Q: Did Jesus ever smile or laugh, or was He solemn all the time? I have a friend who’s very solemn, and he says he doesn’t believe in laughing or cracking jokes, because Jesus never laughed, and we ought to be like Jesus. — M.McD.
A: I answered a similar question last week when someone asked what Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus looked like. My answer here is very similar. We can’t know the answer because Jesus is a fictional character. I think it would be a mistake for anyone to base their life on a fictitious person, especially one that advocated cruelty and violence and was highly inconsistent in his advice.
Feel free to leave your answer to this question in the comments.
Advertisements
I have a question for you, it seems you completely dispel the idea of Jesus in his entirety. Do you allow room for perhaps the idea of maybe he did exist, but obviously he was not God’s son/God? I have played with the idea of maybe he did exist, but was a regular guy that did some nice things that people recognized, therefore they wrote a book about him and the concept stuck and was taken a little too seriously.
I’d love to know!
It’s possible the stories of the New Testament were based on a real person and then greatly exaggerated. Since there is no credible evidence of Jesus’ existence outside the bible and the text of the bible is suspect, I guess we’ll never know. However, since the gospels were written decades after Jesus’ supposed death (and since the manuscripts we have were transcribed centuries after his supposed death) it seems that they were written and rewritten to validate a popular myth circulating at the time. I would say there is a remote chance that Jesus was real, so I don’t discount the idea entirely.
I gree with Jeff that the character of Jesus could have been based on an actual person or persons but no doubt exaggerated to great detail – much in the same way that Seinfeld’s Kramer character was based on an actual person, but the character took on it’s own unique persona.
Okay, thank you for your response. 🙂 I feel the same way.