The biblical gospels were all originally anonymous? How historically plausible is that?

Some assert that the gospels were originally anonymous, but does that notion need to be rethought? Allow me to explain why there are grounds to open up that question, and to conclude that claim is not so historically plausible. 

Most secular scholars would assert that the gospels would probably have been technically anonymous from the first, but only technically in the sense that authors' names might not have been physically tagged to the scrolls the gospels were written on (leaving open the possibility, however, that that people did actually know what authors wrote them). Some scholars go further and assert that there were no such tags and also no-one ever did know who wrote them either, but that argument ends up being very complicated. That's the issue that this blog is about.

So, I'm going to focus on the question in what I call "the big sense" and the "technical" sense. Were the gospels originally anonymous in the big sense that no-one knew who amongst their fellow Christians was writing the gospels that were appearing? And were the gospels originally anonymous in the technical sense of being passed around without anything to say who wrote them?

In looking into this, we have to ask: from the first days of the gospels, did the conditions exist in which it was possible for the authors to remain anonymous among fellow Christians, and did the conditions exist to make it likely that they actually remained so. And did the conditions exist where it mattered whether or not the gospels were passed around without anything to say who wrote them? Did the existing conditions make it more likely that provenance was needed, or more likely that it was not needed? 

This blog is my response to those questions for readers to consider. I’ve been been deep in reading academic work in this area for some years, and I commend this simple thread of argument to anyone who is willing to think it through.

I’ll do another set of posts to address how very complicated some scholars can make their claim of total anonymity in both the big sense and the technical sense. But here, things will be kept simpler, and run against the idea of anonymity.

Literacy

Amongst scholars, it is generally recognised that literacy rates were low in the first century world of the early church. The larger percentage of people in the Roman world in those days could write their name. A smaller percentage could read at least basic official documents. A smaller percentage still could read religious texts. There would also be copyists who could copy out a book letter by letter, not necessarily with great style - think of "scribes" - they could copy a book, and might be able to write basic documents or letters. Some might have the natural talent to be able to develop from there to something more creative. (In the ancient world, a lot of natural talent would have gone untapped though.) A smaller percentage, really few, still could write literature of a more than basic standard, such as the texts compiled in the New Testament. Not all scribes had the training and skill to write a book of their own - that was relatively rare. This has a real bearing on whether the conditions existed for anonymity for book writers.

Your small pool of writers

If you lived in a church community two millennia ago, it probably would not have been huge. It might have been a house church. In the first century, there were not millions of Christians. There were not even hundreds of thousands. There were just thousands, scattered pretty thinly. At one point, there may have been a few thousand in Jerusalem, but elsewhere house churches were common. In your small-ish Christian community - in Rome or Syria or wherever - you knew the names of the literate people, because there wouldn't be many of them, and you needed to know who they were. When they stood up and read from a scroll, that was a dead giveaway. But you would know anyway. People needed to know. They needed someone to read official documents to them. Literate people were of even greater value to the community if they had the additional ability to write for official purposes or to write letters for people. It would be selfish (and implausible) to keep it a secret that two or three people in a community could write, or write well. Their writing services were needed, to write ordinary letters on behalf of other people to take from one place to another, and so on. You needed to know who these people were. You did know who they were. If they were of greater literary ability, the fact could not be hidden.

It any small community, such as an early Christian community, only a small number of people had the education and ability to create something as sophisticated as a gospel.

If you were in a community in which, say, only a few people had the level of literacy to write a book of some quality, and a book was written, the author was known to you. There was no anonymity in a close community. Let’s say it was a Jewish community, and in it only a minority were Christians, and maybe only two of them could write something as sophisticated as a gospel, then it is even more obvious that the author in your community was known to you. There was no anonymity for them. If you were in a small Christian community in which the only two people with significant literacy were, say, Luke and Paul, and one of them wrote a gospel, then everyone knew which of them wrote it. There was no hiding. If it was Luke who wrote it, you – as a member of that small community - knew it was Luke.

So, all in all, it is difficult to say convincingly that the conditions ever existed in which it was possible for the authors to remain anonymous among fellow Christians. Even if the background conditions needed for anonymity had existed, and I can't see that, I still don't see how the balance of probabilities would make such personal anonymity more likely than not in light of what we know about these communities. It's interesting that scholars often make the point that few in the first Christian communities would be literate, and yet rarely make the logical step from there to the realisation that authors in such communities could hardly remain anonymous.

