#19 The Bible (Part Two): May 21st 2011, The Actual End of the World

(Deep booming voice) Previously, on Chris Writes About The End of the World


Yes, we’ve covered the Bible before, and the number of zombies and zombie apocalypse type events within its pages. The case for the Bible predicting all our deaths at the hands of animated, cannibalistic corpses is a slim one. Slightly more alarming however, is the apocalypse that is actually predicted in the Bible, which some people are arguing is due this Saturday. So hey, at least it’s a weekend that’s likely to have decent barbecue weather.


Here Comes The Maths
Above there’s a link to an eBible Fellowship tract that explains the thinking behind this date, however, Bible tracts have a pretty dry style, and an absolute dearth of knob gags, so I’ll do my best to summarise here.

It all starts in the book of Genesis when God says to Noah “Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”

You might have read about that flood in picture books as a kid, and maybe know songs about animals going onto the ark two by two, because if there’s one thing RE teachers are good at, it’s turning global, apocalyptic level acts of genocide into catchy tunes. However, by skipping forward a few books, you find this quote: 

“Then he used the water to destroy the ancient world with a mighty flood. And by the same word, the present heavens and earth have been stored up for fire. They are being kept for the day of judgment, when ungodly people will be destroyed.

But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.”

So, God mentions the flood, then tells us that to him, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.

The flood is dated as taking place in 4990 BC (because... Okay, I didn’t look this bit up, those websites are written in a really dry style with absolutely no knob gags). So:

-4990 + 7000 = 2010!

Okay, that doesn’t look impressive, sorry. But, due to a massive oversight on the part of our Gregorian Calendar makers, they forgot to include a year 0 because... Okay, I didn’t find that out either. The point is, the sum is actually:

-4990+7000 = 2011!!!

Then we get May 21^st from this passage:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.”

And then... Okay, then the argument gets kind of hard to follow. It’s all up here though and involves detailed readings of Genesis, Peter, Hebrews, Matthew and others.

Basically, it is one hundred percent clear that, with detailed readings from various books written years apart, and combining that with lots and lots of sums, the beginning of the end of the world is due to start this Saturday. Because if there’s one thing we learn from the Bible, it’s that when God has a really important message to deliver to us, he likes to do it in code.

Pictured: Subtlety

Raptured
Now, don’t worry, we’re not all going to die on Saturday. The Earth isn’t destroyed in fire and brimstone until October 21^st because (Look, just read the damn tract)

However, zombie lovers, May 21^st is the day that (I’m quoting the tract, not the Bible here) “God will raise up all the dead that have ever died from their graves. Earthquakes will ravage the whole world as the earth will no longer conceal its dead (Isaiah 26:21). People who died as saved individuals will experience the resurrection of their bodies and immediately leave this world to forever be with the Lord. Those who died unsaved will be raised up as well, but only to have their lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be everywhere.”

This is an event commonly known as The Rapture. It’s basically when God filters out all the good people, to leave the rest of us sinners to endure some of the unholy shit that goes on in Revelations.

Basically it'll look like this. I'm so sorry for reminding you of this film.

That, for those of you who mainly get your Bible teaching from the Omens movies, is where huge balls of fire fall from the sky, and the water turns to blood, among a complete host of other fucked up things.

And weirdest of all, there is a certain, very specific kind of Christian (not to confused with regular, non-insane Christians) who has an absolute hard on for this happening. Enough of them to buy 65 million copies of the books in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series. It’s a sixteen book series, but with incredible foresight LaHaye and Jenkins got the final book in the series out in 2007. The series also spun off a videogame trilogy, which has the dubious bonus of a multiplayer mode where you get to play on Satan’s side. (Side note, am I the only one who thinks the theme music that website plays is weirdly catchy?)

Sure, you won the game asshole, but now you're definitely not getting Raptured!

One blogger far, far braver than me, has actually been trying to read the book series and pointing out just about everything that’s wrong with the writing, morals and theology of the books. Sadly, he won’t have finished reviewing the series by Saturday, so we’ll never know if it gets good towards the end.

