The Bible claims that Jesus went onto the wilderness where he was tempted by the Devil. Francisco Barajah, inset, a pastor in Mozambique, tried to reenact the myth, but the stunt went horribly wrong.
“The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…
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BARAJAH, who founded the Santa Trindade Evangelical Church in the central province of Manica, was unable to stand, bathe, or walk after 38 days without food and water, according to a report in the Daily Beast.
He died at a hospital in the city of Beira on Wednesday.
The pastor, who also worked as a French school teacher, was said to have developed “severe anaemia”, had internal organ damage, and was unable to digest food.
One of Barajah’s neighbors said the pastor become ill on the 25th day of his fast, but that his health became much worse on the 38th day. Medics reportedly attempted to rehydrate and nourish Barajah with liquid foods, but to no avail.
His followers were said to be unsurprised by the news of his death after seeing his extreme weight loss.
Reporting for the DB, Dan Ladden-Hall said:
It is not impossible to survive going without food for 40 days or more … In 2003, magician David Blaine consumed nothing but water for 44 days while locked inside a transparent box suspended from a crane in central London (a misery made more complete by Brits who taunted his attempt by flying a hamburger up to the box with a radio-controlled helicopter).
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Blaine’s recovery noted that, even with “cautious management,” the illusionist showed “important elements of the refeeding syndrome”—a potentially fatal shift in electrolytes sometimes seen when severely starved or malnourished patients are given food.
Much longer fasts have been recorded. In the mid-1960s, a Scottish man named Angus Barbieri fasted for 382 days, shedding 276 pounds while consuming little more than vitamins and hot beverages. He was motivated by obesity rather than religion. He weighed 456 pounds (207 kg) at the start of his fast.
In the 1971 edition of The Guinness Book of Records, Barbieri’s fast was recognized as the longest recorded.
In 1979 an 18-year-old Austrian bricklayer named Andreas Mihavecz made it into The Guinness Book of Records for living 18 days without water after he was locked in a police cell by officers who then forgot about him.
Bible photo by Stempow via Pixabay. I added the heading
It ain’t necessarily so, It ain’t necessarily so, The t’ings dat yo’ li’ble, To read in de Bible, It ain’t necessarily so.
Gershwin brothers lyrics from Porgy and Bess (1935)
Note: The woodcut of Jesus apparently wearing cool Ray-Bans while resisting Satan was created by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld in 1860.
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