From Democritus and Isaac to Jesus Christ: the laughter in the construction of the Christian's God

We revisit, starting with the Patristic sources, the quaestio disputata of the laughter (or not laughter) of Jesus, in order to establish the role of laughter in the representation of the God of the Christians. In a reaction against the old theologia mythica, the mythology (with the "inexhaustible laughter" of the gods), the Fathers of the Church substantially redefined the status of laughter and humor in Christian life and spirituality. They did so from the exemplum o Jesus and the silences of the Gospels, but also reusing laughter as a border between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the definition of Christology itself. Knowing that the Christ of the Gnostics, like the pagan divinities, laughs much more than the Jesus Christ of the Gospels and of ecclesiastical doctrine, we are interested in establishing how laughter (human or divine?) was used in the elaboration of the diverse Christologies: in a constant tension between the Docetic tendencies that affirm the laughter of Jesus in order to negate his humanity and highlight the otherness of the man Jesus in contrast with the divine Christ (Gnosticism) and the "Catholic" reading that denies the historical Jesus the laughter "proper to man", with the consequent risk of diminishing the real humanity of Christ, which is however underscored in the "tears" and the drama of the Passio.