A much better interpretation of the events of the Book of Revelation, the final word on the Biblical Apocalypse, can be found at the Brick Testament, here. I would include a picture the giant, bloodied, seven eyed lamb he build, but the guy who runs the site doesn’t like other people using his images. Which is a shame, because that photo is fucking terrifying.

So, for what will, let’s face it, probably be the final time. Let’s play the drinking game.

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? Ummm, maybe, kind of. Depends who you ask. Infected with God! Yeah, go on, take two shots.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain?

Umm. No. No they are not.  However, what it does have is armoured fucking locusts with fucking human faces and fucking lion teeth and fucking scorpion tails, ruled by Abaddon the Destroyer. Fuck it, I’m taking a drink.

Is mankind the real monster?

No, no it is not. I’m pretty clear that the monsters here are the fucking locusts with human faces. Oh wait! No! There’s a seven headed dragon!

Have a drink anyway.

Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!”

They’re coming to get Barbra, they’re coming to Ben, they’re coming to get you, and me, and everyone you care about. Take a drink.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building?

No, not buildings. People scream to the mountains and the caves to hide them. Christ that’s depressing, I’m having another drink.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies?

It’s supposed to be an all-loving, benevolent, omnipotent God doing this right? Fuck yes he’s incompetent and dangerous. Finish the bottle.

If you think there's hope in trying to avoid the inevitable, terrifying judgement of your Lord, and you happen to live in Norwich, you could gain a few brownie points this week by going to the charity gig Art Love World Live, where I, and other talented individuals will be trying to raise money for the victims of the Japan quake by performing comedy, poetry and music. Giving to charity is great, right? And it's THE DAY BEFORE THE RAPTURE. Basically, I think God is telling you to buy a ticket to this event.

EASTER SPECIAL! #16 The Bible: Are There Zombies In The Bible? (Part 1)

Given the time of year, there really was no other alternative for this week’s blog. I ummed and ahhed about doing The Passion of The Christ as our movie this week- but that belongs more in the Saw/Human Centipede genre than the movies we’re interested in, so I decided to go right back to the book.

But this isn’t just about making cheap jokes about other people’s deeply held religious beliefs (although it is partly about making cheap jokes about people’s deeply held religious beliefs). I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but the zombie apocalypse genre is a genre with a long standing habit of cannibalising what went before. And through the last 2000 years (give or take a few centuries) one of the most popular sources to plagiarise has been The Holy Bible. If this was a blog about Movies Where Friendly Aliens Visit, the drinking game would probably feature the rules: Does the alien have amazing powers (Take an extra shot if those powers are healing powers)? Do they try to spread a message of peace and love? Do a frightened and warlike government kill the alien because they don’t understand it? Does the alien then come back from the dead? (Take an extra shot if the alien then ascends to the heavens in a stunning light display).

These are all Jesus

 And the zombie apocalypse genre with its, well, apocalyptic imagery and all the gore and violence and penchant for preachers who totally kick ass (for the Lord), seems like it wouldn’t have wasted any time before raiding the good book. One of the most iconic lines from any horror movie is “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth” from Dawn of the Dead. It’s a line that sounds like it ought to be a Bible verse, although there’s no line even close to it anywhere in the good book.

So, looking at the Bible, just how many zombies, or zombie like entities can we find?

Candidate A: Lazarus

As seen here, and immortalised in a brilliant pun here. Lazarus is probably the second most famous example of someone coming back from the dead. There’s definitely some zombie-like qualities here, the wandering around in his burial clothes, the fear that after being dead for four days he’ll stink up the joint, his insatiable lust for flesh.... Okay, I made up the insatiable lust for flesh.

No, truth is, Lazarus pretty much just gets up and goes about his business as usual.

Admittedly, he really looks like a zombie

 Candidate B: Jesus Christ

You may have heard of this one. Jesus note only rose from the dead- as I just pointed out, he caused others to rise from the dead. And he was quite big on the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood, as shown here, here and here. 

Who knows, maybe the New Testament would have turned out very differently if the Romans had decided to skip crucifixion in favour of removing the head or destroying the brain.

