Making Fake “Jesus(es)”
A LESSON IN FAKE JESUS(ES)
In the summer of 2012, an aging fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy in Borja, Spain, was catapulted from obscurity into worldwide mockery. The painting—Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man”—had hung there for more than a century. It wasn’t a masterpiece, no museum was vying to put it on display, but it had a kind of humble devotion to the Christ who was crowned with thorns. It was painted right onto the wall of the church with simple skill by a rather unremarkable artist. But after almost a century the paint had thinned, the colors were faded, and the plaster showed signs of cracking.
It was at this point, that a well-meaning parishioner decided to “help.” She loved the fresco. She hated seeing it fade. And with nothing more than enthusiasm, a few brushes, and no training whatsoever, she began her rescue of the project. Yet, in a matter of strokes, she wasn’t really restoring the Christ—she was erasing an image formerly made of Him.
What she produced is now infamous. The solemn eyes blurred into circles. The jaw collapsed. The wounds vanished. And the Christ who once looked down on His people in suffering was replaced with a lopsided cartoon the world instantly renamed Ecce Mono, which is Spanish is translated: “Behold the Monkey.” The image went viral, a global spectacle of unintended vandalism, and now a source of tourism for the church.
But the fresco wasn’t the real lesson. The real lesson was what it revealed about us: whenever we try to “improve” Jesus, we end up deforming Him. Every attempt to touch up Christ according to our preferences—our sentiment, our fears, and our conveniences—always leads to a Jesus who looks less like the One in Scripture and more like the one of our imagination.
And nowhere is this impulse more active than in December. The month that should draw us into the awe and thunder of the Incarnation instead becomes a gallery of unauthorized portraits—plastic infants, syrupy artwork, cinematic daydreams, and cutesy devotional trinkets. None of it is harmless. None of it is neutral. December becomes the season when Christians feel most devoted to Jesus while surrounding themselves with depictions of Him that He Himself would not recognize.
And let me say this plainly: while I believe the Second Commandment forbids us from making any images of Jesus, I do not consider porcelain nativity sets the chief violation. The far greater danger is the Jesus we sculpt in the imagination. The Jesus who shrugs at the very sins the real Christ drove out with a whip. The Jesus who pats your head and soothes your guilt when the real Christ thundered, “Whitewashed tomb!” The Jesus who nods politely at your compromises when the real Christ called sinners to die to themselves.
Our hearts rarely launch idolatry by denying Christ outright. It always begins with adjusting Him. By sanding down His authority. By warming His confrontations until they feel like compliments. By easing His demands until discipleship feels optional. By recentering His mission around our comfort rather than His glory.
And once that happens, the false Jesus takes over. Idols don’t stay quiet. They rewire our affections. They bend our conscience. They reshape how we read Scripture. You can recite the Nicene Creed with a counterfeit Jesus lodged in your imagination. You can sing “O Come Let Us Adore Him” while adoring a Jesus who only exists to soothe you.
The most dangerous false Jesus you will ever meet is not the one on a mantle.
It is the one your heart invents.
What follows is not meant to amuse you but to awaken you. These seven distortions show how naturally we drift toward a Christ of our own shaping—a Christ who reflects our preferences more than His Word. They remind us how desperately we need Scripture to correct the versions of Jesus our hearts so easily invent.
A SMATTERING OF FAKE JESUS(ES)
1. The Lone-Ranger Jesus
There is a Jesus beloved by the spiritually self-assured—the Jesus who gives a solemn nod to their self-ordination. He is the patron saint of rugged individualism, the sovereign of “me and my Bible,” the Messiah of personal space. He requires no church, because He Himself has no Bride. He appoints no elders, because He prefers a kingdom with no officers. He administers no sacraments, because sacraments require a people. He calls no wandering sheep home, because wandering is His preferred spiritual discipline.
What makes Him so dangerous is that He is not found in Scripture at all—He is an idolatrous mental portrait, carved in the imagination, polished by pride, and adored as though He were the Christ of glory.
