A 1925 adman bestseller portrayed Jesus as the original advertising executive

Evidence

In The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 bestseller by adman Bruce Barton, himself the son of a Methodist preacher, Jesus Christ is depicted, not ironically but with earnest reverence, as an early advertising man and small-business owner, managing his team of disciples who “mastered public attention” and came up with winning slogans such as “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Barton reached even deeper when he wrote that “advertising” was a force “as old as the world…‘Let there be light’ constitutes its charter. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how attention industries borrowed religious legitimacy — echoes earlier chapters tracing admen from clergy families.
• SEED: An essay angle: how American advertising systematically laundered its prestige through Protestant religious imagery and vocation language.
• CANDY: Jesus-as-adman is a genuinely surprising, tweetable historical tidbit.