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Taking a brief detour from the continuing story of Saul and David’s rivalry in
the Hebrew Bible’s books of Kings,
over the next month or so The Brick
Testament will present a re-illustrated version of the New Testament’s
Acts of the Apostles.
Today the first seven new stories have been added to the website:
The Other Fate of Judas
Lottery Used to Choose New Apostle
Instant Fluency
Accept Communism or Die
Holy Prison Break
Theudas and Judas the Galilean
Stephen Gets Stoned
(NOTE: For anyone unfamiliar with The Brick Testament or the Bible, please take
note of the content warnings for the stories before viewing.)
Enjoy,
-The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith
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Hey Brendan,
More great work as always. BTW, if you are in any of the stories and you click
on “Acts of the Apostles” at the top, you go to the
original version, not your new
ReActs. I
was kind of happy, as I wish you’d include a page on your site with links to
these earlier versions as I like to compare, but you probably want to fix that.
Judas - Masterful intestines. I tried that before and it just didn’t look right
for me. The comment in the last scene is funny. Btw, there’s a guy in the last
pic with red printed hair and then a brown hairpiece that just looks kinda off.
Maybe it’s a bad toupee? Comparing with the
original,
I miss the last scene, with Judas’ skeleton still lying there and all the
animals looking on.
Lottery - Not a lot to say here. Is that frowning head real or customized (or
photoshopped)?
Instant fluency - That flame effect is really cool. Btw, the apostles sitting
in a circle has a very Jedi Council feel to it. The bubbles with different
scripts is a funny effect, particularly the Mayan(?). I like the crowd of
people from all nations (even the Exo-force mountain, it seems). The head of
the old guy with the dumbledore hair seems paler than most fleshies. Is that
real or just a lighting effect? I’ve rarely done this, I think, but I must cry
foul at your editorial choice. I think to cut off the story at Acts 15 (I just
looked it up, you miss-cited the verse) is to do a disservice to the source
material and just make it look silly. You could at least, IMO, include one more
scene where Peter quotes Joel about being filled with the Spirit and then say
something about him going on to preach about Jesus. The story of Pentecost is
not that they were filled with the Spirit and then people thought they were
drunk, but that they were filled with the Spirit and then went out and spread
the gospel, and 3000 were converted.
Communism - Just a note, I’m not a big fan of the mixing of fleshies in with the
yellow figs here. It seems kind of random. I like the use of the Jack Stone
pillars as walls. It gives an interesting texture. That guy getting money in
4:35 sure doesn’t seem too happy about it. Where is Sapphira’s head from? Ooh,
I like the Squidward torso in the last scene - it works well to go with the sand
green sleeves.
Holy Prison Break, Batman - Funny take on the signs and wonders. Here I always
thought it was more the heal-the-sick kind of thing. Exo-force dude is perfect
for demon possession. I like the photoshoppery on the demon leaving.
Theudas - Wow, I’m really digging the blue and white color scheme in the
sanhedrin’s hall, also the star of David withthe flex tubing. What’s the blue
piece in the wall with a curved groove? I like your cat of nine tails solution.
In the last pic, what are those steps they are coming down? Is that LEGO?
Stephen - What’s with the man-boobs on the guy in the second pic? Also the guy
with the Aunt May torso seems odd. Hey, you finally got that scroll tile. More
good views of that great sanhedrin hall and those not-very-LEGO-looking steps.
The mid-flight stones look great. Hmm, I miss the old bald Paul a bit. Why’d
you make him into a fleshy?
Bruce
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Hi, Bruce.
In lugnet.build.ancient, Bruce Hietbrink wrote:
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More great work as always. BTW, if you are in any of the stories and you
click on “Acts of the Apostles” at the top, you go to the
original version, not your new
ReActs.
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Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I’ve fixed it now.
I do intend to keep the old version of
Acts online (just as the old version of
The Gospels is still there).
That way links to it on other people’s websites will not suddenly become broken,
and intrepid souls like yourself can compare old and new if so inclined.
