The Laughing Jesus

Before I begin, let me say that I do believe Jesus has a sense of humor, and that He no doubt enjoyed Himself on many occasions while here on earth. He was the one who made the "best wine" for a wedding party, after all. So the idea of Jesus laughing is not one I am uncomfortable with.

As I read the Gospel of Judas, I was struck by how often the author of that treatise describes Jesus as laughing. Usually when Jesus laughs, He is laughing at the misconception of the disciples or of Judas, and His laughter seems to be somewhat derisive. It also struck me that a number of those events have Jesus laughing at the concepts held by the orthodox church of that time.

Now, the author of Judas doesn't always appear to have a firm grasp on the orthodox faith of the second century. There seems to be some bouncing around between Christian and Jewish thought, and a few of the times it's hard to say just what the author has Jesus laughing at. This is sometimes due to gaps in the manuscript of the text, and the reconstructions needed to try to fill in as many blanks as possible. Still, there seems to be a gap between what this author considers orthodoxy to teach and what we see in other authors of the second century.

No doubt at least some of this is also due to the unsettled nature of orthodox theology in the second century. While we look back and piece together the commonalities of the writers we have to try to understand what the early church believed, some of the formulations of later times have not yet been worked out. The church, under periodic persecution and with no central organizational structure, was more concerned with survival and evangelism than with producing anything approaching what we might today call a systematic theology.

This fluidity has been used by some to posit that there were multiple Christianities, and that what we today call "orthodoxy" just happened to be the winning form. The authors who contribute essays to the volume I have been reading fall into that camp to a greater or lesser degree. They believe that the Gospel of Judas is a major discovery that shows us what an alternative Christianity looked like.

My take on the presentation of Judas is exactly the opposite. The use of a chronological framework that appears to work around the Passion week accounts of the canonical gospels and the very fact that the author tries to make orthodox thought the foil to the more "exalted" Gnosticism he presents tell me that there was on at least some level an "orthodoxy" that stood opposed to the ideas presented in this treatise. There apparently were some core beliefs that were widespread enough that they touched the locale in which this author wrote.

I don't have the time at present to do so, but it might make for an interesting study (no doubt already done somewhere if I could find it) to try to work out the theology to which the Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic reaction. It certainly appears to me that it is something along the lines of the orthodox, catholic faith we see in the writers of the second century, which was more fully developed in the writings of Irenaeus at the end of that century. It certainly would not be a theology at which Jesus would laugh; I suspect His mirth might be more aptly expressed at those scholars who two millennia later would find a fragmentary Gnostic gospel more exciting than the gospel accounts of Jesus' life.