Get ready to have your mind blown because recently released documents from the estate of beloved author/guy who corners you on the street to talk about whether you’re going to Heaven C.S. Lewis have suggested that when he wrote Aslan, he meant for him to be Jewish and to feel deeply weird about being compared to Christ.
“Jesus was Jewish” says C.S. Lewis in newly released letters between him and Peter Jackson, writer of the Hobbit trilogy. “Then people killed him, and then he woke up and was like ‘Yo guys. I’m not Jewish anymore. Build a church in which all people will be welcome, that stands for justice and tranquillity and in which child abusers will immediately be rooted out and denounced by the leadership’ and Peter was like ‘I heard the thing about not being Jewish anymore but what was the other things you said’ and Jesus was like ‘Sorry I have to go, I’m a ghost.’ The Chronicles of Narnia is an alternate history in which Jesus didn’t stop being Jewish and was a lion.”
Wow! That was a long paragraph! Whenever asked publicly about whether Aslan was Jesus, Lewis would ramble for about five hours about complex eschatology and people would leave before he got to the part where he mentioned Aslan was Jewish, but remnants from an interview in 1956, when Lewis thought that a bush was interviewing him and ended up being overheard by bystanders, hints at this vital context.
“Aslan always feels really weird about the Christian stuff.” he shouted at the bush. “He’s like, oh, ok, they think I’m Jesus. I mean, I’m a lion, so that’s weird, but also how do I reconcile this constant imposition of Christian iconography onto my Jewish faith? That question haunts him throughout the books, and I tried to represent that in the way that he just becomes really uncomfortable when people start using in your face Christian allegory to talk about him. You know, the lines “Aslan looked at his feet and sighed very loudly as the posh girl spoke about missionary work” and “Aslan kind of sidled away while the eldest boring child droned on about how his resurrection was like Jesus and how Aslan is Jesus but the white anglicised Protestant Christian version .” That stuff. Aslan finds it really hard. But he feels too awkward to bring it up because he’s aware of the deep vein of anti-Semitism that runs through British society and he knows that these rich children will probably end up interpreting his legacy anyway, so why bother you know?”
Wow! Words!
Reaction to this news has been mixed.
“Oh I see. First they say Jesus isn’t white and now they say he isn’t even a lion or Christian?” said some columnist at one of the newspapers. Let’s face it, it’s hard to tell them apart. “This is part of an agenda. AN AGENDA I SAY!”
“Judaism is just another of the oppressive Abrahamic religions” said perpetually-unimpressed-by-anything-anybody-ever-does-except-themselves liberal blogger #resistthechrist. “They should have made him part of an actual progressive religion, like cluedo-vampirism, or that one with the hats. It makes me so sad that all literature isn’t measured by my own personal litmus of wokeness. I clearly have all the answers.”
Renowned Lewis scholar, God, was surprised than anything. “I always thought that Aslan followed the Viking faith, like me.” he said. “I guess this explains why Lewis seems so unhappy in Valhalla. He just hides under the table and cries. It’s embarrassing for everybody.”