on, but before then, the world has no idea Clark even exists. More to
the point, in a lot of the most blatant visual linkages there s really no one else there except
us, the viewer. The film s first big, gaudy, T-pose comes after Clark rescues the oil-rig guys,
and is floating underwater but they can t see him anymore it s just the camera and Clark.
We re not inhabiting anyone else s perspective here except Snyder s. Then there s probably the
most blatant one, which comes after Clark s first symbolic death-and-rebirth aboard Zod s
ship and the only person here to see it besides us and Snyder is Jor-El. In moments like this,
we aren t seeing how the world sees Superman, we re seeing how the film sees him. So I really don
t think that reasoning for the DCEU s embrace of Superman-as-Jesus is particularly solid.
The next common response far more common than that one, in fact, I m still getting a comment
or two bringing it up every couple of days is that, actually, the Jesus link was there from
the beginning because Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster named their character Kal-El, which
is Hebrew for voice of god , and, hence, Jesus. And there s actually a fair bit to unpack here.
First there s this weird slippage that seems to be happening in the minds of many fans between
Hebrew and Jesus if I had to guess at what s going on here, I d say to a lot of people, Hebrew s seen
as, just, that language from the Bible, and to a lot of those people Bible just kinda means Jesus.
So let s knock this silliness on its head. Hebrew is a biblical language but it s not the only one.
As a matter of fact, it's mostly found in the Old Testament. The New Testament, with, y know, the
gospels, the Jesus-y bits, is primarily in Greek. So a Hebrew name really doesn t point toward Jesus
in any remotely straightforward way. But, in fairness, that s not the full extent of the link
most like to make although there are definitely some who left it there. No, were you to believe
the internet, Kal-El actually means voice of God , in Hebrew. And who s the voice of God? Well,
Jesus, obviously. But as you might have guessed from the way I opened that last sentence,
it s not that simple. To begin with that s, not what Kal-El would mean. Voice of God would be
Kol-El. Except, barely, because while the voice of God is a concept which pops up in ancient
Judeo-Christian texts particularly the Tanakh the phrase which refers to the voice of God isn t
Kol-El , it s Bat-Kol . And, as you might have guessed from the fact it s associated more
with the Tanakh than with the gospels it doesn t really have much to do with Jesus. It is, however,
commonly associated with Moses. Funny, that! But I m sure a couple of you still have a few
dregs of copium left in those Jesus Kent pipes, so no Kal-El, literally that is, the Light of God
doesn t really point to ol Yeshua of Nazareth either. Jesus called himself the light of the
world a couple of times, but that s a, different thing, and its recorded as a Greek phrase,
which I m not even gonna try and pronounce. As you can see, though it s not Kal-El. It s not
even Kol-El, or Bat-Kol, even if you directly translated any of those phrases from Hebrew.
The light of the world is something else entirely. Jesus is something else entirely.
Siegel and Shuster weren t, as far as I know, experts in ancient Hebrew phraseology so the
fact that these supposed links aren t exactly 1:1 doesn t necessarily mean they weren t going
for Superman-as-the Voice or Light of God but it also means it s not the slam-dunk QED a lot
of people seem to think. Because, also? We don t actually know that these honestly kinda garbled
translations are why Siegel and Shuster named Supes Kal-El. There is another explanation. The
name Kal-L was introduced alongside his fathers , Jor-El initially, as with Kal-el, without the E on
L and apparently (source in the description), the origin of this Kyrptonian naming convention was..
a lot less esoteric than is often speculated. Jerome Siegel may have simply named Jor-el after
himself. Jer(ome) Sieg-L if you take the start and the end - Jor-L. It s an abbreviation. Jor-L
was the father of the character, in both senses. Now this explanation isn t total
why Kal, right? but it s worth noting, to remind us of the point that drilling down into the names
of these characters isn t necessarily going to be a fruitful endeavour. Look, I m not
saying that there s no religious significance to the name Kal-El, that it wasn t intended to
be read as Hebrew. It may well have been, at least partially, but that s impossible to prove without
a time machine and a polygraph so the idea that Superman s name was created to invoke anything,
is really just speculation. Fairly well-founded speculation, but speculation all the same. And
that isn t intended as, like a gotcha, or anything I think it s pretty likely that the Hebrew ring
here was intentional perhaps as a secondary meaning, thought of after the JERome siegEL to
Jor-L leap had been made. But even if the Hebrew side of this was intended was what drove Siegel
and Shuster to name these characters in this way where s Jesus, in any of this? Nowhere, really.
I ended that first video by noting, extremely briefly, the links some had drawn between the
Superman/Jesus linkage and the Christian theology of supersessionism which is, to boil things down
immensely, the idea that all that Jesus stuff meant that all the promises and covenants God made
with Israel in the Old Testament actually stopped being linked to the Jews, and instead transferred
over to the Christians. Very convenient! The cultural effects of this principle more broadly
are that plenty of Christians, and people raised culturally Christian,
don t even consider that from the Jewish point of view, the New Testament, the fulfilment of
the Messianic prophecies, and all that, are little more than unlicenced fanfiction and so,
that large parts of their religious or cultural background were Jewish before they were Christian,
and indeed, continue to be Jewish to plenty of people. So as a result of this widespread,
unconscious, cultural supersessionism people might look at stories drawing on Moses and see Jesus.
Or people might see a Hebrew phrase, loosely translating to voice of God and assume it means
Jesus, because who else, right? Supersessionism and the role it may or may not play in today s
culture is a somewhat contentious issue so, all I ll say here is, the idea that it might play a role
in popular conceptions of Superman? The responses some people had to the idea that,
no, Superman isn t Jesus, have made me pretty sympathetic to the idea.
In summation this video, and indeed the previous one? They re not to say that we should never
consider Jesus symbology when we re thinking about this character just that it shouldn t be
the dominant way of understanding Clark Kent, and that it certainly shouldn t be the default. Oh,
and there was one other repeated refrain in response to my previous video: who cares?
And I am sorry to break it to you, but you care. You clicked that thumbnail,
over 300,000 of you and you clicked on this one too. You obviously care, at least a little,
and I clearly do too since, I, y know, went to the bother of making this. So this might be the
weakest point of all. But that s it for Superman isn t Jesus 2: Kryptonian Boogaloo. And if you can
think of any other reasons in the comments why I m wrong about this and am a stupid idiot, maybe
I ll see you for Superman isn t Jesus 3 someday. Hope you ve had a good time, and thanks as always
to all my Patrons onscreen now especially Jonathan Francis Bond, Kevin Douglas, and Ian Fyfield.