Night of the Living Jesus
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It’s been interesting to observe the progress of Zombies in popular culture in America, from the brain damaged product of some Voodoo poisoner to the brain eating corpse from Night of the Living Dead to the complex creatures with many characteristics and features we see in The Walking Dead. There are versions of course, but the Zombie of Hollywood fame has evolved. We know you have to shoot one in the head, that Zombies don’t climb, that they transmit the condition by biting their victims, that they don’t die even if they don’t eat and if they rot away to almost nothing.
Those beliefs have been added in the last half century, but like the things that stick to folk heroes and mythological creatures over the centuries, we see them as always having been the way they are now.
It’s sort of the same with Jesus. History tells us nothing about him, Nobody who ever saw him wrote a word about it. What we get from the selected texts is contradictory and loaded with bits of earlier myths, but the Jesus today: the personal investment adviser/Lord of the Universe has become very complex and diverse, with every generation, each age adding or removing features and characteristics. We even know just what he looks like. He looks a lot like Albrecht Duerer in fact and that’s a lot different from images found in early churches. But human creations, passed from generation to generation evolve much as Darwin suggested that living things evolve.
So why not a Zombie Jesus? Nothing is more mutable than that which never existed outside of fiction and myth, yet nothing is subject to more Denialism, rage and aggression when change is proposed. Just ask the Dixons of Cincinati, Ohio who set up a Zombie Nativity scene on their front lawn, thereby raising Holy Hell.
But where’s the beef? Isn’t Jesus risen from the dead? Isn’t he still around? Well one thing never evolves and that’s eternal self -righteousness and humorless zealotry. The idea that religious tolerance means protection from insult adds a bit of sweetness to this confection, coming as it does from a religion famous for defaming and persecuting any and all other religions and even variations of the same one. All beliefs, all religions deserve equal protection under the law — and praise be: a tax exemption.
The Dixons are getting resistance from Zoning boards and neighbors who know just how and where Jesus was born and to whom and what he looked like. They know all about his parents and their sex life and everything they know is the accretion of thousands of years of speculation and unwarranted assertion – and of course invention. Look, it’s a free country and no matter how much you hate the idea, Zombie Jesus is risen. He lives forever. He gives eternal life and destroys sinners when he brings the apocalypse, and like religion in general he eats your brain. It’s been foretold and the Church of Jesus Christ, Zombie is here to take your donations.
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Didn’t Jesus have a cameo in Shaun of The Dead? 😉
Evidently I’ve been watching the wrong movies! I appreciate the enlightenment, but yes, I agree, the danger is not in being eaten by a Zombie or some other not-quite-alive creature, but by the followers thereof.
The followers of the silly Jesus are the real zombies in this scenario.
To anybody who knows their undead, it is very clear that Jesus is not a zombie. There are a variety of undead, both incorporeal, such as ghosts, phantoms and wraiths, and corporeal, which have a greater variety: mummies, ghouls, vampires, liches, wights, zombies and revenants. Of these, rather than a zombie, Jesus is a lich.
What’s the difference? Well, for one thing, zombies do not maintain any vestiges of the personality they had in life. They are either mindless, part of a collective or hive mind, or (as with voodoo-type zombies) controlled by another. The condition is spread by means of potions or spells (again, in voodoo) or in the manner of an infection. Liches, on the other hand, are self-animated and retain the same mind, intelligence and personality they had in their previous life. The word is derived from Old English lic (pronounced like “leech”), which means “body” or “corpse”.
It is clear from even a casual reading of the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ post-crucifixion activities, that he was still the same old Son O’ God, but with a leaky body. That distinguishes him not only from zombies vampires and ghouls (who also feed on the living*) but also from revenants, wights and mummies (whose purpose is to terrorize the living**). It is also clear that the mindless members of a collective under the control of others is not Jesus, the focal point of the religion, but the followers of Christianity or any other major religion.
*Interestingly enough, Christians perform a reverse sort of vampirism/zombieism, becoming parts of the mindless collective by consuming blood and flesh rather than being consumed.
**Again, a practice not attributable to Jesus himself, but enthusiastically embraced by his followers.