JESUS LAUGHED. Guy G. Stroumsa has an article ("And the traitors will become heroes") in Haaretz on Gnosticism and the Gospel of Judas. It has some interesting ideas, notably about Jesus laughing in Gnostic tradition.

Jesus laughs

A striking characteristic of the new text is the fact that it depicts Jesus as laughing a lot. This is a laughter of superiority and scorn for the blindness of others - including his disciples, who do not understand the essence of things, nor the significance of their acts. This laughter is typical of the figure of the Gnostic Jesus, and is familiar to us from other Gnostic texts, especially those found toward the end of World War II at Nag Hammadi, south of Fayum. The Nag Hammadi "library" is comprised of approximately 50 Gnostic texts in 13 codices in the Coptic language (into which books had been translated from the original Greek). The texts had not been known beforehand.

The discovery at Nag Hammadi, which is similar in importance to the discovery of the scrolls at Qumran, allowed us to understand rather precisely the processes of the emergence of the Gnosis and the details of its extensive mythology. The new text, along with three other texts that were found in the same codex, is a significant addition to the Nag Hammadi discovery.

Jesus laughs at the sight of the stupidity of the "rulers" (Archons) - the angels of evil. These act under the command of the god Saklas (the Fool - related to the Hebrew word ksil), who is the God of Israel, the creator of our material and evil world. Saklas and his cohorts intend to crucify Jesus, but they succeed only in killing the material body, an empty shell that the spiritual redeemer succeeded in exiting before the calamity. Therefore Jesus laughs.

Parallel to Isaac

Some time ago I suggested the hypothesis that Jesus' laughter in the Gnostic texts hints at constructing the figure of Jesus as a parallel to the biblical Isaac (whose name comes from the Hebrew root for laughter), who is also saved at the last minute from an attempt to sacrifice him. The new text supports this hypothesis, both because of the centrality of laughter and because it includes a probing discussion of sacrifice in general, and human sacrifice in particular. The possibility of seeing Jesus as an avatar of Isaac hints that the first Gnostics were Jews, and that at the basis of their interpretation stood the difficulty of acknowledging that the messiah died (and in such a humiliating way). The new discovery helps us draw a more precise picture of the complex religious situation that existed at the inception of Christianity.

Indeed, Jesus never explicitly laughs in the canonical gospels, although he does "rejoice" (Luke 10:21) and he is laughed at once (Mark 5:40). But in the Gospel of Judas he laughs quite a bit, and also elsewhere in Gnostic texts, notably in the Gospel Apocalypse of Peter (NHC VII.3 81), where he laughs from the cross. I'm not sure what to make of all this, although I suppose it must mean something.

That said, I can't say I see anything in Isaac parallels that leads convincingly to a pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism. I myself think that Gnosticism developed within Christianity.

UPDATE: My thanks to Richard Bauckham for the correction above (Apocalypse of Peter not Gospel. The Gospel of Peter is a different, non-Gnostic work.) Also, there are two Apocalypses of Peter, one (the one to which I was referring) survives in a Coptic manuscript from the Nag Hammadi Library and another survives in Greek (in part) and Ethiopic (complete).