Jesus wept

September 23, 2006 11:56 PM

Is there an explanation for why Jesus is never said to be smiling or laughing (he must have at some stage surely)?
posted by tellurian to Religion & Philosophy (14 answers total)

Nor is He said to have frowned, or ridden a camel (ass, yes; camel, no), or gone to the bathroom, or danced; obviously nobody wrote down every last detail of His life. I haven't heard of anything written about a lack of laughing or smiling in particular.

Ecclesiastes 3:4 has "a time to laugh" (although that is OT). In the NT, the Beatitudes -- said by Jesus -- include "Blessed are ye that weep, for ye shall laugh" (Luke 6:21). There's also Jesus's (debated) pun in Matthew 16:18, and the image of a camel going through the eye of a needle could've been amusing when it was too new to be cliché. The NT also has plenty of references to rejoicing (people in general and Jesus in particular) and to joy, so perhaps it's just due to a difference in translation.
posted by booksandlibretti at 1:18 AM on September 24, 2006 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The gospels don't give a lot away in terms of tone of voice or facial expression; the storytelling style is much more implicit.

For example, I would assume some non-verbal communication between verses 4 and 5 of John Chapter 2. Whether it was a smile, a wink, a laugh, a rolling of the eyes or if Jesus was as deadpan as Jack Dee is up to the reader to decide.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 1:22 AM on September 24, 2006 [1 favorite]

This probably doesn't answer your question as its not part of the canon, but in at least one of the gnostic gospels, Jesus laughs.

Its a delightfully evil scene I'd love to see in a movie at some point. Jesus goes through the trial with Pilate and gets sentenced to death. At the point where he collapses under the weight of the cross, the Romans make some guy, I believe Simon was his name, out of the crowd carry the cross while Jesus follows behind. At some point in the confusion, Jesus finds a way to blend in with the crowd, while Simon carries the cross up to Golgotha. By the time they reach the destination, the soldiers at the crucifixion site don't know what Jesus is supposed to look like and so they crucify Simon, despite Simon's protests.

While Simon is dying in agony, along with the two thieves, Christ picks this moment to return to heaven, ascending above the amazed crowd. There are no final pious words, no words at all. He is laughing.
posted by pandaharma at 1:50 AM on September 24, 2006 [2 favorites]

One of the Gnostic gospels (It's not Thomas, I don't think, but some other) does include an account of Jesus laughing. So you might or not count that, since it's not cannonical.

In later two cannonical gospels (Luke and John), Jesus is portrayed as more regal and godlike, with accounts of his suffering either absent or deemphasized in comparison to Mark and Matthew. In line with that emphasis, perhaps comical anecdotes were left on the cutting room floor.

I don't think that's a great explanation, but maybe a start?
posted by bluejayk at 1:58 AM on September 24, 2006

Best answer: literary style and expectations were different back then ... a lot of what we would consider important touches, such as physical descriptions, more complete details of a person's life and thorough (or any) description of places or objects aren't often used ... authors either considered them unimportant or perhaps assumed their readers would just know what certain things looked like ... of course, some writers back then did use these tactics here and there in self-consciously literary works ... but the surviving examples we have are mainly poetry, not prose ... but the gospels aren't really the same thing

the writers weren't trying to write a novel ... how could they when there was no such thing then? ... their sense of narrative, such as it is, was influenced by the old testiment and the oral stories and sayings that had already sprung up about jesus, decades after the cruxificion ... so what jesus said, or was reported to have said, was much more important than how he said it or even where he said it, and the bald style of the passages busy old fool linked to illustrates this
posted by pyramid termite at 2:49 AM on September 24, 2006

As bluejayk suggests, the disciples' accounts would naturally tend to emphasize the godly (nonhuman) aspects of Jesus. That said, it seems unlikely there wasn't a hint of a smile playing around the corners of His mouth when Matthew quoted (in 7:4) Jesus, "How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"
posted by rob511 at 3:15 AM on September 24, 2006

The gospels don't give a lot away in terms of tone of voice or facial expression; the storytelling style is much more implicit.

that would make a lot of sense, considering that they were all written ages after the event. unless i am mistaken, none of the authors of the gospels ever met jesus, or was even a contemporary.

i read that (part of) the tradition of the time was for "wisdom literature", which meant that collections of clever sayings & their associated events meant more than lifelike depictions of the people who mouthed those sayings.

if the authors had no personal experience of the clever person being described, the tendency would be all the more to emphasise the sayings & to avoid giving any kind of (imagined) personal form to the man himself.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:53 AM on September 24, 2006

While it doesn't address the question directly, this site assumes that Jesus laughed. The have a shirt that quotes Psalms 2:4 -- "The One whose throne is in heaven, sits laughing."
posted by maurice at 4:21 AM on September 24, 2006

I'll say that I've seen artistic renditions of him smiling knowingly.
posted by wackybrit at 5:37 AM on September 24, 2006

considering that they were all written ages after the event.

(That's a popular misconception, but fragments of NT manuscripts have been dated to within a few decades of the dates at which those events were supposed to happen.)

Laughter only occurs a few times in the whole Gospels. It seems like it just wasn't in literary vogue to show the characters of your narrative having the giggles. For what it's worth, though, there's more than a few mentions of Jesus telling his disciples about his joy.
posted by brownpau at 5:51 AM on September 24, 2006

As UbuRoivas stated, it's most likely because none of the authors of the gospels that were chosen to make up the chrisitian bibles ever met Jesus. In fact, there's so little evidence of his existance, some scholars believe he was a work of complete fiction. There are other gospels from early christianity in which he is said to laugh, but they didn't fit the "theme" the early church was trying to embrace.
posted by Spoonman at 8:15 AM on September 24, 2006

A sub-text of these answers would seem to be that laughter and Christianity are in some degree incompatible; I don't think I agree, (The Canterbury Tales is intensely Christian and one of the funniest works in English) but a sense of the absurd can certainly run over your dogma if you don't watch out.

If you'd like to know just how creepy laughter can be in a religious context, try to find some of the old recordings of Rajneesh addressing his followers; wave after relentless wave of laughter raised the hair on the back of my neck and made me feel like I should be running for my life.
posted by jamjam at 12:18 PM on September 24, 2006

I always imagined him smiling in Luke 7:8-10, although the text does say he did.
posted by 4ster at 12:56 PM on September 24, 2006

You might want to check out Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" as there's a lot of stuff in it about whether or not Jesus laughed.
posted by shokod at 4:01 PM on September 24, 2006