God Is Disappointed In You Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication and Copyright

  Preface

  The Old Testament

  Part One: The Torah

  Genesis

  Exodus

  Leviticus

  Numbers

  Deuteronomy

  Part Two: The History

  Joshua

  Judges

  Ruth

  The 1st Book of Samuel

  The 2nd Book of Samuel

  The 1st Book of Kings

  The 2nd Book of Kings

  The 1st Book of Chronicles

  The 2nd Book of Chronicles

  Ezra

  Nehemiah

  Esther

  Part Three: Wisdom and Poetry

  The Book of Job

  Psalms

  The Book of Proverbs

  Ecclesiastes

  Song of Songs (aka Song of Solomon)

  Part Four: The Major Prophets

  Isaiah

  Jeremiah

  Lamentations

  Ezekiel

  Daniel

  Part Five: The Minor Prophets

  Hosea

  Joel

  Amos

  Obadiah

  Jonah

  Micah

  Nahum

  Habakkuk

  Zephaniah

  Haggai

  Zechariah

  Malachi

  The New Testament

  Part Six: The Gospels

  The Gospel of Matthew

  The Gospel of Mark

  The Gospel of Luke

  The Gospel of John

  Part Seven: The Act and Letters of Paul

  The Book of Acts

  Paul’s Letter to the Romans

  Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians

  Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians

  Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

  Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

  Paul’s Letter to the Philippians

  Paul’s Letter to the Colossians

  Paul’s 1st Letter to the Thessalonians

  Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Thessalonians

  Paul’s 1st Letter to the Timothy

  Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Timothy

  Paul’s 2nd Letter to Titus

  Paul’s Letter Philemon

  Part Eight: Other Assorted Letters & Visions

  The Letter to the Hebrews

  The Letter of James

  The 1st Epistle of Peter

  The 2nd Epistle of Peter

  The 1st Letter of John

  The 2nd Letter of John

  The 3rd Letter of John

  The Epistle of Jude

  The Book of Revelation

  Afterword

  Bios

  GOD IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU

  WRITTEN BY

  MARK RUSSELL

  CARTOONS BY

  SHANNON WHEELER

  Mark would like to thank Kalah Allen, Sarah Arndt, his support group at Writers Anonymous, and Nora Robertson, without whom this book would have never happened.

  Shannon would like to thank his lucky stars for not getting hit by lightning (as did his mom).  Also, thanks to Patricia (who survived a lightning hit), Richard, Rani, Austin, Berkeley, Max, and baby. And finally a thanks to Mark for letting me be a part of this awesome project. I hope it doesn’t get us killed.

  God Is Disappointed In You © 2013 Mark Russell and Shannon Wheeler.

  Published by Top Shelf Productions

  PO Box 1282

  Marietta, GA 30061-1282

  USA

  Top Shelf Productions® and the Top Shelf logo are registered trademarks of Top Shelf Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission, except for small excerpts for purposes of review.

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  Visit our online catalog at www.topshelfcomix.com.

  First Printing, July 2013. Printed in China.

  Preface

  The Bible may be the single most important book in human history. It has inspired no fewer than three of the world’s major religions. Four, if you count Mormons. People look to the Bible for guidance on everything from bombing another country to entering the cheese competition at the County Fair. But it’s my guess that of the more than a billion people who claim to live according to the teachings of the Bible, not too many of them know what the Bible actually says. They, like me prior to writing this book, probably only know the tiny morsel of the Bible that was spoon-fed to them in Sunday School. The rest of the Bible remains a sort of religious hot dog, something they eat on faith without having the first clue of what’s actually in it.

  When I began this project, I quickly became astonished to realize just how little I actually knew about the Bible, despite growing up in church and attending Christian schools, where I was taught the Bible as part of a daily routine. How many stories my teachers had sanitized, omitted, or just gotten wrong. How many dark, hilarious, or truly profound passages the Bible contained that I was never taught, probably because all anyone really wanted me to learn was how to sit quietly, eat my carrots, and feel guilty.

  Whatever the case, no one ever really taught me what the Bible was, or why I should love it. This is an oversight I hope to correct with this book. I give you the entire Bible, albeit condensed down to its very essence. I also tried to incorporate a little historical background to give what you’re about to read some much-needed context. It was my aim to take each of the sixty-six books of the Bible on its own terms, including the stories you were probably never meant to hear, and yet, eliminating all the interminable genealogies, arcane language and repetition that has probably kept you from reading the Bible yourself.

  When reading this book, the first question to cross your mind will probably be, “Is this really in the Bible?” The short answer is yes. The dialogue and phrasing is mine, of course. For example, none of the books of the Bible were written in a Q&A format. Presenting Habakkuk and Hebrews this way was a stylistic choice on my part.