But, although he did have some cool/gruesome scars after he rose, Jesus still seems pretty much articulate and none-flesh eating, which isn’t really in keeping with the zombie apocalypse tropes. And raising one person isn’t exactly an pandemic- for there to be an argument in favour of a zombie apocalypse, you’d need a whole bunch of people rising from the dead.

Candidate C: When Jesus Causes A Whole Bunch of People to Rise From The Dead

Taken from Matthew 27: 50-53 – right at the moment when Jesus dies on the cross. 

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

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

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!””

This is way, way more impressive. Tombs breaking open, a whole horde of the dead rising, this is the kind of shit they really ought to be telling kids about the Bible in school. This imagery is proper, classic Romero stuff.

I know several of you are now clicking the Bible open in a new tab and excitedly reading on to the next bit. You’ll be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, Matthew 27 is one of the better chapters- as well as being the bit where Jesus gets crucified, this chapter also features Judas hanging himself- admittedly, the least cool of the two Judas deaths described in the Bible. (The best one can be found here) but there’s nothing more on the zombie uprising. It’s not said whether the risen saints feasted on the flesh of the living, carried on from where they left off, or simply dropped dead again, necessitating a massive clean-up operation. The Bible pretty much skips that whole thing.

And deep down, you know it’s not enough for the dead to just rise. So far, the only gore we’ve seen at all is a couple of holes through Jesus’s hands. Dead rising and just walking about, while creepy, isn’t what we came here for. We want some violence!

Candidate D: Some Really Really Nast Shit Goes Down

You wanted it. Here it is- this line is taken from Zechariah 14:12-15: 

“This is the plague with which the LORD will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day people will be stricken by the LORD with great panic. They will seize each other by the hand and attack one another. Judah too will fight at Jerusalem. The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be collected—great quantities of gold and silver and clothing. A similar plague will strike the horses and mules, the camels and donkeys, and all the animals in those camps.”

“Flesh will rot why they are still standing” “eyes will rot in their sockets”- finally, we’re getting to the really gruesome stuff. Admittedly, there’s nothing here to suggest that they are actually dead, but as we’ve established before, and outbreak of the Rage virus still counts! According to the book of Zechariah, attacking Jerusalem will result in an outbreak of zombie madness.

Pictured: Rational justification for a pro-Israel foreign policy

Candidate E: The Book of Revelation

Of course, “attacking Jerusalem will result in an outbreak of the rage virus” is one of the lesser known Biblical prophesies, and considering that all those saints rising from their graves sounded like quite a big deal, it’s been pretty much underplayed by churches and R.E. lessons alike. No, it’s generally acknowledged that when the end times finally roll around, the book to look to is the book of Revelation, which Biblical scholars tell us predicts that before the end of the world, we will see the dead rise.

Pictured: Biblical scholars

Well, unfortunately Winston Zeddemore doesn’t have great Biblical recall. There is a resurrection in Revelation, only it’s just all the really nice people being brought back from the dead. Then, later, they bring the rest of the dead back only to quickly chuck them into Hell. 

And quite frankly, in the Book of Revelation, that’s some of the tamest stuff that happens. And this is something we should go into right now, because it turns out this book might be about to become extremely...

Then the screen flickers, and the image of the witty but informative zombie blog is replaced by the pale visage of Locutus of Borg.

This Blog is to be continued...

In the mean time- time for the drinking game!

Well, there’s not much of people under siege, or incompetent/dangerous rescuers (Unless you count Judas). There’s not even much of mankind being the real monster. However, there are walking dead (One shot) who do rise without being “infected” (Two shots) and nobody calls them zombies (Two shots).

#14 Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe): Everything New is Old Again

Welcome to our most belated, longest titled blog entry yet. Now it takes a great man to admit when he’s been wrong. From the very beginning of the blog, I have emphasised that the zombie apocalypse genre is one that is, for want of a better pun, cannibalistic. I have argued that everything in the genre today can be traced back to Night of the Living Dead, which itself is traced back to I Am Legend.

