James Brown

I've been told the "camel through the eye of a needle" line by Jesus was intended to be hyperbole, which is a kind of exaggerated humor.

arnoldo

I heard the same also.

jgreen44

Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife. (Proverbs 21:9)

God, the stand-up comedian.

Mageth

Elijah taunting the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18):

"Call with a loud voice, for he is a god. Perhaps he is talking, or he is pursuing enemies, or he is relieving himself, or perhaps he is sleeping and will awaken."

James Brown

How about this one:

Well it makes me laugh.

Mageth

The story of Balaam and his talking donkey (Numbers 22) is certainly humorous.

James Brown

If you're looking for more humor in the Bible, you can't go wrong with The Skeptic's Annotated Bible's list of absurdities.

Doug Shaver

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...s-in-the-bible

Solo

I think lot of the scenes in Mark are inside jokes, and spiritual puns, aimed to fool the unknowing outsider (4:11) and to ridicule the Petrines.

The biggest joke is the "messianic secret". The gospel was written as an allegory of by Mark who was a Pauline, ~ forty years after Jesus was crucified and well after Paul started to declare him as Messiah. (I do not believe the original Nazarenes considered him more than a prophet and a heavenly intercessor for the coming messiah. I consider Hebrews as an attempt to reconcile the Pauline Christ position with the Nazarenes intercessor's. There are appelations of Jesus as "apostle", a "high priest" in 3:1, and a view that "Christ" entered "once and for all into the Holy Place", 9:12 i.e. no parousia, but fulfilment of Zech 3). The command : "do not tell anyone about my messiahship" actually fulfils what happened after Jesus' death "vaticinium ex eventu". It was Paul who proclaimed the gospel of Jesus as the Christ, so when Jesus in Mark's says don't tell anyone till after I have risen, he is just poking fun at the Petrines who have no gospel at the time of Mark's writing. At the ending (16:8), the women run away not telling anyone anything, so the gospel reaches the Petrine followers through Paul and Mark - and the messianic secret has been kept ! (not quite because Jesus answers affirmative when the question is put to him by the Sanhedrin)

Another sort of tongue-in-cheek characters are the recipients of Jesus cures or the ecstatic onlookers who do not obey his orders not to tell anyone about the healings. This is a hugely funny allusion on the property of the spirit (sponsored by manic excitation) called pressure of speech . They just can't help babbling away when they are around Jesus. "...And the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it (7:36)" This must have caused roars of laughter when read among the ecstatics.

The rescue at the sea was also a big joke. Mark's Jesus projects back Paul's risen Lord, as the Holy Spirit that enters the Nazarene Jesus at baptism. But this risen Lord is not yet accepted by the Petrines, whose traditions only reference the Jesus of flesh and blood. So when Jesus takes a walk across the lake, (note the intent of Mark to make Jesus walk by the boat !) the crew scares because they think they see an apparition - this was a huge joke to the Paulines, to whom of course Jesus was the Spirit. So the levitating Pauline Ghost changes the direction and heads for the boat, to assure the distressed sailors he is not a ghost: "It is I (as the risen Lord); do not fear"! I think Matthew - undoubtedly an ecstatic himself - was really impressed by Mark's cleverness but he disliked his Pauline uppity lampooning, and was going to pay him back. His community accepted the cross but wanted to assert the Palestinian traditions, so in their version Jesus Christ was not a communally and individually accessible Spirit, but a uniquely unparalleled Saviour. The Matthean counter-gospel's position was that Jesus was accessible only through the original discipleship. The little added story with Peter asking Jesus to make him come to him on the water is in reality a humorous lashing back at the conceited Paulines who think they - fesh and blood like everyone else - can be the imitators of Christ. He is telling the Markans, get off your high horse: no one can imitate Christ. Peter asked to tread water with him and look what happened !

A further comical, but really nasty, Peter-bashing is the doublet of the second feeding at the Gentile side of the sea of Galilee and the two-stage cure of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mk 8:1426) right after that. I believe the "I see men; but they look like trees, walking" was supposed to be funny too, but was received as an insult by Matthew, as it 'used' Jesus vainly for demeaning the Petrine traditions of him. The 'judge-not' section of the sermon looks like a determined attack on Paulines to make them bear the full brunt of Jesus' unhappiness with their ways. It addresses Paul's unsoundness in 1 Cr 2:15-16 (The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ. ).

Jesus thunders at them (and I think this time directly at Mark for the Bethsaida incident): 'You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.'

Then Matthew really sticks it to Mark, for his lording it over the disciples and his portrayal of them as faithless, dumb and deficient slaves to lower instincts: "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to rend you".

And trample Mark's pearls Matthew did, relegating the original and the most interesting of the gospels, to a mere footnote to himself.

Best,
Jiri

I Am Only An Egg

It's sort of like a bad spin off of Who's On First.

God: "Who's on the cross?"
Jesus: "I am."
God: "No, you're me."
Jesus: "Yeah."
God: "But I'm not on the cross."
Jesus: "Right, I'm on the cross."
God: "Well, where's the Holy Ghost?"
Jesus: "He's on the cross."
God: "You said you're on the cross!"
Jesus: "I am."
God: "Why in My name are you on the cross?!"
Jesus: "That's right."