Did Jesus tell jokes?
The authors of the Gospels never say. Viewers of The Chosen may have an easier time believing the answer is yes. The Chosen is a bingeable TV series based on the life of Christ, projected to unfold over seven seasons. As Americans spent more time than ever in front of screens during the lockdowns, The Chosen has become the most successful crowdfunded project of its kind in the history of video streaming. This success is partly due to the fact that it is available for free through a phone app, but also for a much simpler reason: It is more entertaining than any other Jesus movie ever made. Jesus is no stranger to the screen. Franco Zeffirellis Jesus of Nazareth, a six-hour miniseries that first aired on NBC in 1977, was the definitive version of the Gospel story for a generation of viewers. Whatever the artistic merits of Zeffirellis version or the dozens of others dating back over a century, from Sidney Olcotts From the Manger to the Cross (1912) to Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ (2004), they all have one thing in common, namely, there is hardly a moment of levity to be had. Yes, frequently. Not so much. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to find anything truly amusing in a Jesus movie. While this may be the greatest story ever told, to borrow the title of George Stevens 1965 epic starring Max von Sydow in the lead role, its hardly the funniest. To be fair, the source material is no barrel of laughs. The Jewish Scriptures contain the occasional lighthearted vignette, as when the 89-year-old Sarah giggles at the prospect of having a child with her husband Abraham. Humor is harder to come by in the New Testament. Jesus parables feature exaggerations and elements of the absurd that, one may guess, might have tickled his original audience. More often, it seems you had to be there to get the joke. Of course, there may be more wit in the Bible than meets the ear and we just dont know it. Too much is too easily lost in translation from Hebrew and Greek, as the very essence of humor resides in the subtleties of language, its paradoxes and many permutations of meaning. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger declared that language is the house of being. Without question, it is the house of mirth. The biblical image of the stoic savior fades in some ancient texts written between the second and fourth centuries. Apocryphal stories depict a much more jocular Jesus than one encounters in the Bible, yet there is an edge to the character appearing in these later writings that may leave readers uncomfortable. A precocious 5-year-old Jesus mocks and humiliates the teacher who tries to correct his penmanship in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. In The Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs derisively at his disciples for their benighted understanding of God as they give thanks for their daily bread. Two heterodox texts discovered in Egypt in the 1940s, The Coptic Apocalypse of Peter and The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, portray a sardonic spirit Jesus turning tables on his enemies, making fun of them for their ignorance of his incorporeal being as they nail his physical body to the cross. Far from humanizing him, Jesus laughter in these later texts accentuate just how different he is from friend and foe alike. Participants in early theological debates about the nature of the son of God, these authors had little trouble regarding Jesus as divine. It was the notion of his humanity that they found risible. And this is what makes the Jesus of The Chosen different. He winks at his disciples. He laughs with them, not at them  not to ridicule or signal his superiority, but out of a sense of compassion and joy that makes him believable as a human character. No doubt this strikes a chord with the series many backers, all the more so at a time when many Americans feel like they are awash in an ocean of sarcasm, snark and irony. Suffering is an inescapable aspect of our mortal state, as the pandemic has reminded us. So is the capacity for laughter, especially when it comes from somewhere unexpected. Patrick Gray is professor of religious studies at Rhodes College and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Send a letter to the editor and you just might get published.