Is Superman the story of Jesus?

Well, sure it is. Does’t every reluctant hero’s quest for the trophy hew closely to the story of Christ as depicted in the New Testament? Now I’m not saying the authors of the Bible cribbed from JosephCampbell, but the story of the life of Christ follows pretty much the same narrative as he lays out for every hero’s journey.

Think about it: Act I, establish the hero’s normal world. Christ is dirt poor but doesn’t mind because he’s got a cool bag of tricks, a head on his shoulders and a dozen besties who worship the water he walks on.

Act II, he pisses off the authorities, is pursued, caught and ends with his life imperiled.

Act III, he survives a death trap, [spoiler alert!] forgives his tormentors and claims his prize—eternity sitting at the right hand of the Father.

Starring Channing Tatum, with Ian McKellan as Pontius Pilate!

However, was Superman created as an allegory for the life of Christ? Hardly likely.

Superman is the work product of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both children of Jewish immigrants, whose parents survived pogroms in the old country, and institutionalized racism in America.

Superman, like Siegel and Shuster’s families, is an immigrant. But unlike Jewish immigrants, instead of coming to America and finding themselves still considered second-class citizens—even by the Irish!—Superman arrives with the powers Siegel and Shuster would have liked to have had. Most fiction, at some level, begins as an expression of the author’s inner life. (I’m looking at you, author of 50 Shades of Gray.)

If Siegel and Shuster had any subtext in mind when they drafted that first Superman story, I would posit that it had a lot more to do with the immigrant experience in America than it did the story of Christ. The similarities in narrative structure are strictly for storytelling purposes.

It does make for a nice Sunday morning headline, though.