So it is with all due humility that I say- it turns out I was more right than even I suspected.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe) was a lovely event held in London last week, hosted by the Birkbeck Literature Club where various academics and zombie geeks met up to listen to a series of talks and readings about the zombie apocalypse genre- and how it related to 18^th century literature- specifically, the historical recordings of the events surrounding the spread of the plague in that period.

From the very start the venue for the event gave off mixed signals. On the one hand, the walls were littered with red crosses and pleas for God’s mercy- on the other hand, there was free wine and nibbles. I poured myself a glass and found myself a seat.

The opening talk came from a man named Peter Jones, who told us about the “Anointers” from Alessandrro Manzoni’s  Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).

Not this Peter Jones. He knows nothing about 18th century literature or the zombie apocalypse

Faced with the horrific death and destruction, medieval peasants (Here we are defining the word “Peasant” to mean- “Anyone who doesn’t own a TV”) reacted the way they always have in the face of horrific circumstances- a great big group prayer meeting. Modern scientists have responded to the idea of fighting a contagious disease by getting everyone in your community together in a poorly ventilated building, or having them march through the streets from one end of the city to the other en masse as “Oh for the love of God no! What are you doing! And Jesus Ever-Loving Christ do none of you wash your hands?” but community leaders at the time hung up a big “Mission Accomplished” banner and told everyone to go back to their daily business.

Known today as the Mayor Larry Vaughn Technique

Those of you who have just finished googling that pop culture reference (Come on! There was picture of a fin on the poster behind them! Surely that was a give away?) will probably be able to guess what happened next. If you guessed lots and lots more people dying, you can have a gold star.

As this highly crumpled hand-out I still have left over from the event says (In an extract from The Betrothed):

“The men who had fought so long and so resolutely against the view that a seed of a disease had from the beginning been near at hand, or in their very midst, which could multiply and spread by natural means to cause a disaster – those men were no longer able to deny that the disease was in fact spreading through the city. But they could not admit that it was due to natural causes without also admitting that they had completely misled the public and done great harm thereby. That disposed them to find some other reason, and to accept any explanation of the sort that might offer itself.”

This sounds not just like Mayor Larry Vaughn (For Christ’s sake people, he was the mayor in Jaws! The one who kept insisting that there was no shark because it would damage tourism? Jaws is only one of the most successful films ever made! For once, watch something that came out before Kung Fu Panda!) but also rings a bell pretty close to the news reports we hear at the beginning of every zombie movie. It’s taken as read that when the zombie apocalypse starts, our government will leap right into action to fuck it up. And while we’d like to believe that we’re better than medieval peasants (those of us with televisions anyway) deep down we kind of know we aren’t.

So, if prayer meetings don’t work, what do medieval peasants do next?

If you answered "Horror" have a gold star

Yes, it turns out, face with unimaginable tragedy and worrying uncertainty, people’s first reaction was to find people who “didn’t fit in” and weren’t from round these parts” and then torture them. Fortunately people are much more civilised now.

Specifically, in this book the plague was blamed on “Anointers”- suspicious, shady types who would sneak around, “anointing” people with plague. Now apparently there don’t exist that many visual representations of these Anointers, and other academics (for the purposes this article: Wussydemics) would have been stopped by that. Peter Jones however showed he was a good ten times more awesome than his Dragon’s Den counterpart by giving his talk dressed like this:

Peter Jones dressed as an Anointer. Photos courtesy of Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, the Jimmy Olsen to my Lois Lane.

Peter Jones’s talk was followed by a break, where we all got more wine and sat down to be suddenly interrupted by a man bursting in and angrily reading from  'God's Terrible Voice in the City' by Thomas Vincent, who stayed in London and was giving sermons during the plague. It was while he described the gruesome, terrifying sights of the plague to us in an underground room a little way out from King’s Cross, that I decided that I wouldn’t be going to any more apocalyptic pandemic based events in London. Thinking about this stuff is the best fun in a small, out of the way city that even the Romans had trouble clinging onto- thinking about it near the centre of a huge mass of humanity that has historically dealt with plagues by burning itself down is a little more disquieting.