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I was kind of happy, as I wish you’d include a page on your site
with links to these earlier versions as I like to compare
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Not sure if I’d want to put actual link to the old versions. All in all I’d
rather people view the new ones. But maybe someday I should create a “bonus
features” page with links to the old versions and “deleted scenes” and
director’s commentary and whatnot. But for now I’d rather concentrate on
illustrating more stories.
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Judas - Masterful intestines. I tried that before and it just didn’t look
right for me.
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Thanks! I was happy with the way they came out (so to speak) this time.
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Btw, there’s a guy in the last pic with red printed hair
and then a brown hairpiece that just looks kinda off. Maybe
it’s a bad toupee?
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Well, that’s the apostle Philip, and he’s had that mismatch going since
we first meet him by the banks of the Jordan river. Not sure why it stands out
more here than in previous stories. I admit it does look a little funny.
Perhaps I should have used a hobby knife to scrape off those reddish bangs. But
it’s probably too late to do much good now. It may have to wait until I
re-re-do The Life of Jesus and Acts in 2017.
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The comment in the last scene is funny.
Comparing with the
original, I miss the last scene, with Judas’ skeleton still lying there and
all the animals looking on.
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Yeah, I liked both the old skeleton scene (in theory at least--it looks
amateurish in execution to me now) and the idea of an apostle realizing that the
two Biblical stories of Judas’s alternate demises don’t match up in the least.
But there’s only so many bits of scripture to illustrate here, and I chose the
latter over the former to illustrate that last line of Peter’s.
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Lottery - Not a lot to say here. Is that frowning head real or customized
(or photoshopped)?
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It’s the same smile Joseph known as Barsabbas whose surname was Justus has in
the first two panels, but flipped over both horizontally and vertically to
become a frown (the opposite of “turn that frown upside-down!”). Had to do a
little more smoothing things out around the edges to make it look OK.
I always debate (internally) whether or not to have my LEGO Bible characters
ever change their facial expressions. I kind of like the challenge of telling
the whole life of Jesus, for example, with Jesus’s face never changing. It
makes it so you can’t rely just on the facial expressions to tell the story, and
forces a certain creativity. But even with Jesus I finally did alter his
expression to
close his eyes when they take him down from the cross. As I explained at the
time, having his eyes normal there just looked really freaky.
And in this scene it didn’t quite seem right to have Joseph known as Barsabbas
whose surname was Justus just continue to smile blithely when God chose the
other guy over him. Maybe that means I should have just picked a different face
for that character to begin with. But I guess I couldn’t resist setting up the
viewer to assume that the friendly-looking guy would get picked over the
grumpy-looking one.
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Instant fluency - That flame effect is really cool.
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OK, good, glad that works for you. That took a while to set up, and at the end
I wasn’t sure I had captured the effect quite right. Logically there should be
more tongues of fire connecting to more apostles, but then there would be so
much fire you couldn’t see any apostles.
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Btw, the apostles sitting in a circle has a very Jedi
Council feel to it.
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Heh, that’s true. Hadn’t thought of that consciously. I just needed a way to
have them arranged so that the fire effect would look cool.
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The bubbles with different scripts is a funny effect,
particularly the Mayan(?).
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Technically, it’s pre-Mayan or proto-Mayan. I wanted each of the scripts to
represent languages that were actually around at the time Acts is set. I’m not
sure I got it all 100% right in that regard, but I tried.
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I like the crowd of people from all nations (even the Exo-force
mountain, it seems).
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Is it any more surprising that there would be representatives from Exo-force
Mountain than from, say, South America? :) If you take “every nation”
literally, that’s quite a claim!
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The head of the old guy with the dumbledore hair seems paler than most
fleshies. Is that real or just a lighting effect?
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In my attempt to visually depict people from “every nation” I wanted to include
as many minifig skin tones as seemed plausible. So I threw in that guy with tan
skin. The only tan minifig heads I have are Tusken Raiders heads, so I turned
one around and drew two eyes and stuck it into the gray beard. The tan arms and
hands were easy enough to come by.
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I’ve rarely done this, I think, but I must cry foul at your
editorial choice. I think to cut off the
story at Acts 15 (I just looked it up, you miss-cited the verse)
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Thanks for the verse correction. Fixed it now.
