As I left Apple’s iPad launch last Wednesday, someone thrust a pamphlet into my hand. Nothing startling about that–there are often folks handing out literature outside these events, and they usually turn out to be from either small Apple-related companies or organizations that are unhappy with the company’s DRM.

This pamphlet, however, was…a religious tract. From Jews for Jesus, the quixotic organization which devoted the brochure to a particularly quixotic purpose: addressing Steve Jobs directly, comparing the noted Buddhist to Jesus Christ, and arguing that he should accept Christ as his savior.

It’s certainly not the first time certain parallels have been drawn between the co-founder of Apple and the Son of God: Googling for “Steve Jobs Messiah” returns a scary quantity of results, Apple fans have long been compared to disciples, and the iPhone and iPad have frequently been called the Jesus Phone and Jesus Tablet, respectively. But I don’t know of anyone who’s taken the idea as far as Jews for Jesus, which peppers the pamphlet with both obvious religious allusions (Adam, Eve, and the apple) and unexpected ones (telling Jobs that his “NeXTStep” should be to ask God for “a new OS.” I understand that Jobs’ firing by John Sculley represents the Crucifixion, but I’m not enough of a Biblical scholar to figure out whether it’s the founding of NeXT or Jobs’ return to Apple that parallels the Resurrection.

At first, I thought that the pamphlet was a custom job for the iPad event , but it’s several years old, as evidenced by its lack of mentions of the iPhone, let alone the iPad. (The later is a particular shame given the rich scriptural possibilities in the mere notion of Apple tablets.)

After the jump, the flyer in full (as reprinted from Jews for Jesus’s online library of PDFs). It’s the first religious document I’ve run here, and I have a hunch it’ll be the last…

fff

 
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