His followers believe themselves pioneers of an elite spirituality, never noticing they have merely reinvented the ancient religion of doing whatever one pleases. They congratulate themselves for avoiding the “messiness” of organized religion, unaware that they have embraced the chaos of disorganized rebellion. They boast of peace because they avoid conflict, not realizing that sanctification is born in the friction of covenantal life. They speak tenderly of their “direct connection to God,” never realizing that their Lone-Ranger Jesus cannot connect them to anyone but themselves.
He is the Christ of spiritual bachelorhood, the Savior of solitary saints, the Redeemer who rescues no one into a family. And his disciples grow spiritually malnourished—not because Christ starves them, but because they traded the real Christ for a mirage who encourages them to sip dew drops alone on the frontier.
2. The Non-Judging Jesus
There is a Jesus whose ministry has been boiled down to a single embroidered phrase: Judge not. He smiles like a children’s cartoon, speaks with the force of a marshmallow, and carries the moral authority of a decorative pillow. He never offends, never confronts, never corrects, never wounds in order to heal. His holiness has been replaced with winsomeness; His authority traded for affirmations; His words trimmed to whatever can fit on a refrigerator magnet.
This Jesus is not merely mistaken—He is an idol, a “graven image of the imagination,” crafted to silence the real Christ who dares to command repentance.
He is adored because He is harmless—the perfect deity for those who want inspiration without transformation.
Yet His worshipers never notice the bill. Their consciences soften like wax left in the sun. Their sins harden like clay baked in the kiln. Their theology becomes a boutique of comforting slogans, carefully curated to ensure that nothing resembling repentance ever intrudes.
This Jesus never says “Go and sin no more,” because He finds sin rather charming. He never calls hypocrites to account, because hypocrisy is His favorite hiding place. He never raises His voice, even as wolves tear His sheep to pieces, because raising one’s voice is so unbecoming.
And slowly His admirers become the very caricatures Scripture warns against—people who love their sin more than their Savior. The real Christ divides loyalties because He is holy; the Non-Judging Jesus divides nothing because He commands nothing. He is a plastic deity—and his children inherit his hollow soul.
3. The “Let’s All Get Along” Jesus
There is a Jesus whose greatest miracle is keeping conversations pleasant. He is the archbishop of affability, the chaplain of conflict avoidance, the guardian angel of uninterrupted tranquility. He recoils from doctrinal edges, treats conviction as impoliteness, and believes the eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt be nice.”
But this Christ is no Christ—He is idolatry dressed in courtesy, a sentimental statue carved from our fear of man, not the fear of the Lord.
His disciples become spiritual porcelain—fragile, decorative, easily shattered by the slightest gust of controversy. They trade truth for togetherness, clarity for congeniality, conviction for comfort. Correction sounds cruel to them. Precision feels unloving. Boundaries feel barbaric.
They have forgotten that unity without truth is not unity—it is surrender with better lighting.
This Jesus produces believers who wilt in the face of heresy because they have never met a Christ who contends for them. They become experts in peacekeeping but strangers to peacemaking. They inherit a kingdom with all the softness of a plush toy and all the backbone of a decorative placemat.
4. The Family-First Jesus
There is a Jesus cherished by well-meaning households—a Jesus whose mission in life is to preserve domestic tranquility at any cost. He never disrupts holiday cheer. He never challenges marital sin. He never calls fathers to lead or mothers to disciple. He would never dream of insisting that the Lord’s Day outranks the travel sports schedule. His chief ambition is to keep everyone comfortable, polite, and undisturbed.
He is, of course, another mental idol, a household god dressed in Christian vocabulary—a golden calf wearing a cardigan.
Homes shaped by this Jesus learn the vocabulary of Christianity without the demands of Christ. The Family-First Jesus transforms fathers into spiritual mascots, mothers into sentimental chaplains, and children into well-behaved pagans who know just enough Bible to be inoculated against the real thing.
He stabilizes the household while suffocating the soul. Families who follow him discover too late that they raised polite unbelievers—children who can recite Christian terminology but have never been summoned to Christian obedience.
5. The Prosperity Jesus
There is a Jesus who sounds less like a rabbi and more like a motivational speaker auditioning for a luxury brand. He winks like a salesman, promises like an influencer, and talks like a corporate recruiter. His cross guarantees promotions. His blood secures bonuses. His gospel is a vending machine—insert faith, collect lifestyle upgrades.
