Jesus wept, groaned in spirit, raged against the hierarchy and lost his temper with the temple traders. But he didn’t laugh. At least, that is the impression gained from a cursory glance at the gospels.
This is odd, because the divine story, so familiar to Jesus, begins with an elderly couple laughing at the idea of a baby being born in a geriatric ward. “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed. ‘Shall a man be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety, bear a child?’” On hearing the news, Sarah is herself convulsed with laughter. That apart, it is distinctly curious that a thirty-year-old man with four biographies to his name should not once be quoted as having laughed.
So has there been a conspiracy of silence down the ages amongst the gospel writers, church fathers, theologians and ecclesiastical authorities to excise all humour from the Christian religion in the interests of misguided piety?
Paul set the ball rolling by bracketing laughter with carnality, and condemning both. “Let there be neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor jesting, which are not befitting”. The church fathers muscled in behind with a heavy-handed indictment of humour. “What have we to do with tales and laughter? I judge that not only extravagant jesting is to be condemned but all jesting” says St Bernard. [No wonder the St Bernard dog has such a hang-dog expression! - Ed.]. St Chrysostom primly claims that “there is no place for laughter among Christians, for whom not jesting but grief and tears are befitting”. St Basil thought it wrong ever to laugh in “this vale of tears”.
Twentieth century theologians have sung the same tune.
In 1933 Otto Borchet wrote, “Yet there was no jesting in Jesus’ kindliness - not even with children. Fun and humour found no place in the life of Jesus because the strain introduced by the sin of the world was too great. He lacked that smiling ease without which humour is impossible”.
Reinhold Niebuhr says that “laughter belongs in the vestibule of the temple, perhaps the echo of laughter in the sanctuary, but only faith and prayer and no laughter in the holy of holies”.
Karl Barth, in twelve volumes of dogmatic theology, grants a measly two pages to-humour, which is more than most theologians do. Type “the theology of laughter” into York Minster library’s computer and the machine comes up with a resounding blank.
None of this is surprising. Take a quick trawl through church history and you find little ground for laughter. Jesus had to endure the barbarities of the Roman occupation, the hostility of the mob, the cynicism of the religious SOF 46 / March 2001 authorities, and finally the crucifixion. His disciples in the years following suffered the horrors of the Neronian and Diocletian persecutions. Not much footage for humour there.
Nor was there much to laugh at in the militaristic fervour of the crusades, the tortures of the Inquisition, the burnings of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the image-smashing of the long-faced puritans. The Victorians, with their lugubrious hymns and interminable sermons, simply put a rubber-stamp on what had gone before.
But that is not the whole story. Running counter to all this was a humorous Christian sub-culture bubbling away and bursting to get out of the stoppered bottle. And it begins with what Edward Hancock, writing in 1863, called “The Suppressed Gospels... venerated by the primitive Christian churches during the first four centuries but, after violent disputations, forbidden by the Nicene Council in the reign of the Emperor Constantine and omitted from the Catholic and Protestant editions of the New Testament”.
The apocryphal gospels, so firmly suppressed, contain a wealth of humorous anecdotes concerning the dramatis personae of the incarnation story. The Gospel of the Birth of Mary tells how the three-year-old girl, after being weaned, was brought to the temple by her parents and placed at the foot of the staircase. The second their backs are turned, she skittles up “without the help of any to lead her or lift her, that anyone would have judged from hence that she was of perfect age”. Charmingly, the grandfatherly priest lifts her up to the altar step and “there she danced with her feet, and all Israel loved her”.
In The Proto-Evangelion, Jesus comes across a group of lads at play and joins himself to their company, and they all run away and leave him to seek for them. Here is the primal game of hide and seek!
There is a hilarious episode when Jesus is sent to school and the master instructs him to write out the Hebrew alphabet. He writes down ALEPH and stalls over the second letter BETH. The crusty master threatens his incompetent pupil with the whip, upon which Jesus gives him an erudite exposition of the origin of the Hebraic alphabet!
Many of these tales were expanded, handed down and regaled in medieval times. One relates how the holy infant kept following the creator of the universe and driving him mad. God tells him to clear off and play, so Jesus fashions balls out of clay and throws them into the sky. The creator, amused, blesses them - and they still stand in mid-air as the sun, moon and stars.
Another tale could have stepped out of the pages of a twentieth century nursery-rhyme book. The virgin sends the holy infant with a basket of apples for Joseph, but it is too heavy. The child asks a passer-by to help. “Carry your basket?” he replies, “I’d rather sit in the sky!” Hence the man in the moon. But sadly the apocryphal gospels, with all their humour and wry legends, have been shut away in the ecclesiastical broom cupboard because they dare to associate Jesus with what is funny.
