"And Jesus said Lazarus, come forth."
And he came fifth and lost the job.

Unfortunately the second sentence was edited out.

A serious reply to the posted question:

I recall Charleton Heston singing the praises of the Bible once by saying it had everything in it, including humor. The one joke he recited went something like, A man came up to Jesus and said, I saw you under the olive tree; surely you are the son of God. And Jesus said, Because you saw me under the olive tree, I must be the son of God?

Or something like that. It sounds very Groucho Marx the way I delivered it. Granted, it's very oblique "humor." And I have not been able to find the story itself.

Maybe it wasn't a Jesus anecdote at all. I dunno.

The part where Abraham & God bicker over how many Righteous Sodomites he must find to avoid destruction of the city is sort of funny.

Maybe you should ask Heston, surely he was there when it happened?

Does turning someone into a salt lick go close to the type of slapstick humour that Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges used to get into?

Imagine turning around to take one last look at your home, and suddenly you are a condiment!

And regarding Heston, I particularly liked the bit where God had trashed the Statue of Liberty and he was pounding the sand with his fist going "Damn you all to Hell" ...oops, that wasn't the Ten Commandments was it?


Norm

I found it! The one Bible joke certified by Moses hisself. Refer to John 1:43-50.

(Stop me if you've heard this before...)

So Jesus was kickin' around Galilee, when he meets Nathanael and Philip. Now, Nathanael doesn't believe that anything good can come of Nazareth, so he's taken aback when Jesus pays him a compliment.

"How did you know who I was?" Nathanael asks.

"I saw you under the fig tree" replied Big J. (Never mind that there has been no fig tree in the story up to this point...)

Nathanael then has a epileptic seizure, or something, because he calls out, "You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel."

Jesus twitches his mustache and raises an eyebrow. "Because I told you I saw you under the fig tree, you think I'm the Son of God? You'll see greater things than that, let me tell you."

Stop! My sides are splitting!

All this happens while Jesus is ostensibly wandering in the wilderness after his baptism (as in Mark 1:9-13) -- although John mysteriously ignores that bit and sends him to a wine-deficient wedding. Just an observation.

I'm surprised you all haven't found what I consider to be the funniest joke (seriously intended as a joke, that is) in the bible. It is found in both Matthew 26 and Luke 22:

That's funny shyte...

Daniel "Theophage" Clark

I was always of the opinion that whoever wrote 1 Samuel 6 (the golden hemorrhoid incident) had a particularly demented and sophomoric sense of humor. Sort of South Parkesque.

In a small southern town there was a "Nativity Scene" that showed great skill and talent had gone into creating it. One small feature bothered me. The three wise men were wearing firemen's helmets. Totally unable to come up with a reason or explanation, I left.
At a "Quik Stop" on the edge of town, I
asked the lady behind the counter about the helmets.

She exploded into a rage, yelling at me, "You darn Yankees never do read the Bible!" I assured her that I did, but simply couldn't
recall anything about firemen in the Bible.
She jerked her Bible from behind the counter and ruffled thru some pages, and finally jabbed her finger at a passage. Sticking it in my face she said,

"See, it says so right here, 'MAT 02:01
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came three wise men from afar.

If you want some humour just check out the Songs of Solomon, that would make the Xian conservatives squemish . Or for some sadistic humour (funny only due to it's unbelievabilty) check out the Book of Irrelevation....oops, Revelation .

[This message has been edited by Sephiroth (edited December 12, 2000).]