This is not gospel. It is golden-calf theology with a Christian paint job, worship of a deity who exists to fund our idolatrous appetites.
He promises everything the flesh already wants: crowns without crosses, growth without pruning, blessing without obedience.
But the Prosperity Jesus is an economic bubble waiting to burst. He withholds what the real Christ insists upon: maturity through suffering, humility through trial, intimacy through affliction. His disciples are enthusiastic until discomfort appears, faithful until idols are threatened, generous until generosity becomes sacrificial.
He cannot produce martyrs or missionaries, only customers. And when life inevitably wounds them, they collapse—because the Jesus they trusted was too shallow to bleed.
6. The Silent Jesus
There is a Jesus who never interrupts you. He never confronts your habits, questions your desires, vetoes your decisions, or interferes with your ambitions. He is the deity of selective hearing—heard only where you already agree and conveniently mute everywhere else.
He is not the Christ of Scripture. He is the idol of autonomy, the god who speaks with your voice because he was handcrafted in your mind.
He is cherished because He leaves you sovereign. You may keep your bitterness; He will not pry. You may nurse your grudges; He will not inquire. You may indulge your lusts; He will not object. You may drift toward ruin; He will not raise His voice.
But His silence is not compassion—it is abandonment. And His followers soon lose the ability to hear the thunder of Scripture, having trained themselves to prefer the soothing whisper of their own imaginations.
The real Christ speaks with the voice that split mountains and summons the dead. The Silent Jesus, by contrast, never speaks because he has nothing to say—and those who adore him slowly inherit his deafness.
7. The Pleasure-Permissive Jesus
There is a Jesus who treats appetites as sacraments. He baptizes indulgence, canonizes cravings, and canonizes every desire so long as it is sincerely felt. He never calls for fasting, never demands restraint, never summons sacrifice, never warns that sin devours those who pet it.
He is the idol of craving—the Jesus fashioned from desire itself, molded into the shape of whatever the heart wants next.
Under His ministry, appetite becomes emperor. His followers learn to obey their cravings as oracles, their impulses as prophets, their stomachs as sovereigns. Pleasure becomes the shepherd; Jesus becomes decoration.
This Christ cannot make you holy because He cannot make you hunger—hunger for God, for righteousness, for the narrow way. He has no power to crucify the flesh because He is too busy complimenting it.
Those who follow Him eventually wither, starved of the very grace they were too entertained to seek. They sink into a soft, smiling ruin—surrounded by pleasures that promised life and delivered only hollowness.
A FAMILY OF FAKE JESUS(ES)
And of course, the seven counterfeits named above are only the patriarchs of a much larger, noisier, and more embarrassing family. Their relatives swarm the imagination like a reunion of theological impostors—each bearing the family resemblance of the idol that sired it. The Lone-Ranger Jesus begets the Libertarian Jesus who sneers at authority, the Sabbatical Jesus who blesses perpetual absence from worship, and the DIY-Savior Jesus who insists you can sanctify yourself with enough grit. The Non-Judging Jesus spawns the Grandpa-in-the-Sky Jesus with his toothless benevolence, the Pleasure-Permissive Jesus’ gluttonous cousins who canonize every craving, and the Universalist Jesus who considers hell a public-relations liability. The “Let’s All Get Along” Jesus raises a brood of congenial deities—like the Pacifist Jesus, translucent and timid, and the Aesthetic Jesus who lights candles but never hearts, all of them too polite to confront a lie even when truth is bleeding in the street.
Meanwhile, the Family-First Jesus produces the Middle-Class Morality Jesus who mistakes manners for holiness, and the Child-Wrangler Jesus who manages behavior but never forms souls. The Prosperity Jesus fathers a decadent lineage—the Influencer Jesus who treats blessing like a brand partnership, the Transactional Jesus who turns forgiveness into a loan agreement, and the Bootstrap Jesus who commands you to climb ladders Christ already tore down. And skulking behind them all is the Silent Jesus’ extended kin: the Doctrine-Free Jesus who offers passion without propositions, the Mystical-Experience Jesus who trades Scripture for vibes, and the Personal-Brand Jesus who remodels Christ into the flattering silhouette of your own personality.
