Did Adam,
the first human created by God, along with Eve, according to the Abrahamic
creation myth, look anything like the Hollywood star Vin Diesel? This, perhaps,
isn’t a question that religion has asked in the last 2,000 years. Yet, in Elon
Musk’s ‘digital town square’ Twitter, this is the question people debated,
laughed over, and ‘engaged with’ on Friday, October 28.

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A joke
shared by Alamo Drafthouse NYC, an indie theatre operator, on Thursday,
triggered this discussion. The theatre operator, sharing a template tweet that
has often been used for humour of the absurd variety, tweeted: “Scientists at
Princeton University have reconstructed this 3D model of how Adam, the first
human being created by God, might have looked.”

The image
looks like that of Vin Diesel, the action-hero of the Fast & Furious
franchise.

The tweet
garnered over 125,000 likes and more than 30,000 retweets as it sought to answer
a civilisational question – How did the first man look?

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But no.
Like Vin Diesel is not the answer. Twitter adequately described the trend as: “Vin
Diesel becomes the latest celebrity to fall into a meme trend of someone
posting a picture of a celebrity or 3D-rendered character for humorous effect.”

But,
evidently, the social media-addled brains of many on the Twitterverse were
ready to take a joke for the Truth, at least on social.

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The joke
went so tangentially that the theatre producers put out a clarifying tweet: “Just
a reminder that we’re a movie theatre; not an academic journal,” adding, “That
said, here’s our soundcloud,” – linking not to SoundCloud, but to the theatre’s
landing page.

Vin Diesel,
55, is an American actor whose real name is Mark Sinclair. He is one of the
highest-grossing actors, best-known for playing Dominic Toretto in the Fast
& Furious franchise.