  James never called anyone a “prick,” as far as we know. And the astute observer might note that King David never actually went through a heavy metal phase, though some of his lyrics could have easily found a home in Dio-era Sabbath. Certainly I use my own language and allegories to make the work translate to a modern audience, though my intention is always to describe the events and their meanings just as they were written in the Bible thousands of years ago.

  I am joined in this work by Shannon Wheeler, award-winning cartoonist for the New Yorker and the creator of Too Much Coffee Man.

  It was hard enough for me to squeeze each book of the Bible down to two or three pages each. Shannon had the unenviable task of boiling them down into a single panel, and in doing so, making it even easier to absorb. This is by no means a new strategy. In fact, this is the basic concept behind cathedrals. When people were bored by the bishop’s sermon, they could always look around at the stained-glass windows and enjoy the glowing cartoons of Jonah getting swallowed by a whale, or John the Baptist getting his head lopped off. When you’re trying to explain something complicated, visual aids never hurt.

  It is not my intention to mock the Bible with this book, nor to endorse it, but merely to present it on its own terms in a way that is accessible and which relays the same sense of fascination I had when I truly discovered the Bible for the first time. If you want to reject the Bible as ancient superstition or digest it as the holy word of God, that’s up to you. I just thought you might like to know what’s actually in the hot dog.

  —Mark Russell

  THE OLD TESTAMENT

  Part One

  The Torah

 
In which God gets the human race on the road and then threatens to stop the car, the Jews receive 613 easy-to-follow rules, and a haircut topples a nation.

  The Torah represents the first five books of the Bible. It tells the history of the human race from Creation through the founding of the Jewish nation and their settlement in the land of Israel.

  God created the human race to be his pets. As a first-time pet owner, God wisely chose to start small, creating just two people: Adam and Eve. But, much like baby alligators, they proved to be rotten pets and were thus flushed into the sewer, where they propagated, until the sewers were overflowing with wild humans, hissing and spitting, fornicating and worshiping idols. So God flushed out the entire human race with a flood.

  When the survivors of the flood dried themselves off and re-populated the Earth, God decided that, rather than exterminating them, he would take another crack at domesticating human beings. Again, he decided to start small, with one family, the family of Abraham, whom he found to be smart and highly trainable. God gave Abraham and his descendants a set of laws with which to housebreak them. Then God found them a good home, a Promised Land where they could set a good example for the rest of the human race of how God envisioned this whole pet-thing playing out going forward.

  In truth, though, God “discovered” the Promised Land in much the same way that my mother discovered the Olive Garden. Everybody already knew about it, and it was already full of people when she got there, but hey, unlimited breadsticks.

  When the Jews arrived at the Promised Land, they were a little irked to find the place overrun with pagans. The Promised Land was populated by many different tribes, each with their own unique culture and way of life. There were the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Girgashites…for our purposes, let’s call them “Indians.”

  Whenever the Jews won a battle against the Indians, God ordered them to celebrate by killing all the men, women and children. He also ordered them to kill their cattle and their sheep and throw all their belongings into a bonfire, as if the Indians never existed. So it was sort of like,

  “You know, maybe we really did discover the Olive Garden.”

  When they were done clearing out all the pagans and their furniture, they named their new country “Israel,” but this is not the end of the story. Being God’s chosen people is always a roller-coaster ride…and this ride was just beginning.

  Genesis

  In the beginning, God was lonely.

  He made the same mistake as a lot of men who live alone: he decided to go out and meet people. Only there weren’t any people, so he had to make his own. God created Adam and Eve to be his friends.

  God built a beautiful garden in Iraq for Adam and Eve to live in. Adam and Eve spent their days running around naked and playing Frisbee. They ate a lot of fruit.

  It was a lot like living at a Grateful Dead concert. God’s one rule was that they couldn’t eat the fruit from this magical tree he’d planted in the center of the garden. I don’t know why he put it there. It just tied the whole garden together.

  Understandably, Adam and Eve were consumed with curiosity about this tree. It was just one of thousands of trees in the garden, but now they found it impossible to resist eating its magical fruit… and having a talking snake constantly goading them into it didn’t help any. So Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the forbidden tree and were immediately endowed with the knowledge of good and evil, which mostly made them uptight about nudity.

  When God found out about the missing fruit, he went apeshit. He yelled at them, evicted Adam and Eve from the garden, and as extra punishment, he ordered them to become parents. This move backfired, however, because Adam and Eve simply filled the world with children who murdered each other, worshiped idols and had sex with giants, all of which really pulled God’s beard.

  God was so angry that he killed off the entire human race with a giant flood. Well, not the whole human race. He gave one guy named Noah a heads up. Before the flood, Noah built an enormous boat and filled it with every species of animal he could find, which made Noah not only the world’s first sailor, he was its first animal hoarder as well. As soon as he finished packing the boat, the flood began. After forty days and nights of rain and a meat-heavy diet, the water subsided and Noah found land. When God saw the millions of dead bodies littering the ground, he wondered if maybe he’d overreacted.