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is to do a disservice to the source material and just
make it look silly. You could at
least, IMO, include one more scene where Peter quotes Joel about being filled
with the Spirit and then say something about him going on to preach about
Jesus. The story of Pentecost is not that they were filled with the Spirit
and then people thought they were drunk, but that they were filled with the
Spirit and then went out and spread the gospel, and 3000 were converted.
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One of the challenges of illustrating the Acts of the Apostles is that it might
be more accurate to call it the Long-Winded Speeches of the Apostles. A full
20% of the text of Acts is taken up by such speeches, and that trend starts here
with Peter. Illustrating all or even anything close to a majority of these
speeches would make for some very uninteresting illustrations. Much better to
just read the speeches in the Bible than to see 20 panels in a row of Peter
talking. So for each story I illustrate from Acts that has one of these long
speeches, there’s the necessary question of how much (if any) of it to include.
When scripting out this story, I made some attempts to reign in Peter’s speech,
but ended up thinking it would be better to just leave it out.
As such, I did not title my version of the story “Pentecost”, but simply
“Instant Fluency” since that is the section of the story I find most fascinating
and best suited for illustration. The long-winded and (in my opinion) extremely
tortuous (not to mention anti-semitic) arguments Peter puts forward to make it
appear that Jesus was clearly predicted in the Hebrew scriptures (by David
himself no less!) and then murdered by “the Jews” seemed like a matter best
handled separately. And since Stephen soon afterward employs a similar argument
before the Sanhedrin in a way that is more integral to the plot of that story, I
considered that enough to provide a sample of the way these earliest apostles
are portrayed as blaming the Jews as a whole for both fundamentally
misunderstanding their own scriptures and for murdering the messiah God sent to
save them.
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Communism - Just a note, I’m not a big fan of the mixing of fleshies in with
the yellow figs here. It seems kind of random.
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When I decided to re-illustrate the Life of Jesus, I made a decision as regards
the use of different minifig skin tones to represent peoples of different
regions of the ancient world. Since I’d already used the standard yellow skin
tone for the Israelites, I was pretty much locked into that. But I liked the
idea of representing the Romans and Greeks of the ancient world as looking
noticeably different than their Middle Eastern counterparts, and both of those
looking noticeably different than than their African counterparts, etc. So I
made the choice to generally use the light-peach skin tones to represent
European characters and likewise to generally use the light and dark brown skin
tones to represent the non-Egyptian (or, say, Carthiginian) African characters.
The other available skin tones (the “NBA medium-peach”, for example) would
generally represent characters hailing from of other (sometimes indeterminate)
parts of the ancient world.
You are welcome to criticize this methodology, but that’s what I decided to go
with. That being the case, things get tricky when depicting people from the
border areas, such as Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) or Cyprus. I suppose the
best I can do is to use a mix of skin tones in such areas. I decided to go with
the light peach to depict these particular Cypriots in this story.
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That guy getting
money in 4:35 sure doesn’t seem too happy about it.
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It’s supposed to be the same guy from the previous illustration, so the idea is
he just gave the apostles a very large sum of money and is being handed back a
tiny fraction of it as his portion. Maybe he would actually have been thrilled
by this socialist redistribution of funds, but I chose to give him the reaction
I figured most viewers would have, Christian or not.
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Where is Sapphira’s head from?
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Hmmm... I’m actually not sure. I just tried to find it on Bricklink, but it
turned out to not be the one I was thinking of. Maybe someone else recognizes
it? It’s definitely relatively new (last year or two).
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Ooh, I like the Squidward torso in the last scene - it works well to
go with the sand green sleeves.
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Yeah, nice to have another torso to add to the mix that can pass as ancient. I
wonder if any other Spongebob minifig parts will make it into The Brick
Testament...
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Holy Prison Break, Batman - Funny take on the signs and wonders. Here I
always thought it was more the heal-the-sick kind of thing.
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Well, you get some of that too. :)
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Theudas - Wow, I’m really digging the blue and white color scheme in the
sanhedrin’s hall, also the star of David withthe flex tubing.
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It’s almost definitely an anachronism to throw the Star of David symbol in there
(from what I understand there’s no evidence of the hexagram being used as a
particularly Jewish symbol until after 1000 CE), but once I had created one it
was too hard not to want to use it.
