Did Jesus Ever Laugh? Thomas More versus Erasmus

According to Thomas More (Renaissance philosopher and author of “Utopia”, an imagined perfect community) Jesus never laughed in the gospels. More (pictured right) thinks that the purpose of this absence of laughter was to show us that this life is a vale of tears: `To prove that this life is no laughing time, but rather the time of weeping, we find that our saviour himself wept twice or thrice, but never find that he laughed as much as once...'

And if you look through the four New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, you will see that Jesus never laughs.

But the four gospels of the New Testament are only a fraction of the gospels written to recount Jesus’ life – they are the Canonical Gospels. However, in addition to these there are numerous Gnostic Gospels, written in the centuries after Jesus’ death, but rejected as unsatisfactory by the Church authorities. In one of these, "The Gospel of Judas" Jesus laughs four times - and he laughs at his disciples, because they have distorted his message and got it so wrong. "Master, why are you laughing at us?" asks Judas. It turns out that only Judas truly understood Jesus' teachings, according to this gospel. Apparently the Gospel of Judas interprets Judas Iscariot’s "betrayal" of Jesus as not a betrayal at all, but rather as an act of obedience to the instructions of Jesus - because Jesus required a second agent to set in motion a course of events which he had planned. According to this gospel, Judas Iscariot was a hero, rather than a betrayer, and the other four gospels maligned him.

Thomas More's friend, the famous Renaissance humanist Erasmus, had a different view of Jesus. He believed that Jesus was an Epicurean. Recall that few were more despised and mistrusted by Christians than the godless, materialist, hedonist Epicurus, who languishes in the sixth circle of Dante's hell. Epicureans think that pleasure is all that is ulitmately of real value for human beings. And here is what Erasmus says about Jesus:

"If people who live agreeably are Epicureans, none are more truly Epicurean than the righteous and godly. And if it's names that bother us, no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of Christian philosophy Christ, for in Greek epikouros means `helper'. He alone, when the law of Nature was all but blotted out by sins, when the law of Moses incited to lists rather than cured them, when Satan ruled in the world unchallenged, brought timely aid to perishing humanity. Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ's having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismal mode of life. On the contrary, he alone shows the most enjoyable life of all and the one most full of true pleasure."

Literary Bluffers and Show-offs. Exhibit A: Nabokov

I like simple styles. As Stendhal says “Only great minds can afford a simple style”. So I am suspicious of people who write “dazzling” prose in an affected manner. You know the type. Those writers for whom style is so much more important than substance; those show-offs for whom the way something is said is so much more important than the thing which is said; those little boys who always seem to be trying just a bit too hard to impress us with the cleverness of their sentences. Even when they have little or nothing to say, by God they intend to say it, and they intend to say it brilliantly.

AA Gill (right) does it wonderfully, despite his dyslexia. He’s the best thing you will find in the Sunday papers. Martin Amis (below) tries to do it, but doesn’t quite pull it off, which is a bit embarrassing for everyone involved. Then there is Clive James. John Banville is another one. We’ll go easy on him because he’s Irish. Taking it up a notch, there is Saul Bellow. And then perhaps Joyce, when he gets a bit carried away. And Vladimir Nabokov (above). Ah Nabokov. Don’t like him at all. Never liked him. Never really read him. So the other day I picked up “Transparent Things”, and started to read it so that I could scoff at it.

And?

Well. I had to quickly engage in one of my characteristic 180 degree pivots. The writing is just amazing. Stunning. You have to take off your hat. How can someone write like that? It’s the literary equivalent of watching Lionel Messi playing football. How did he do that? You can even see the effects of reading Nabokov on this blog, as I try to be all clever in my prose. Now, you won’t have read “Transparent Things”, it being one of his lesser known works (and it wouldn’t do at all for me to be reading something well-known by him, would it? Oh no. I just had to come up with something impressively obscure). But you will all have heard of “Lolita”:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

You are now nodding your head and muttering “great opening” to yourself. How about this opening line from another of his novels, “Pale Fire”:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the window pane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky

I don’t know what this means, and neither do you, but it sounds cool doesn’t it? Every so often a bit of fancy writing doesn’t go astray. If you can recommend any more stylish writing of this sort, then please let me know.