Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Humor Of Jesus Of Nazareth, Donald W. Viney

Faculty Submissions

As Rudolf Bultmann advocated demythologization to separate the message of Jesus from outdated cultural forms in which it was expressed, so I advocate what I call desobrietization to discover the humor that Jesus used that has been lost because of translation, prosy interpreters, and preconceived ideas about what it is to be divine. Without pretending to recover the actual words of Jesus, one may nevertheless hear the authentic voice of Jesus and therein detect his wit. One discovers the humor of Jesus in his use of exaggeration, satire, sarcasm, plays on words, and irony. Irony is especially important for it …