Dear Almost-All-Knowing Cecil,
You missed mentioned the best resource on humor in the Bible. It is the now out of print book “The Humor of Christ” by Elton Trueblood. It can still be found used at places like Amazon.com.
Trueblood makes the point that reading things centuries later tends to obscure the jokes. We don’t know the culture, can’t hear the inflection, the pauses, the look over the shoulder at the Pharisees. Even our own jokes don’t read well. The classic Henny Youngman joke of “take my wife, please” isn’t funny at all without the long pause before the last word.
Here are a couple of examples from the book:
From Mark 4:21, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or a bed?”
[Not funny until you remember what their beds might be made out of --straw? That is an inflammatory statement!]
From Matt 6:34 “Each day has enough trouble of its own!”
[Put in today’s language: "Oy Vey! Aren’t your days packed with enough problems without adding worry on top?!]
From Matt 23:24"You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!" [The Hebrews not only liked visually preposterous jokes, but this also poked fun at the stuffy Pharisees with their anal-retentive legalistic rules.]
Incidentally, this is also a pun in Aramaic, since Camel and Gnat are ‘gamla’ and ‘galma’.
Finally, someone on here mentioned the story of Elisha (II KIngs) being teased with “Go up, baldy!” A friend of mine who is a religion professor says that in that culture when a farmer wanted a bull to mate with a cow, he’d say “Go up! Go up!” If true, that means those kids taunting Elisha weren’t just mocking his lack of hair. They were also, in effect, saying “F— you!”.
It makes Elisha’s response seem a little bit more reasonable.
That line isn’t funny at all unless you know the context of the phrase “take my wife”.
Yes, the next time someone flips me off, I’ll have to remember that bit about calling on God to send a bear out to eat them. Seems justified to me. :rolleyes:
I hadn’t heard that. I have it mentioned that this was soon after Elijah had been caught up in the fiery chariot, and this gang of young men (NOT necessarily little children) was taunting him to ascend in the same way. Also, the term used for the youths was the same term used elsewhere for young priests & the area where they were at was a big center for Baal-worship.
So what we could well have is a situation where a gang of young acolytes for Baal is taunting Elisha to get raptured the way his mentor did. So he invokes the Name of God, leaves them & the two she-bears turn on them.
Did he say the equivalent of “God damn you” or “The Lord smite thee”, or just “Lawd jus’ bless yo’ hearts”?
Kurt Vonnegut in one of his books of essays argued that “the poor you shall have with you always” was a joke. He believes the incident was basically like this (I’m using the Gospel according to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber):
Judas: Woman your fine ointment/brand new and expensive/should have been saved for the poor!
Why has it been wasted?/We could have raised maybe/300 silver pieces or more!
Jesus: Judas… chill. Don’t worry about it… there’ll still be poor people to help tomorrow dude, I promise.
Another “New Yorker”-sounding Biblical joke (heavy on the sarcasm!) appears in Exodus 14:11, when the frustrated Children of Israel (stuck between Pharaoh’s army and the as-yet-unsplit Re[e]d Sea) whined to Moses: “Weren’t there enough burial sites in Egypt, so you had to take us out here to die?!” (Okay, I’ve modernized the language a tad, but if you look it up you’ll see I’ve kept the meaning.)
For yet another choice piece of Biblical “New York”-style sarcasm, consider Isaiah 47:13, when Isaiah taunted his nation for having consulted with magic-users in hopes to find some way to save themselves from the Babylonian invasion: “Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee.” In other words – to modernize the language – “Poor guys, you’re all tired out from your discussions … so don’t worry, let the astrologers and psychics win the war!”
Paul to the Galatian Church, complaining about those who would insist Gentile converts to Christ get circumcised- (paraphrased) “I wish those who insist on cutting you would totally cut themselves off.”
I might have been confusing Gnostic with Coptic, but none of the books of the Bible appear to have been written in Egyptian either. I don’t recall any Gospel of Thomas.
No, all of the books of the NT, as we have them, are in Greek. (There is an ancient tradition to the effect that Matthew was originally written in Aramaic, but there are problems with that.) But “Coptic” does not mean “not in the Bible”; it’s just the name of a language.
At any rate, the Gospel of Thomas is not in the Bible. It’s quite possible that it preserves a genuine sound-bite or two from Jesus that the Bible doesn’t, but, in general, it takes a point of view that is completely opposed to Christianity.[ul]
[li]The world is totally evil, and God didn’t make it (which incidentally means that Judaism is a total lie).[/li][li]To get to Heaven, you have to know the Big [insert theremin woo-woo here] Secrets and be a member of the Inner Brotherhood.[/li][/ul]Think of it as ancient Roman Scientology. (In fact, if you translate “Scientology” out of the barbarous half-Latin, half-Greek that it is into pure Greek, you get “Gnostic”.)
In Matthew 14, Simon tries to walk on water, and sinks like a stone. In 16, he is called Peter, the rock on which Jesus will build the church. Later in 16, he is called a stumbling block. I read it as Jesus teasing Peter with a nickname recalling his great failure, and then turning it around and making it an insult minutes later.
In 1 Kings 18, Elijah (who has a reputation for going and coming like he’s apparating around the desert) tells Obadiah to bring King Ahab to him. Obadiah goes into a long rant, “easy for you to say, we’ll get back, you’ll be gone, and Ahab will kill me for mentioning your hated name/making him come all the way out here for no reason! Why me? I’m a good person, what have I ever done to you?” Elijah promises to wait, and when Obadiah returns with Ahab, Ahab sarcastically greets him as “Troubler of Israel.” (Elijah starts his public ministry by declaring a drought, and Ahab’s country is dying around him.) Dry {ha!}, I admit, but pretty funny. (Both Obadiah and Ahab.) I also think it’s funny that Elijah is presented as having no trouble prevailing over all the priests of Baal in a public showdown, but as soon as Jezebel tells him she’s angry, he runs away, outrunning the kings horses and chariots in his eagerness to get away from her.
My Hebrew professor made the argument that the entire book of Jonah is a satire on the prophetic tradition, especially on Elijah. There are several words that only occur in those two books and the structure is parallel in some ways. If you look at Jonah that way, and are open to puns and wordplay as funny, it is sarcastic and a sharp dig at how seriously these prophets took themselves. The last line just kills “Don’t you want to save all these cows?”
OK, so they’re not to every taste. But they are funny.
Gnostism believes that the world was created by an “imperfect” lower-case “g” god. This god is considered by most to be the God of the OT. This god is seperate from a supreme “unknowable” God.
Bart Ehrman has an interesting book “Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faith We Never Knew” that deals with a lot the lost gospels, and different branches of Christianity.
The whole story of Balaam and the talking donkey (Numbers 22-24 or thereabouts, I think) is pretty amusing, with the alleged great and powerful magician proving to be the intellectual and moral inferior of his ass.
There appears to be some confusion over what is being said. None of the books of the Bible were originally written in Coptic (or any version of Egyptian). Rather, many manuscripts were translated into Coptic dialects as part of the spread of Christianity in the early years. There are many recovered manuscripts that were written in Coptic dialects.
There are a number of Gospels that are not in the official Bible in either the Protestant or Catholic versions. Rather, they are texts that for various reasons were not deemed to be appropriately Christian. Mostly this consists of Gnostic texts. Gnosticism was not Christianity per se, but attempted to subsume Christian and Jewish beliefs into a larger framework, one that consisted of layers of secret knowledge and mysticism.
