The Bible Says It’s Zombie Jesus Day April 24, 2011

The Bible Says It’s Zombie Jesus Day

By Guest Contributor
April 24, 2011

Chad at No Gods Allowed reminds us that the whole “Zombie Jesus” thing isn’t just a joke — the Bible testifies to it in Matthew 27:51-53:

51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

Chad tries to make sense of this:

It took most of those zombies two days stuck inside their half smashed tombs before they could get out. Two days! While Jesus is out on holiday playing the last level of Doom III, a whole bunch of generally nice undead are stuck inside their graves scratching and moaning and breaking fingernails just trying to get a breath of fresh air. And brains.

This couldn’t have gone unnoticed. There have got to be a bunch of freaked out caretakers scared shitless because half their crop is trying to escape through damaged tombs. Did it make any difference that these zombies were holier than others? My guess is no. By the way, how could they even be holy if they haven’t accepted Jesus as their own personal savior? Something is amiss.

Very good points. Surely there’s another passage in the Bible that explains it all…

On a side note, if pastors talked about stuff like this on Sundays, I would *so* attend voluntarily.

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  • Adam

    New idea for a church: Church of the Holy Undead. Every Sunday the preacher reads quotes from various zombie novels, shows clips of Bruce Campell movies, and teaches its parishoners the rules of undead apocalyptic survival.

  • How many times do I have to say this? Jesus wasn’t a zombie. He was a vampire! Everything from the Last Supper to the Resurrection makes far more sense when viewed through the lens of the vampire myth.

    …And yes, I do have something far more important and more than a little intimidating to be writing than this. How’d you know? 😉

  • Ally

    @Consider the Tea Cosy. I think you may be right about Jesus, your blog makes fascinating points. However, I believe this verse is referring to Vampire Jesus’s army of holy zombies, which are a separate matter. Now let’s suppose God is an alien and the bible can be a parallel with Plan 9 from Outer Space. lol!

  • @Consider the Tea Cosy:

    That reminds me of my favorite moment out of any True Blood episode I’ve ever seen, when one of the lead characters says to a Christian fanatic:

    Maybe Jesus was the first vampire. Man, he rose from the dead too, and he told people, “Hey y’all, drink my blood, it’ll give you special powers.”

  • Ally- I see absolutely no reason why VampJesus can’t have an army of zombies! Zombies make better armies anyway- far less likely to get distracted seducing some pretty young thing to drink their blood. Or not. They’re just all about the brains.

  • Steve

    They were holy because they believed in god before they died and because god made them into zombies. The whole “accept Jesus as personal savior thing” is a modern concept.

    As for the whole story. Why couldn’t the writers simply have made them ghosts? That would have been far more credible. And yes, we’re on thin ice when we debate whether zombies or ghosts are more credible.

    The arguments for Vampire Jesus are overwhelming though. I think I’m converting

  • Dark Jaguar

    I gotta be nerdy pedantic here, but for me “zombie” implies a creature with no semblance of it’s living personality that only runs on the basest mental need to find food, or at least just lash out violently. These holy undead are implied to be at least as smart as they ever were while alive. Vampire myth kinda works, but they don’t seem to need to drink blood to live. I’m going to suggest they’re closer to those undead in World of Warcraft that wear suits and plot world domination while condemning the OTHER army of the undead that also plot world domination.

  • Richard P.

    Couldn’t be ghosts, their to hard to see in the daylight.

    He couldn’t have been a vampire, his hands still had holes. Everyone knows that vampires heal fast.

    They had to be a zombies. The evidence is irrefutable, there were eye witnesses.

  • Maybe the holy that died were disciples that had accepted Jesus as savior, but who could not be saved until the resurrection?

  • Areoseph

    Howdy! First time posting, long time lurking. I got really inspired by Chad’s (correct) interpretation of Matt.27:52-53 so I made a memorial poster for the victims of the Zombie Uprising. PZ Myers posted it (glee!!!) and I figured I’d share it here too, in case anyone finds it funny. Enjoy.

    Zombie Uprising 33 A.D.

    v/r

    Areo

  • Raised Godless

    He couldn’t have been a vampire, his hands still had holes. Everyone knows that vampires heal fast.

    Not only that, but he still had foot/ankle holes, and a lovely hole from the “Holy Lance,” which Doubting Thomas was given the opportunity to probe. Gag.

  • Roger

    I will look forward to seeing you in church. I talk about this stuff all of the time. But you are an atheist who never goes to church, so how would you know?

    Pastor Roger

  • Even now Jesus still wants your brains.

  • Jon

    I would try to point out the rather significant differences between zombification and actual resurrection, but I’d guess you actually already know that… 😛

    The point about not accepting Jesus as their own personal saviour though? Well that’s quite easily explained. The Bible is very clear (read the book of Hebrews) that the whole of the Old Testament points towards the promise of a coming Messiah (that’s what the Jews were waiting for) who would bring salvation. Romans quotes Genesis describes Abraham as being justified by faith – in other words he believed that God would bring salvation. So he did have faith in Jesus – but without knowing his actual name. He trusted that there was a Christ to come, and God counted that to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6, Rom 4:3).

    So that’s how the whole retrospective thing works – so those men were not holy because they had lived perfect lives, but because they had faith in God that Jesus was coming.

  • littlejohn

    Tom Paine addressed that particular passage in “Age of Reason.” Some of his funniest stuff.
    If you don’t own Paine’s book, it’s reproduced in Bertrand Russell’s “Why I’m Not a Christian,” which I assume you all own. OK, you don’t own that, either.
    Google “Paine” and part of the line.

  • He couldn’t have been a vampire, his hands still had holes. Everyone knows that vampires heal fast.

    not necessarily. some of my favorite vampires are notoriously slow to heal, and the authors spell out the reason why. it’s logical. a vampire is only ‘alive’ in the sense that it has had fresh blood from a living creature recently. sure, it can’t die, but without that blood it loses strength and the ability to regenerate. so unless it’s glutted on blood, its wounds will heal very slowly, more slowly than a living being. yvmv. heh. (your vampire may vary)

  • Hypatia’s Daughter

    Jon, Latter parts of the OT point towards the coming of a Messiah, a new David, who would liberate the Jews from the yoke of the oppressors – not someone who would become the sacrificial lamb and “wash away their original sin”. That was what the Jews believed. Rereading it to fit xtian eschatology is like interpreting the Hindu concept of reincarnation as being “born again”.
    And what happened to those risen holy men? If they were resurrected to eternal life, are they still alive? Did they die again and get reburied to be resurrected again at the second coming?

  • Great post and great find in the bible. Consider The Tea makes a good argument for vampire jesus, but rising in the morning, VJ would turn into a bat and fly back into darkness. Doesn’t bode well for “I am the light and the way” 😉

    Zombies at least can hang out in daylight without dissolving.

  • Drew M.

    @Aeroseph:

    I love it! Your poster reminded me of this song, which so befits the occasion:

    http://youtu.be/I9BRUe4yToQ

  • Zarathustra

    I can imagine some ancient Roman witnessing this and thinking “Great! That’s all we need: a bunch holier-than-thou undead running around.As if the Jews, and all those cultists weren’t enough!”

  • R2D3