Antiquitopia

Dorothy King of PhDiva has written an extensive post on the European burials of "vampires" and/or "zombies" (the differentiation of which she repeatedly notes is a more modern invention) for this holiday season.  Check it out here .

There is a piece in the Religion Bulletin  on "Zombie Jesus Day" by Philip Tite, who plays with the importance of labels, shifting perceptions, and multiple "ownership" of holidays.  Quite appropriate for my recent discussion of the tombs opening in the Gospel of Matthew a few days ago, which has further links between the Gospel narratives and Zombies.

There is a small detail that Matthew adds to Mark's narrative concerning the broader effect of Jesus' death and resurrection: the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.  (Matt 27:52-53). The line to inspire every zombie apocalypse to come:  the dead climbing out of their graves to mingle among the living.  Or so it seems.  From an ancient Jewish perspective, it appears that Matthew is saying that Jesus' resurrection has triggered the general resurrection (Paul says something similar--that Jesus is the "first fruits" of the resurrection, suggesting the season of resurrection is at hand for the rest of the "fruits").  The general resurrection occurs at the end of time (or the end of the age), which suggests that at Jesus' death and resurrection the "Kingdom of Heaven" has broken into this w...

Well...sort of...at least according to this Huffington Post article by Michael Gilmour.  Zombie imagery and resurrection imagery often do have quite an uncanny resemblance.  Here are three of my favorites from Gilmour's list: 2. The Book of Revelation: "the sea gave up the dead that were in it" (Revelation 20:13). John the Seer's creepy statement reminds me of a scene in George A. Romero's "Land of the Dead" (2005) that features slow-moving corpses walking out of the surf, and Max Brooks' "World War Z" with its account of the boy returning from a swim with a bite mark on his foot. He also describes the zombie hoards roaming the world's oceans: "They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fisherman's nets." ..... 5. The Gospel of Matthew: "The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep we...

As everyone begins preparations for the most important religious holiday of the year--Halloween (what else would it be? Yom Kippur? Easter? Diwali? Ramadan?)--I thought I would provide some seasonal cheer for your undead pleasure.  While the jury is still out on whether or not Jesus was a zombie , who did come from the dead and encourage us to drink blood and eat flesh (although drinking blood lends itself to a more vampiric reading), zombies appear to be as old as civilization itself. The earliest reference I know of occurs in Mesopotamian stories of the Descent of Ishtar and, perhaps a bit more well-known, the Epic of Gilgamesh . In the latter, Ishtar threatens: "Father, please give me the Bull of Heaven, and let me strike Gilgamesh down! Let me...Gilgamesh in his dwelling! If you don't give me the Bull of Heaven, I shall strike (?) [                                     ] I sh...

I just saw this in NPR: archaeologists are studying the graffiti in the ancient Beit Shearim necropolis: Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic. "Once you understand Aramaic," says Karen Stern, "you can read anything. You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. I always call it the little black dress of Semitic languages." Stern, 35, is an archaeologist and an assistant professor in the history department at Brooklyn College. Her passion is the tomb graffiti of the ancient Jews in what was then Roman Palestine. Graffiti has been "published, but sort of disregarded," she says. "Whereas I think it is intimate, vocal and spontaneous, and adds to the historical record." .... "They were grapho-maniacal," Jonathan Price, head of the classics department at Tel Aviv University, says of the ancient Jews who were entombed here in the first and second centuries. Over the next ...

...that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Such are the famous first words to Jane Austen's masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice . But what if they read just slightly differently? Here is the product description to a new take on the classic masterpiece: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies , an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young...