Easter is coming up, and with it our social media accounts will be flooded with generic “Jesus was a zombie” jokes. The first thousand times you see them, they might garner a mild chuckle, but after that they drift into the social media background static. The Jesus Zombie trope has been around for a decade now, and I’d guess even most atheists have grown weary of it, delegating the joke to a status akin to “Why did the chicken cross the road?” And with good reason!

No one actually takes the Jesus Zombie joke seriously. It’s merely a jab at a silly belief using another myth to compare and contrast the two. But by now most people have gotten the point. Christians have taken this joke under advisement and rejected its premises. Therefore, I think it’s about time we retire this joke from our repertoire of criticism. Besides, it’s obvious Jesus was a werewolf!

It’s so obvious.

The above image doesn’t do this post justice. A simple google search on “Was Jesus a werewolf?” reveals many anecdotes by bloggers who, as children, noticed the similarities between the images of Jesus in their churches and werewolves. In essence, they made the connection between the two because painters’ renditions of Jesus looked sort of like Michael J. Fox’s Teen Wolf. But that’s not where this post is going. The “Jesus kinda looks like a wolf” argument is superficial. For the purposes of this post, I’ll be looking into the origins of the celebration of Easter, thanks to Catholic.com.

According to this Catholic website, the date of Easter is determined by the lunar cycle. They write:

[Early Christians] decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after (never on) the Paschal full moon.

Theoretically, the Paschal full moon is the first full moon occurring on or after the spring equinox. …

In other words, Jesus rose from the dead the day after a full moon. … y’know, kind of like the way werewolves become human again the day after a full moon. We can make the argument that Jesus wasn’t really dead for three days; he was actually a werewolf, running around Jerusalem, terrorizing the Romans and the Pharisees. This might also explain why the women found Jesus’ tomb empty. He was too busy feasting on human bones to be playing dead inside a cave.

But wait, I hear you say. Full moons only last a day, not three!

Well, you’re wrong. The full moon actually only lasts for a second. The apparent full moon, however, can totally last for three days. The myths about werewolves depend on our perception of the full moon, not the actual time half of the moon is completely illuminated from earth’s vantage point.

Jesus wasn’t a zombie! Zombies are reanimated corpses. But Jesus wasn’t a corpse; the bible says he came back as living flesh after mysteriously being missing for three days. He just happened to come back the day after the full moon. So what was Jesus doing during that time? I argue he grew fangs and claws and did his best Esau impersonation, while howling at the moon. When the full moon subsided, he came back to town and pretended like nothing happened.

I don’t believe in Jesus. I’m not even entirely convinced a historical Jesus existed. But his story more closely resembles our werewolf myths than they do our zombie myths. And if this post isn’t enough to convince you of that, I’ll leave you with this:

In this archived photo (ca. 33 AD), Jesus of Nazareth is seen howling, covered in his victims’ blood.

This Easter I want to see more werewolf memes and fewer zombie memes.