126 - The Wisdom and Wit of Rabbi Jesus

The Wisdom and Wit of Rabbi Jesus
By William E. Phipps
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1993. 254 pp. $17.99.

The operative question behind this study is "rabbi": Was Jesus of Nazareth just another rabbi of his day and age, or was he a singular figure and perhaps more than another rabbi? William E. Phipps of Davis and Elkins College, well-known for his Was Jesus Married? and many other books, places Jesus squarely within the Jewish community of his time (see in particular chapter four on Jesus as teacher). Much of Phipps's dialectical response to the above problematic is to characterize Jesus as a "prophetic Pharisee," similar in many ways to the Pharisee leaders, different in many other ways (chapter 2). Jesus "defended few novel ideas that had not been accepted by at least some of the Pharisees." The main difference between Jesus and other Pharisees "is in the way they treated outsiders-women, Gentiles, and the am ha-aretz. " Only occasionally in these pages is there any residuum of a traditional ideological disjunction between Jesus and his people, as in the phrasing, "in Jesus' opinion, Jewish legalism and literalism were overlooking the purpose of the Sabbath." The word "Jewish" smacks redundantly of separationism. Again, Phipps gives no place to the New Testament exegesis that sees Jesus as expecting the imminent intervention of God to destroy human tyranny. And one literary lapse is the author's unnecessarily lengthy review of Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, especially since Phipps identifies this as fictionalization to be entirely dismissed.

128 - The Wisdom and Wit of Rabbi Jesus

Rabbi Jesus' wisdom is never dour or dull, and it invariably "dances with wit," as in the whimsy of his parables. He is a master of hyperbole, a skilled humorist, a foe of religious literalism (chapter 3, with special reference to marriage/divorce and to the afterlife), as also of the kind of supernaturalism that makes divine causation contravene "the regular natural order" (chapters 7, 9). "Had Jesus been one more wonder-worker .. . he would not have been revolutionary." The personal weakness in potential teachers that Jesus deplores most is duplicity. His most profound paradox is "about losers who are winners and successful people who have lost themselves." "Humor is the homage that Jesus pays to those who are addicted to piling up perishables"; the "cure for being consumed with personal property is immersing oneself in causes associated with the rule of God." It is in Jesus' parables that we find "the most effective of his varied methods for conveying humor-coated wisdom."

Central to Phipps's analysis is chapter five, "Wry Humor," an area he treats both deductively (Jesus as fully human and thereby possessed of a sense of humor) and inductively (stress upon the particularity of Jesus' self, experiences, and teachings). In the latter connection, the author's treatment of Jesus’ camel and needle hyperbole is a high point. All in all, Jesus-with Jewish tradition as a whole-is a sworn foe of the later Christian notion that "the more solemn, the more holy; the more hilarious, the more profane." At the all-crucial moral level, "Jesus urges his disciples to go beyond prudential ethics and imitate the merciful God."

A major element in Phipp's contribution is his combining of three kinds of sources for assessing Jesus' wisdom and wit: the New Testament and biblical scholars (Günther Bornkamm, Walter Brueggemann, Ernst Käsemann, Bruce Metzger, E. P. Sanders, and Gerd Theissen); representative spokespeople within comedy/humor (Peter Berger, Harvey Cox, William Hazlitt, Conrad Hyers, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Nelvin Voswhose first name is misspelled); and certain philosophical and literary figures who are relevant to his subject (Socrates, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and Mark Twain).

Phipps understands well that authentic humor-contra our TV laugh-track mentality-means infinitely more than something "funny." This is a good solid work, of much aid to general reader and scholar alike. The study is carefully documented, with up-to-date references. For a book of average length, The Wisdom and Wit of Jesus is admirably comprehensive. It combines first-class scholarship with clarity of writing and liveliness of style.

A. Roy Eckardt
Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK