Good Grief - Pastor killed by crocodile while baptising

[moriah]

64. Here's the BBC version:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44366360

And the link in Amheric, the official language of Ethiopia.

https://www.bbc.com/amharic/44355105

Google Translate gets it a little odd, but okay, here's a few differences between the fake story about Zimbabwe (which for some reason first appeared in English) and this.

1) Baptisms aren't events of hubris, like claiming that a person can walk on water.

2) The large number of people to be baptized isn't unusual, whereas pastors preparing to show congregants a miracle, fasting and praying and then "walking out 30 meters before trying to get to the surface" certainly is. If you were able to walk on water, shouldn't you have started at the beginning?

3) There's no suggestions that the lake was considered unsafe by natives in the original version or the BBC English version of this story -- in fact, fisherman were mentioned in both the original and the English BBC version, using nets. You don't get to do much fishing on lakeshores with nets without getting your feet as wet as a person would using that location for baptisms. In the urban legend, there's the note that he deliberately chose a river called the "Crocodile River".

4) Part of the original foreign language version states that a funeral was held for the pastor, and people were trying to save his body from the crocodile -- and were successful at that, though not at killing the crock. In the urban legend, the only things left allegedly were his sandals and underwear.... conveniently floating atop the surface like he'd allegedly intended.

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Now, whether this actually happened or not is something none of us can know, as apparently there wasn't video of the incident.

Is this some propaganda attempt to scare people off of being baptized? Possibly.

Are DUers making fun of full-immersion baptisms falling prey to the same type of thing that made the obvious urban legend spread like wildfire, including cultural insensitivity/supremacy? Perhaps.

But this one has the ring of tragedy, not trying to teach some moral lesson on pride -- which in the "walk on water" UL was clearly an integral part of the story, even if it had the "dumb people from Africa" trope also for the setting they chose.