There is nothing more Indoor Kid than what we’re looking at today. Someone recreated the Bible, the Holy Bible, in its entirety, using Minecraft. The idea sounds like a homeschooled child’s desperate gambit to play more video games. It’s something you’d come up with if you were a nerd your entire life then suddenly tried to rebrand yourself as “cool” after becoming a youth pastor. And it’s fucking garbage. From concept to finished product, it sucks beyond the scope of God’s forgiveness.
Besides being a clear mockery of the authors’ creator, THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is completely unauthorized. It’s just baaaaarely not in violation of the game’s commercial use guidelines, and should serve as a lesson to all future media companies: include the line “not for use in weird fucking Bibles” in your terms of service. In fact, by continuing on to the Minecraft story of Creation, you consent to these terms.
The Christian universe doesn’t have a complicated origin story, but when it got adapted into Minecraft it got shortened to exactly 16 panels (and 4 of them are blank). And if you’re wondering if this book was the work of inspired artists expressing their passion for Christ using the limitless potential of digital sculpture, look at that weak shit. That gray cube on nothing is how they represented the majesty of the time God made the entire moon. It’s not necessarily terrible, but it’s clearly saying, “If there was a way to do less, I would have, God.” The artist obviously hated doing this and more obviously couldn’t have done a good job if they cared. Let me put it like this: if you were recently fired for being bad at teaching gorillas how to play Minecraft, this would be a D- project by one of your below average students.
This was the moment when God created Woman? This mental patient burying a sex doll? Can you imagine looking at this and thinking, “This is going great. I’m going to stick with it and do the ENTIRE BIBLE.” Even with stakes this low — a book sold exclusively to bad grandparents which will never be opened — this is an embarrassing effort. If this is what I had made and Jesus Christ Himself asked to see how my Minecraft Bible was going, I’d tell him I lost all my files in a masturbation accident.
The dialog isn’t much better than the set design. After Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, they tear their own legs off and whine, “We are going to be in such big trouble!” Why are these naked, grown people talking like babies? I know this is intended for kids, but in what world does that mean every character has the mind of a child? Even Starscream had enough respect for his audience to shriek things like, “You are a coward, Megatron! I should lead the Decepticons!” He didn’t look into the camera and say, “My poo poo is more big boy than his! Clap, clap if I am right!” Wait, sorry, I accidentally undermined my point by making Transformers better.
There really is no better way to tell the story of man’s original sin than the skin of a nude guy stretched across three cubes and telling God, “She did it!” Do you hear that sound? It’s every oil painter in the world whispering a reverent “MINECRAFT” into the barrel of a shotgun. And if you were curious how this book’s crafty artist represented the serpent, they put a Creeper behind a bush and counted on the imagination of Minecraft players to replace the unseen parts of one of history’s most well-known video game enemies with “snake.” It genuinely wouldn’t have been any lazier if the caption said, “Sorry the game didn’t have snakes, and if you’re reading this, God, that’s in many ways on You!”
We all get this is a dumb thing made by untalented assholes who bet three weeks of their life on the idea of how Christians will buy anything. But with Cain and Abel, I think there is a danger in telling the story of the invention of murder using characters in a game where death is cute and meaningless. It’s, I don’t know… it’s like explaining the dangers of misogyny using sound clips from Big Natural Milk-Squirting Sluts. It gets the message across, but does it? Anyway, let’s skip ahead to the end of the Cain and Abel story.
T-that’s the end? God gave them Emo Peter Pan as a replacement son, bye? Is this book even accurate? It’s been awhile since I’ve read the non-Minecraft Bible, but I don’t remember the story of Cain and Abel being two things long and one of them was Eve giving birth to a teenage Seth in front of a makeshift Arby’s. Oh, good. The next part is Noah’s Ark. I remember this one:
Honestly, when I first realized this book wasn’t kidding, the first thing I considered was how much effort it would take to do Noah’s Ark. I thought about the undertaking it would be to build every animal out of 3D blocks and the scale at which you’d have to do it. And then I turned to page 23 and saw Noah only rounded up the five farm animals that come included in Minecraft. This isn’t storytelling. This is a tedious expression of how you gave up on joy. If the Walls of Jericho stand for ten thousand more years, the children of God will never come up with a more stupid or slothful way to spread His word. If anyone reading this makes a bubble gum that tastes like the cry of the Israelites, you can put this quote on the packaging: “Absolutely not the worst Bible adaptation! – The Internet’s Seanbaby.”
When you read in an ordinary Bible how God tells Noah to put two of every animal on a boat so He can safely kill everything with a flood and restart the Earth with the incest set to max, it seems reasonable. To me, at least. But when you see that story play out in video game form, it doesn’t quite resonate the same. Watching this guy try to save all of Earth’s animals and seeing how all he does is lure a couple pigs into every five-year-old’s first Minecraft barn… it doesn’t look like he’s doing God’s will. Presented this way, it just looks like some old farmer lost his goddamn mind.
