Hollywood Jesus, Realistic Jesus, Real Jesus

Submission 1,205

Part of a series on Jesus. [View Related Entries]

About

Hollywood Jesus, Realistic Jesus, Real Jesus refers to an exploitable format based on an atheist meme in which three depictions of Jesus are captioned, "Hollywood Jesus," "Realistic Jesus" and "Clothed Jesus," with a fourth, blank space is captioned, "Real Jesus." In the memes, various individuals and characters are edited into the blank space.

Origin

On January 11th, 2015, Redditor SecularVirginian posted a humorous image with four depictions of Jesus Christ in it, labeled, "Hollywood Jesus," "Realistic Jesus" "Clothed Realistic Jesus" and "Guantanamo Jesus." The post (shown below) garnered over 7,800 upvotes in the /r/atheism^[1] subreddit in 10 years.

Later that day, Redditor TripleFive posted the earliest found edit of the image in the same subreddit,^[2] removing the leftmost depiction of Jesus and adding an empty space with the label, "realistic Jesus," implying that Jesus did not exist. The post (shown below) received over 1,700 reposts in 10 years.

Spread

An edit in which the rightmost space was empty and labeled "Real Jesus" saw spread online in the following decade, reposted on Reddit, Twitter and other websites.^[3]

On November 28th, 2024, X^[4] user @craigo001 reposted the edit, with their post (shown below) gaining over 1,500 reposts and 5,900 likes in one week.

On December 1st, 2024, X^[5] user @FemalePucc25341 posted the earliest notable edit in which a character was edited into the blank space. The edit, which added Jesus from the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga series, received over 780 reposts and 8,900 likes in four days (shown below).

In early December 2024, the image achieved viral popularity on X as an exploitable format, with users editing various individuals and fictional characters in the "Real Jesus" spot. For example, on December 3rd, X^[6] user @vocaloidedits posted a Hatsune Miku edit that received over 5,500 reposts and 51,000 likes in two days (shown below).