To give them their due, some of the church fathers did have a crack at introducing levity into religion. St Augustine in his Summa Theologica says that relaxing is achieved through ludicrous words and deeds, and he Type “the theology of laughter” into York Minster library’s computer and the machine comes up with a resounding blank. commends jesting, sporting and playing games. But sadly it is his Confessions that we remember today, not his humour. Thomas Aquinas goes along with him and supports jesting and sporting, which are “necessary to relieve the mind”.
Erasmus, one-time Augustinian canon and reformer, frequently encourages laughter and pokes fun at would-be theologians and bible commentators such as Nicholas of Lyra (1270) and the 12th century Peter Lombard, who knew no Greek. In his Greek translation of the New Testament, Erasmus adds footnotes which sparkle with humour. As a result, some of his contemporaries maintained that he was insane and should be “constrained in the straight-jacket”.
When Rabelais, Franciscan-turned-Benedictine and avant-garde church reformer, did an amusing send-up of the creeds and holy writ he was accused of heresy and his books were condemned as obscene. Today, the word “rabelaisian” has unsavoury connotations.
Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales gives us a glimpse of a laughter-filled sector of the medieval church with his vivid descriptions of the friar, the secular-minded nun and the fun-loving wife of Bath. But it didn’t last long. Soon the heavy hand of the official church slammed down and pilgrimages, processions and religious festivals were transformed into humourless acts of piety, penitence and sometimes punishment.
Now, in the 21st century, signs of change are in the air and the long conspiracy of silence is being broken. Last year a course was held at Amsterdam University entitled “Humour in the Hebrew Bible”. The book-list included works by French, British, German and American theologians of the 1990s who have endeavoured to show that the bible and the life of Jesus are full of laughs.
According to Elton Trueblood, our understanding of Jesus is distorted. “We twist his humour out with misguided piety”. George Krause puts it even more pungently: “God created humour and we see it riotously in Jesus. Laughter with us and at the devil. Laughter at man’s boasting. God’s laughter as judgment at the gates of hell and their importance”. Lorenz Nietung in Dialog 1983 tells us where to start looking for Christ’s humour, and he begins with the absurd.:
In the sermon on the mount Jesus talks about putting a lamp under a bed. Lamps had open flames and Palestinian mattresses, being of straw, were highly inflammable. The preposterous idea would surely have raised shouts of laughter.
During a teaching session, Jesus makes a preposterous statement: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”. However much commentators may miss the joke by linking the camel's eye to a narrow gate in Jerusalem, it is clear that Jesus intended to make his hearers laugh. And more wry smiles must have appeared on the faces of the crowd when he told the Pharisees that “harlots go into the kingdom of God before you!”.
Nudge nudge, wink wink!
Jesus is also a master of irony, that veiled form of humour. When the gospel writer, clearly impressed by the turn-out, says “five thousand were there, not including women and children”, Jesus brings him sharply down to earth. “Where the corpse is, there are the vultures”. Crowds gather for all sorts of reasons - don’t be taken in! When the crowd asks about the ascetic John the Baptist, Jesus replies “Well what do you expect? Fine clothes and luxurious living - in the wilderness?” Lorenz Dietung rewrites Jesus’ teaching about plucking off offending parts of the body in modern jargon to show what a humorous punch it originally packed. “A wimp was whining and complaining that his body kept getting him into trouble. ‘My hands touch money, and next thing it’s in my pocket. My feet lead me into one problem after another. My eyes see a woman and I get turned on. It’s their fault, not mine!” ‘So why don’t you get rid of them?’ asks Jesus. You can almost see the twinkle in his eye as he delivers his punch-line.
Nietzsche, the confronter of Christianity, got it all wrong when he caustically remarked, “Would that Christ had remained in the wilderness and far from the good and the just. Perhaps he would have learnt to live and to love the earth. And laughter too”. But that was the very thing Jesus did. The gospels spill over with veiled mirth.
Elton Trueblood, in The Humor of Christ (Harper & Row, New York, 1964) lists no less than thirty humorous passages in the gospels, including throwing pearls before swine, gathering figs from thistles, dead undertakers (“Let the dead bury their dead”) and blind guides. Jesus was quite a stand-up comedian.
Maybe we should take a page out of the Greek Orthodox tradition’s book. After the Easter ceremonies, clergy and laity gather in the sanctuary to tell jokes and stories celebrating The Big Joke that Jesus played on the devil at the resurrection.
He had the last laugh.