These are not harmless quirks or innocent exaggerations. They are idols—second-commandment violations with first-rate marketing—mental sculptures forged from fear, pride, appetite, exhaustion, sentimentality, self-protection, and self-rule. They do not resemble Christ; they resemble us, and that is precisely why they are so seductive. They demand nothing, command nothing, and reform nothing. They exist to baptize our preferences, perfume our sins, and gently escort us away from the real Jesus while convincing us we have never left His side.
And because they cannot save, they must all be shattered—every last one of them—so that the true Christ may stand alone.
REPENTING OF FAKE JESUS(ES)
The God who forbade images on Sinai is the same God who gave us His own image at Bethlehem. The Word became flesh—real, sovereign, untamable flesh—not so that we could soften Him, resize Him, or sentimentalize Him, but so that we might finally behold Him as He truly is. The Incarnation is not divine permission to craft Jesuses who suit us; it is divine invasion to destroy every Jesus we have crafted. And here the blade turns inward, because the counterfeit Jesuses described above are not merely the delusions of others—they are the familiar shapes our own hearts produce when we grow weary of the real Christ. Idolatry seldom begins with renouncing Jesus; it begins with revising Him. It begins with the quiet, almost invisible brushstrokes of personal preference—sanding down His authority, warming His confrontations until they feel like compliments, trimming His demands until discipleship feels optional, reshaping His mission until it bends politely around our comfort rather than His glory. Before long, we find ourselves bowing to a Christ who looks strikingly like us.
This is why we do not need inspiration; we need revelation. The only antidote to our imaginative vandalism is the Jesus of Scripture—the Christ who walked and wept and thundered, who commanded and confronted, who bled and rose, who reigns with unshared sovereignty. The real Christ speaks in sentences, not vibes; He governs by truth, not sentiment; He sanctifies by commands, not compliments. And we must let that Christ confront our counterfeits, because the Jesuses we invent are far more dangerous than the figurines on our mantles. Mental idols do not remain decorative; they become directive. They do not sit quietly in the imagination; they preach. They shape how we pray, how we repent, how we read Scripture, how we treat others, and how we understand ourselves. They feed on our fears, our exhaustion, our wounds, our pride, our desire to be unchallenged, and then they baptize whatever sin we are unwilling to crucify. Nothing is more spiritually lethal than a Jesus who was born in our imagination instead of in Bethlehem.
That is why the Second Commandment calls us not merely to reject carved images, but to reject the interior ones—the Lone-Ranger Jesuses, the Non-Judging Jesuses, the congenial, sentimental, prosperity-laden, silent, or pleasure-permissive Christs who bless our rebellion instead of rescuing us from it. These are idols in theological costume, sovereigns of convenience who demand nothing, command nothing, reform nothing, and ultimately save nothing. They are the echoes of our own desires wearing borrowed messianic robes. And the gospel demands their death. The false Jesuses must fall so that the true Christ may reign in unchallenged clarity.
The call of Advent, then, is not to display our homemade Jesuses but to bury them. Christ did not take on flesh so we could continue sculpting Him into our image; He took on flesh to restore His image in us. He was born not to stabilize our illusions but to shatter them. He was laid in a manger so that every idol lurking in the quiet chambers of our hearts might be dragged into the light and crucified. The real Jesus—the Jesus of the Gospels, the Jesus of the prophets and apostles, the Jesus who judges and saves, wounds and heals, humbles and exalts—will not share His glory with our inventions. And that is very good news, because the only Christ who can save us is the One who refuses to be remade.
So come to Him. Not the Jesus you edited. Not the Jesus you softened. Not the Jesus you imagined. Come to the Christ who is. Bow before the Lord who cannot be resized to fit your preferences. Surrender to the King who shatters idols by the mere fact of His presence. Let Scripture straighten the contours where your imagination has bent Him. Let His Word reintroduce you to the living Christ. And as you behold Him—the real Him—let every false Jesus perish in the brightness of His glory.