  So God wanted to make it right. But what could he do? What could possibly make up for killing nearly every living thing on the planet? Finally, it occurred to him. He created this really sweet rainbow as a promise to never flood the Earth again. Everyone loves rainbows, right?

  The moment Noah got back on dry land, the first thing he did was to get drunk, and the human race went right back to disappointing God.

  God eventually found someone else he liked, though. God took a shine to a 75 year-old man named Abraham. God told Abraham that, even though he and his 90 year-old wife Sara were childless, he wanted to build a great nation out of them, and that Abraham’s descendants would be his chosen people.

  To finalize the deal, Abraham agreed to cut a tiny bit off the penis of every man who would ever be born into his family. Contracts worked differently back then.

  Abraham went out into the wilderness to start his new nation. His nephew Lot tagged along, but he developed a taste for city living and left Abraham, moving his family to the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  God really hated Sodom and Gomorrah. The people there wanted to have sex with absolutely everything. They even tried to have sex with two angels God sent to warn Lot leave town.

  Angel rape is not how you get on God’s good side. So God incinerated the cities and all their inhabitants with fire and brimstone, except for Lot and his family, whom he let escape. But during their getaway, Lot’s wife made the mistake of turning to look back upon her burning hometown, for which God turned her into a pillar of salt, her punishment for the crime of nostalgia.

  Lot’s daughters felt it was a shame that, because their mother was salt, Lot would never have a son to carry on his family name.

  So they got their father drunk and had sex with him until he impregnated them both, which sort of made Lot his own father-in-law. Abraham, meanwhile, was now in his nineties, and his wife Sarah was no spring chicken, either. So far, their geriatric sex had produced nothing but loads of dislocated hips and swollen ankles.

  Still, God insisted that he would build a great nation out of them. But Sarah still told Abraham to sleep with her maid, so he could at least have some backup kids if God’s promise didn’t pan out. Abraham did as he was told and slept with Hagar, who soon gave birth to a son named Ishmael. Free circumcisions for everybody.

  Abraham’s non-traditional family plugged along perfectly well until, against all odds, Sarah got pregnant. Abraham had finally produced a legitimate heir, whom they named Isaac. No longer needing a Plan B, Sarah made Abraham get rid of Hagar and their son Ishmael.

  Sadly, Abraham loaded them up with snacks and water, and sent them out into the desert. Abraham would never see his son Ishmael again. But he took consolation in the fact that he had Isaac back at home and God had finally fulfilled his promise.

  But then late one night, God woke Abraham up and ordered him to tie Isaac to an altar and to kill him as a human sacrifice, which apparently is the sort of thing God only does to people he likes.

  Distraught with grief, Abraham nonetheless did what he was told. He took Isaac to the top of the mountain and tied him to the stone altar, but just when he was about to plunge his sacrificing knife into Isaac’s chest, God stopped him. Turns out it was all a test of faith, or a really vicious prank, depending on how you look at it. Abraham had chosen God’s need for a midnight snack over his son’s life, and that was all the proof God needed that this was the family for him. His chosen people.

  After his narrow escape from the fake human sacrifice, Isaac grew up to be a man and had a couple of sons of his own, named Esau and Jacob.
Jacob was a bit of a sugar-foot, staying at home with mom, helping her cook and clean and bake pies. Esau, on the other hand, was much more butch. He was a hunter, an outdoorsman, and as hairy as Burt Reynolds.

  Esau was so hairy that Jacob tricked their father into giving him Esau’s inheritance simply by covering himself in wool. After pulling off this act of identity theft, though, Jacob was forced to lay low for several years, evading his cheated brother. On the run, Jacob came to a farm and asked if he could stay there for a while.

  “You can stay here,” the farmer said. “Just don’t be messin’ with my two daughters.”

  But Jacob fell in love with his daughter Rachel, and offered to work the farm for seven years in exchange for being able to marry her. After seven years passed, the crafty farmer tricked him into marrying his older daughter, Leah.

  “But I wanted to marry Rachel,” he complained.

  “That’s fine,” the farmer replied. “You can marry her, too. You just gotta work the farm for another seven years.” Jacob spent fourteen years working that guy’s farm. His real rock bottom moment, though, came when he broke his arm wrestling with an angel. God changed Jacob’s name to “Israel,” which means “one who wrestles with God.” As far as I know, Israel is still the only nation named after a wrestler.

  Israel and his two wives had twelve sons, one of whom was named Joseph. The other sons mostly hated Joseph and it’s hard to blame them. Joseph was clearly the favorite, was always getting the best presents from their dad, and he wasted no opportunity to remind his brothers of this fact. When he told his brothers about a dream where they were all bowing down to him, this really sent them over the edge. They threw Joseph into a pit and sold him as a slave.

  “That ought to take him down a peg,” they said as the slave caravan disappeared into the distance.