I've no idea what I did to him but I am so very, very sorry!

The final talk of the evening, before the Q&A and the retreat to the pub, was Amy Cutler, who delivered a great paper on how Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is echoed by modern zombie movies.

Amy Cutler immediately admitted that her readings of the texts she was talking about were Marxist, which wasn’t a huge surprise. We’ve already mentioned Romero’s parodies of consumerism and capitalism in Dawn and Land of the Dead, as well as his take on I Am Legend as a story about revolution.

Although you could read it as the ultimate example of letting the free market decide...

She started out by drawing on some the more obvious parallels between zombies and plague victims- mainly that people walked around looking really gross, in the process infecting other people who then went on to look really gross. She pointed us to a quote from Defoe’s Journal that went “many People had the plague in their very blood, and preying upon their spirits, and were in themselves but walking putrified carcasses, whose breath was infectious, and their sweat poison”. She goes on to describe how: “The behaviour of the sick and infected also poses a form of geographical insurrection, for ‘they were with great difficulty kept from running out into the Fields and Towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came’”

Amy moved on from here to talk about more structural similarities however, such as “the ways in which the city space is performed and changed bodily by the actions of groups of people, of the bodies of the sick and the healthy.”

This is a key part of the zombie apocalypse genre- in the least few weeks I’ve furnished you with plenty of examples of pubs, shops and radio stations being reinterpreted as fortresses and streets and office blocks becoming battlefields. I think this is not only a key trope in the genre, but also part of its appeal. Unlike the Western, Space Opera or Historical Romance, you can easily re-imagine your own street as it is hit by the zombie apocalypse, a sort of instant Augmented Reality game.

Amy also talks about the mechanics of groups of survivors. She talks about plague survivors in Defoe’s book who “develop their own social, economic, and moral laws: they pool their money on the condition that any further money any one of them gains will be added to the public stock. In Epping Forest they build their own shelter, kill their own food, and almost totally avoid interaction with anyone outside their group.” She compares this to zombie movies where “The zombie film heralds the return of the ultimate democratised travel. There are typical scenes such as a hijacking on the road and the fall into what is basically land piracy. And there are no more zones of exclusion or privilege as each is broken into.”

I’m not sure how much I agreed with Amy’s idea that there is anything Marxist about your typical zombie movie survivors. If anything films like I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead show the survivors as practicing the ultimate in Laissez-Faire capitalism, hording as much as they possibly can behind barricaded windows and locked doors, struggling to keep out or kill the baying hordes outside.

She did go on to point out some interesting trends that immediately seemed obvious after she said them, but hadn’t occurred to me before. Such as the prevalence and importance of petrol stations in pretty much any zombie movie you care to mention- which is odd considering that these same films are often built around static siege narratives.

So what do these talks teach us about the zombie apocalypse? Well, they teach us we keep retelling the same old stories, and that horrible things that happened centuries ago still haunt our nightmares today. They tell us about how we view cities- places of safety and civilisation that could be transformed into a jungle at a moment’s notice. But I think most of all these talks show that there is no threat so great, no common cause so important, no unifying action so crucial to our survival, that we will not act like a complete shower of dicks to one another.

Our zombie experts: Jennifer Cooke, Amy Cutler and Peter Jones, destroying your hope in humanity

I emailed Amy before writing this blog, asking for a copy of her talk and also inviting her to adjudicate the drinking game rules for this week’s blog (since some people still seem to think I’m being overly lenient). Her rulings were as follows:

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? (One shot) NO

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent (One shot) or more dangerous than the zombies? (One shot) YES

Does nobody ever actually use the word zombie? (Two shots) YES

Is mankind the real monster? (One shot) YES

Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!” (Two shots) NO (didn't actually mention that film or play a clip from it!)

Are the zombies walking dead (One Shot) YES who move slowly (One shot) NO (seemed to deal more with running zombies) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Head shot) NO 

Kiddy zombies? (Two shots) YES

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? (Two shots) NO it's all about infection.