Halloween is upon us, and that, for me, means it’s zombie-hunting season. This week, I’ve budgeted ample time to watch my favorite zombie movies and play my favorite zombie video games. I’m in such the Halloween spirit that yesterday I made this video:

It’s a compilation of the best scenes from the Norwegian film “Dead Snow” set to the song “Anti-Zombie” by Die Ärzte.

Halloween this year falls on a Sunday. I think that’s fitting, because zombies make several cameos in the Bible. Perhaps this is crude of me to suggest, but wasn’t Jesus a zombie—having risen from the dead and all? Lazarus too?

Also, the Gospel According to Matthew records this incredible zombie phenomenon:

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. (Matthew 27: 51-53)

(Side note: Had this really happened, why is Matthew’s gospel the only one to mention it? The story appears nowhere else in the Bible nor in any extant historical record.)

And in Zechariah, we read what appears to be a zombie-like pandemic:

Now this will be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples who have gone to war against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they stand on their feet, and their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouth. On that day a large-scale panic from the Lord will spread among them. One person will grab the hand of another, and one will attack the other. (Zechariah 14: 12)

But the folks of the Zombie Research Society deny that there are zombies in the Bible. They explain:

Technically speaking, zombies are NOT people risen from the dead.  Zombies are new creatures animating the shell of what was once a living human being.  The former person is gone, and something new has taken it’s place.

The Zombie Research Society notes that Jesus, Lazarus, and the risen saints in Matthew were fundamentally the same person when they came back to life, and thus technically do not qualify as zombies. And as for the plague in Zechariah, it more closely resembles leprosy than zombihood. “A plague that rots your flesh and eats your eyeballs is a major bummer, but it does not a Zombie Pandemic make.”

Well, there goes my theory. No matter. It was nonetheless a fun excuse to justify a blog post about zombies.