Nov 11, 2019 3 min read

I admit that I missed the Jesus Shoes first time around.

When they appeared online in October, I was busy moving to a new house. I had enough trouble finding my own shoes, let alone Jesus’s. But now that I’m back online regularly, they just sort of miraculously appeared.

MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”), a Brooklyn-based arts company, created what they are calling “Jesus Shoes” by first buying a stock pair of Nike Air Max 97 sneakers for about $150. Then the company imported water from the River Jordan, had it blessed by a priest in Brooklyn and injected it – after coloring it a bright blue to draw attention – into the cushioned soles of the shoes. They placed “MT. 14:25” on the side of each shoe, a reference to the New Testament passage that mentions Jesus walking on water.

They also affixed a golden Christ-on-a-cross charm to the shoelaces and added frankincense-scented insoles and a red sole – a reference to the red shoes worn by popes.

MSCHF made fewer than two dozen pairs of Jesus Shoes, and the first pair sold to an unknown buyer for $1,425 within minutes of being placed on the company’s website. The buyer re-listed them, at $4,000, on the resale website StockX.

As you might expect, reaction to the shoes has ranged from praise to damnation.

Daniel Greenberg, MSCHF head of commerce, told media that the shoes were not meant to be blasphemous but as a jab at “collaboration culture.” Greenberg cited an Arizona Iced Tea-Adidas co-marketing venture featuring shoes that replicated the graphics of Arizona’s tea cans.

“We wanted to make a statement about how absurd collab culture has gotten,” Greenburg told the New York Post. “We were wondering, what would a collab with Jesus Christ look like?”

I’d be willing to bet that as you read this, a couple of priests who thought they’d hit the big time by securing a Vatican post are staring at laptop screen deep within the bowels of St. Peter’s trying to arrive at an answer to this same question.

I, too, have often wondered how Jesus would market himself in our multimedia age. Or, rather, how his handlers might. I’ve already seen the somewhat questionable results of what those who decided to do it came up with: Jesus’s face on a serving tray, inviting coffee stains to rival the Shroud of Turin; a Jesus Pez dispenser; Bobblehead Jesus. And, last week, a Twitter user posted a picture of Jesus staring at Donald Trump with these words, “I chose you to lead this nation …” Some say the picture was Photoshopped; I, on the other hand, remember that the face of Jesus sometimes appears on toast, refrigerators, or the shadows of a wrinkled comforter. So, why not on Twitter?

Yet I doubt that if Jesus appeared today he would have been all over social media and selling merch.

From what I recall of the New Testament, Jesus wasn’t about self-promotion. Had T-shirts existed in the first century, for example, Jesus surely would not have had his apostles wear bright red ones emblazoned with “I’M WITH THE SON OF GOD!” while on tour (30 skekels each, 2/55; XXX, 40 shekels). Nor would the Peter and Paul have manned a merch table on the Mount of Olives offering DVDs of Jesus’s miracles.

Were Jesus to arrive today, I doubt he’d be wearing Jesus Shoes.

But I think Matthew McConaughey would be a shoe-in to star in the biopic.