You may remember I’d created a Nazi flag for
this scene in the Teachings of Jesus. Because of it’s construction, the
swastika in the middle can spin kind of like a giant Nazi wheel of fortune.
It’s been sitting around our house ever since, and recently my girlfriend
suggested I make an Israeli flag with a spinning Star of David to somehow
“counter” the Nazi one. This got me thinking how one might make a Star of David
out of LEGO of the appropriate size.
It turned out to be quite a challenge. There seem to be very few LEGO parts
that lend themselves to hexagonal or trigonal construction. My first solution
produced a very nice overall shape, but lacked the interlocking lines and was
impossible to create in blue and white:
Not completely satisfied, I gave up for the evening, but as I was drifting off
to sleep I got a new idea that I vowed to try first thing in the morning. It
was a pain to force all those minifig hands into all those pieces of flex
tubing, but it turned out pretty well. It’s hard to keep the tubing in straight
lines. But the star does spin. :)
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What’s the blue piece in the wall with a curved groove?
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The far wall of the Sanhedrin is something I’ve had sitting around for even
longer than the spinning swastika. The blue piece with the curved groove is the
brick that holds the
garage door pieces in place. It was probably over a year ago that I thought it
might look cool to used it vertically to make a wall design, but the stark blue
and white design I came up with didn’t seem to have an appropriate place in The
Brick Testament until now.
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I like your cat of nine tails solution.
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Same one I had
Jesus use at the Temple.
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In the last pic, what are those steps they are coming down? Is
that LEGO?
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It is LEGO inasmuch as Duplo is LEGO. Those are the same 4x4 tiles that I used
for the floor pattern of the Sanhedrin.
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Stephen - What’s with the man-boobs on the guy in the second pic?
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Ha! I guess I never considered that a particularly feminine-looking torso, and
so I’ve had males wear it before. But on closer inspection, I can see how there
is indeed what can validly be seen as the suggestion of a bosom. I guess this
dude just has man boobs. What can you do?
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Also the guy with the Aunt May torso seems odd.
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Yeah, I love that dark tan is now a color for minifig clothing, but I go back
and forth about whether I think that the Aunt May torso with its kerchief can
really pass as something an ancient person would wear. Sometimes I just turn
the torso around and use the blank side because of that. But the story seems to
put some emphasis on the fact that these guys are out-of-towners, so a strange
style of dress may be called for.
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Hey, you finally got that scroll tile.
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Yes! I finally have a few of those excellent new scroll tiles. Too bad I can’t
easily just add them in to all the previous stories where they would have come
in handy.
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Hmm, I miss the old bald Paul a bit. Why’d you make him into a fleshy?
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Much like my LEGO depiction of Jesus (with long brown hair and a beard) was
influenced by traditional depictions, I think my old version of Paul was
similarly influenced. He is often depicted by artists as having a longish white
beard and being either bald or balding. But upon rereading Acts, I noted a
verse (Acts 18:18) where it says that Paul shaves his head because of a vow.
This would be far less impressive if he were already bald to begin with. So I
decided I’d give Paul a full head of hair this time around.
In keeping with my new methodology on skin tones, with Paul being a Cilician, I
decided to give him the light peach skin tone. I kind of like that this also
separates him visually from the rest of the Galilean apostles.
Thanks for all the comments!
-Brendan
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Not to pick a fight, but the ‘accept communism or die’ is a little more
subjective than your normal stance... The verse you summarized (partially
omitted) is fairly key...
Acts 5:4 “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was
sold, was it not under your control?...” (Peter)
In my reading this points to lying being the central point of the story as
opposed to ‘communism’. The Bible also has a lot to say about work... I’m sure
you’ve come across it in your thorough reading...
I’m fairly sure we’ll never agree, I just point this out because you used to
attempt to follow the original story and add (in my opinion) a twist (in yours
the truth). Here it seems to be more of a deliberate edit to facilitate a
headline...
Again, please take this as only a comparison to your own standard and not me
holding you to some sort of ‘censored version’.
Nathan
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Hi, Nathan.
