Night of the Living Jesus

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.