There are a few other stories that don’t translate well into Children’s Video Game…
Sodom and Gomorrah is no longer a city of hedonism, but a… what are we looking at? A summer camp for cranky baboons? A parade of peanuts marching at an anti-kindness rally? One of them is really letting Abraham have it with, “God shmod!” If a child made this, their loving parent might brag, “My oldest is so talented!” which is just the misdirect part of the joke before they add, “…his younger brother, on the other hand, is a do-nothing piece of shit who plays Christian Minecraft all da– no, don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”
These nude peanut monsters appear later in the book when they jealously tear off Joseph’s dream coat and throw him down an eighty foot hole. This is unrelated to the prison he gets thrown in for not sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. Stripped of all doctrine, context, narrative, and dignity, then illustrated with cubes, these stories really don’t make a lot of sense. For instance, the rest of this story is about Joseph taking a job as a prison dream interpreter.
I have no notes here. I love that the prison guards let the baker keep his costume. I love how dreaming about birds on your head means you’re going to die in jail. I love the baker’s sad body language when he hears and believes this terrible news. Pausing the Bible to let Chef Boyardee know he’s never getting out of prison is exactly the type of story meant to be told with Minecraft blocks. Ten out of ten.
Look, I don’t know if there’s a good way to illustrate the Angel of Death killing the firstborn of every Egyptian using only Minecraft. But I do know you can’t do worse than this. It’s the bare minimum of design required to say “this is a house” and a figure skating cookie trying its best. This book can’t be serious. If your school assignment was to draw a city and an Angel of Death, and you turned this in, the note from your teacher would read, “HEY, I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE EITHER, YOU SARCASTIC LITTLE FUCK.”
THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is at its best when the text describes the scope and glory of God’s might under a screenshot of a simple idiot’s half-finished diorama. Here, I’ll show you:
Whatever this is rules. To tell everyone to behold the power of the Lord and then show them this completely rules. It’s like 2000 years of sacred teachings were only put here to create the context for this perfect Moses comedy routine.
This “it’s a head on a box but please imagine it’s actually something else” art technique is used all through the book, like when Abraham’s wife gives birth to this moustached refrigerator. Look at this fucking 500 pound terror golem. Can even the most devoted Christians suspend their disbelief this much? It’s like the artist watched someone die in an iron lung and thought, “You know, if you squint your eyes, really squint, it kiiiiiind of looks like a newborn baby!”
Sometimes these hacks don’t even bother trying. Like when God punished Pharaoh with a plague of frogs, they didn’t build a bunch of frogs out of blocks and zoom out. Instead, they showed a picture of Pharaoh looking out the window and explaining to the reader he sees frogs. Like in the movie Jurassic Park where they hold on Sam Neill’s face for 40 minutes and the voiceover says, “Sam Niell is surprised to see dinosaurs. He’s looking right at dinosaurs right now. What has Man done, he probably thinks.” Wait, hold on, is the edge of that tree supposed to be the frog plague? Never mind, I stand corrected.
Most of the books of the Bible are cut down to three or four pages of unrelated screenshots and nonsensical, half-remembered plot points, but sometimes they indulge in a long action scene, like when Samson beats the shit out of a cheetah for two pages. He carries it around, breaks it over his leg, climbs on top of it to taunt it, and piledrives it ass-erect into the ground. Then it… turns into a beehive and he pulls honey out of its butthole? Whoa, I don’t remember any of this from Sunday school.
There’s probably some kind of symbolism in this. Slamming a monster so hard until it stands erect and then eating something sweet out of its ass? I’m starting to see the appeal of Christian theology. Anyway, look at the intrigue that happens later in the same story:
This Samson scene demonstrates the kind of adorable minimalist storytelling they could have been doing this entire time. Look at their little conspiratorial lean! The thoughtfulness in the camera angle and architecture! Something about watching a super ripped guy suck honey out of an asshole really inspired these creators. And to be fair, this also isn’t a bad whale:
Unfortunately, most of the Jonah whale story takes place inside the whale and these authors weren’t about to try to draw this giant damn thing a second time but inside out. So instead of getting swallowed, in the Minecraft version of the story, Jonah sits patiently inside the whale’s gaping mouth for three days.
Look, drawing the interior of a whale’s digestive system must be hard. Whenever I ask someone to do it they say no because their NSFW commissions aren’t open, whatever that means. But Jonah is just sitting there. What are you doing!? Move fifteen feet in any direction, Jonah! What’s the goal here? Are you hoping you’ll die and St. Peter will say, “Hey, there he is! Guys, look who’s here! Earth’s most cooperative leviathan hostage! Ha ha, how’d you figure out we were using Pointless Whale Mouth Patience as a standard to measure morality?” Oh no, this is crazy. All this shit I’m typing is crazy. I don’t think THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is good for my mental health. Maybe let’s turn to one last random page and see if it gets less ins–
aiiieEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: who has cast out that vile ender dragon, Satan, and rejects the vile temptations of The Nether!