In lugnet.build.ancient, Nathan Todd wrote:
So noted. :) Though I’ve moved this to ot.debate because it isn’t really a
discussion of the LEGO constructions themselves nor how I’ve chosen to
illustrate Bible passages with LEGO.
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but the ‘accept communism or die’ is a little more
subjective than your normal stance...
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Hmm. I actually thought it was one of the more neutral titles, surprising
though it is. My first idea for a title was simply “Hardline Communism”. To me
what was most notable about the story was the surprising (to most modern
readers) fact that the earliest Christian community (and therefore presumably
the closest to knowing Jesus’s teachings firsthand) are depicted in Acts as
following a very strict communist lifestyle, pooling their combined wealth and
redistributing it amongst themselves according to need. This seems to be a bit
removed from Jesus’s admonition for people to sell all their possessions and
give the money to the poor (rather than simply redistributing it amongst
themselves), and certainly both of those are very, very far removed from how
most modern Christians think it best to handle possessions and money.
Anyhow, the “Hardline Communism” title by itself seemed to leave out the other
rather notable thing about the story, which is the (somewhat mysterious) sudden
deaths of Ananias and Sapphira. Although the telling of the story in Acts
leaves it unclear just exactly how Ananias and Sapphira died, it seems very
strongly implied that their deaths were a form of instant punishment for their
refusal to fully commit to the apostles’ hardline communism. This is the case
whether their murders were committed by God, the Holy Ghost, or Peter himself.
But let me address your comments...
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The verse you summarized (partially omitted) is fairly key...
Acts 5:4 “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it
was sold, was it not under your control?...” (Peter)
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My omitting that part of Acts 5:4 was not an attempt to change the meaning of
what Peter was saying, but rather (as I’ve done in many cases) simply to pare
down the dialogue to the point where it fits comfortably into the speech
balloons I use.
But I guess 5:4 struck me as less important to the story because I interpreted
Ananias’s crime (in Peter’s mind) to be his withholding money, and that this
withholding of money was (for Peter) somehow the equivalent of lying to the
Holy Ghost (though I admit I do not actually follow Peter’s logic here).
My interpretation is based on two things:
1. In Acts 5:3 Peter says, “Ananias, how could Satan so fill your heart that you
have lied to the Holy Spirit and kept some of the money?”
2. At no point in the text is Ananias depicted as actually telling a lie.
Ananias never says “Here is every last penny of the money I got for selling my
land” or anything of the sort. The text simply says that Ananias sold his land,
kept part of the money and brought the rest to the apostles. Somewhere in that
course of events, Peter detects a “lie”, so my best interpretation is that the
“lie” in Peter’s mind is the very act of holding back money from the apostles,
i.e. not fully committing to their adopted hardline communism.
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In my reading this points to lying being the central point of the story as
opposed to ‘communism’.
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In my reading, the “lying” seems to be the equivalent (again in Peter’s mind at
least, or perhaps the author of Acts’s mind?) to the withholding of money, not
to actually telling a lie about it because Ananias never does such a thing.
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The Bible also has a lot to say about work... I’m
sure you’ve come across it in your thorough reading...
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I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. The Bible says a lot of things in
a lot of places about a lot of subjects, with many instances of the Bible
contradicting itself about a particular subject.
Even if one of the Ten Commandments said “Thou shalt not practice communism” it
would still be the case that in Acts the apostles are clearly depicted as
practicing a form of hardline communism which seems to have been enforced
(whether or not with divine help) on pain of death.
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I’m fairly sure we’ll never agree, I just point this out because you used to
attempt to follow the original story and add (in my opinion) a twist (in
yours the truth). Here it seems to be more of a deliberate edit to facilitate
a headline...
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As I said, I didn’t see this as a real change in my policy, but your seeing it
that way does make more sense to me now that I see how our interpretations of
this story differ.
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Again, please take this as only a comparison to your own standard and not me
holding you to some sort of ‘censored version’.
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I appreciate that. I do take pretty seriously some of the methodologies I’ve
settled on for creating The Brick Testament, and if someone sees me as deviating
from my own set precedents, I certainly don’t mind them pointing it out.
Regards,
-Brendan
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