Friday, May 27, 2005
(8:26 PM) | John Emerson:
700-year-old jokes
You’d normally expect a book of wise sayings, stories and jokes by a Christian bishop from thirteenth-century
A man goes to the dentist to have a tooth pulled. The dentist says it will cost $50. “I won’t pay $50!” says the man. “Tell you what,” says the dentist. “I can’t go below $50, but for the same price I’ll pull an extra tooth.”
Mâr Gregory John Abu Faraj Bar Hebraeus (1226–86) was the head of the Jacobite church in Mongol Persia, and one of the great writers and scholars of the Syriac language (which is very closely related to the Aramaic actually spoken by Christ and his disciples). He was learned in Greek, Arabic, and Persian, and even today has half a dozen books in print in Western translations.
Why does a rooster lift one leg when it crows?
-- Because if it lifted both legs, it would fall down.
The Laughable Stories is actually a mix of wisdom literature and jokes. The Mongols were the first universalists and the first multiculturalists, and Bar Hebraeus (whose family was originally Jewish, as his name indicates) included wisdom from the Zoroastrians, the Hindus and Buddhists, the Jews, the Muslims, and the Christians. He also includes many jokes about morons and lunatics (“demoniacs”).
A man saw a moron eating dates, pits and all. “Why are you doing that?” the man asked. “I can’t afford not to -- I bought them by the pound and I paid for the pits too,” replied the moron.
“A man was caught having sex with a ewe, and the judge ordered them both to be stoned to death. Someone said “I understand that the man must be stoned, but why the ewe? She is a dumb animal, incapable of conscious choice in such matters”. The judge sternly replied, “It is important that justice be strict and unvarying. In such a case I must always order the ewe to be stoned, even though she were my own mother or my own sister.”
Bar Hebraeus’ Chronography, one of the major sources on Mongol Persia, is also multi-cultural, relating the histories of the Hebrews, the Chaldaeans, the Medes, the Persians, the pagan Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the Mongols (called "Huns"). Another historian in Mongol Persia, Rashid ad-din, also wrote histories of
A lunatic lifted his eyes to Heaven and asked “Was this the work of a wise Being? O Lord, You have created a multitude of men. But behold, You kill half of them with hunger. How much better would it have been if for every hundred souls You had made just one, for then all men could have lived happily and in abundance.”
Bar Hebraus’s Christianity, as befits his Greek studies, seems to have been of an urbane, rational sort. It seems unlikely, however, that the demoniac’s plea above was meant to be taken at face value. Or this one either:
A moron was saying his prayers in church when he heard the priests saying in their prayers that Christ was crucified to redeem Adam’s sin. “That is unjust”, said the moron. “He who committed the sin should have been crucified.”
The Aramaic Bible of the Eastern Christians is called the Peshitta. It is usually thought to have been translated from Greek, though it would seem more plausible that it was the other way around, as is argued here (WARNING: it’s a pdf file, and not only that, the author gives signs of mild looniness). On the other hand, here is a warning against the fundamentalist-millenarian "Hebrew Roots Movement".
The Laughable Stories by Bar Hebraeus, translated from the Syriac by E. A. Wallis Budge, Luzac, 1897.
The Chronography of Gregory Abu Faraj the Son of Aaron, The Hebrew Physician Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus, tr. E. A. W. Budge, 2 vols. Oxford, 1932.
(A longer version of this is up at my other site.)
