No Stupid Questions

yup.

and every Christian who takes communion is a cannibal.

No.

I'm in the camp that believes that Jesus was a real person. And being that he was a real person, he did not rise from the dead, because that doesn't happen. So, Jesus was not a zombie.

If Jesus wasn't actually a real person... sure, knock yourself out. Zombie, Lich, whatever else you want to call it. Doesn't really matter if we're just making up stories with no real historical basis.

Assuming Jesus was a normal human being, one of many wandering apocalyptic Jewish preachers of the era... no, he's just a dead cult leader who became legendary following exaggerated stories about him becoming popular after his death.

...

Assuming you attempt to take any of these stories seriously, it depends on your interpretation and which stories you believe hold precedence over others.

Paul seems to refer to Jesus as having a glorified spiritual/phantom kind of body, which evidently looks like a person but is capable of flying and either teleporting or phasing through walls. Paul never actually refers to a physical/fleshy Jesus, Jesus is always seen in visions, or encounters which can be read as fleeting appearances of basically a glorious or mysterious ghost, or more sceptically as hallucinations.

Marcion and his followers embraced these ideas over the later Gospels, and rejected the idea that Jesus had been crucified, that he was physical/flesh whatsoever.

The Gospels however, refer to Jesus very much having a human body, with holes from his crucifixion, (the doubting Thomas story), who eats and sleeps. so this is more in line with a zombie or lich.

But, there's also Jesus' slew of powers/miracles that basically make him into a conjuration capable mage, a healing capable cleric, a necromancer, who raises the dead, a summoner of spirits (the transfiguration, Moses and Elijah come down from Heaven), and whatever kind of mage type spell is needed to either vanish or fly off into heaven.

(Also I guess partly Bard as well, if you count telling parables as a Bardly skill)

So basically he's a custom or multi or hybrid class going by different kinds of TTRPG rules... ???

The entities that were almost certainly zombies were all of the dead who rose from their graves upon the moment of Jesus death in Matthew 27 51-53.

They then waited around the cemetery for the three days it took for Jesus to be resurrected, and then wandered around Jerusalem and 'were seen by many'.

Where they went afterward is unclear, they are never again mentioned.

...

The nature of Jesus physical form vs spiritual form was part of considerable contention amongst early Christians: Was Jesus God incarnated as a human, or was he a human Messiah blessed by God... or... both?

Eventually the concept of the Trinity was decided on, but this was after several hundred years of competing sects and stories and texts.

Early Christian sects varied wildly on ... basically everything, from whether or not the old Jewish law and customs needed to be adhered to, to which stories about Jesus were true and which were false...

The Essenes believed that Jesus was a 96 foot tall demi-god/angelic being and that he had a sister, the Holy Spirit, who was female, and also a 96 foot tall demi-god/angel.

The Cerinthians, the Valentinians and the Sethians seemed to all follow a line of thought which eventually became the Gospel of Judas, which proposes that Yahweh is actually Yaldabaoth, an evil demiurge amongst a pantheon of other gods, who created this world and all material existence as a kind of prison, and that Jesus was actually 'from the immortal realm of Barbelo', come to reveal to us mortals a path to basically escaping the matrix through the enlightenment of learning this and other hidden truths.

(I use 'escaping the matrix' deliberately as the Wachowskis themselves incorporated Gnostic ideas into the movies, as well as concepts from many other religions and philosophers)

So this Jesus would be less like a zombie and be more like Neo getting up after being shot by Smith: Jesus is but a man, he is a physical incarnation in a world with physical rules, but he can sometimes bend or break these rules.

His true essence, his Spirit, is a separate entity that is elsewhere, in another realm of existence, and that spirit is basically just piloting the human form 'Jesus' as one directs a virtual avatar to move around in a video game.

...

There were and currently are so many different sects of Christianity that uh, basically, Jesus is whatever is determined by whichever canon and theology you accept.

When I was in college I wanted to make a short film with Jesus as a fuckup: raises Lazarus as a zombie by mistake, needs little kids’ floaty arm things on ankles to walk on water, apostles only hang out with him for the free wine. Never got around to it.

He's a bitch. He's a lover. He's a child. He's a zombie. He's a sinner. He's a saint.

No. Jesus had his intellect and personality intact, which zombies do not.

NB: I'm taking the Gospels as gospel, here. I do not think the man himself rose from the dead.

Technically, he would be a lich.

I suppose technically he's more of a revenant. Higher hit dice.

He was Jewish, so a Golem might be a better cultural fit, but I'm pretty sure Jesus was (according to the fairy tale) born to a human woman and not made of mud.

Follow up question: if he was a zombie, would you marry him?

According to the Wikipedia article on West African Vodun:

Many vodúnsɛntó practice their traditional religion alongside Christianity, for instance by interpreting Jesus Christ as a vodún. [...] The possessed person is often referred to as the vodún itself.

is santa an elf?

Yes.