In conclusion, the conditions did exist for the authors' identities to actually be known in their Christian communities, and for that to be the most likely situation. Anonymity in the "big sense" is highly unlikely.

Now we must turn to the "technical" sense of anonymity - whether conditions existed where it mattered whether or not the gospels were passed around without anything to say who wrote them. That is, did conditions in those early church communities make it more likely that provenance was needed, or more likely that it was not needed?

Tags in the library

To start with, let’s move on from writers to readers. If you were in one of the first century church communities, and you had sufficient literacy to read a book such as a gospel, it wouldn’t be the only book in your whole world.

In Luke’s community in particular, you would be aware that you had at least one more gospel, because Luke adapted parts of Mark’s Gospel in writing his own. So you have to count both of them as being in the possession of Luke's community. And he possibly used Matthew’s Gospel too.  Imagine being in a church community in the first century, in Luke's community, with two or three of these gospels in a little library of scrolls and parchments, and they would be there together simply because of Luke using one or two gospels in the process of writing his own. Think about that. As soon as Luke finished writing his gospel, it logically meant that Luke’s group now had two or three gospels. The community already, here in the first century, is in possession of two (Luke and Mark) or three (Luke, Matthew and Mark) gospels. That means you somehow have to tell apart two or more things that look similar.

(It is amazing to me to see reputable scholars supposing that only in the second century did a multiple-gospel library exist, at the same time as arguing that Luke in the first century possessed Mark's, without seeing the inherent contradiction in those two positions.)

Now imagine you are a reader in this community with a shelf of scrolls including two such gospels as well as, say, Daniel and the Psalms. As a reader, how do you know which scroll is which? Which is Mark, which is Luke, which is Daniel? What are the others? Easy. You tag them. The old way, the same as the other scrolls on the shelf.

Sending out tagged copies

Next step. Let’s say you lack ability to write a gospel, but you are a copyist, with adequate literacy to copy a gospel out by hand, letter by letter. In that case, you are an important community asset as a copyist. Imagine a message comes to you to copy one of the gospels by hand, say Luke’s Gospel. How do you identify the right one to copy - say, Luke rather than Mark? Easy. The scroll is tagged.

And suppose you are making a copy of Luke’s Gospel, which you know is for the purpose of it being sent to another church to add to its small collection of scrolls. Naturally, they need to know what it is when they receive it. What does the copyist do? Naturally, the copyist does the same as he found in the library where he is based, and tags the one he sends out, e.g. simply “Luke”, to put next to their “Daniel”.

This is even more the case if you are asked to copy more than one scroll in your little library to be taken to another church’s little library. How will the receiving church identify which is which when receiving them? They will not want to be muddled. You tag them before the carrier takes them all off you.

Staying "on message"

Next, crucially, imagine the purpose for which the gospel scrolls are being sent from place to place. They are typically being sent out to be read to another congregation, sent as authoritative normative church teaching. Let’s say a gospel is being sent from Rome to Antioch. On what basis would the Antioch church receive it and use it as authoritative normative teaching? Provenance. Vital teaching such as a gospel needed provenance in the first churches, and saying something like “Mark wrote down Peter’s teaching. Read it to the congregation in Antioch” would suffice. If it had no provenance, then it instantly loses any such authoritative status at the receiving church.

You wouldn’t risk wasting something so important, produced at a high cost (materials) and with such labour involved. You would make sure it was received with confidence, and would be used. How do you make that happen?

Bear in mind that the gospels were not mass-produced for commercial sale by street traders. The gospels were for insiders, a means of message control within Christian communities, in the nicest sense. Message control in a brand new movement doesn't work without something to back it up that everyone respected.

Control was particularly important for a new movement. (Being new, they didn't have the luxury of relying on a teaching guaranteed by many centuries of history.) The gospels were new. Their message to the churches was barely a few decades old. In a new movement, you are vulnerable to loss of control of direction, and you take measures to address the risk. How will you try to address it? (If you are in doubt about the risk, look at the tension and stress in Paul’s letters when he has heard that churches seem to be departing from a teaching that he personally gave them. Or look at the letters to Timothy which emphasise the need to safeguard the message and pass it on as received. Control was intrinsic to spreading their movement successfully, and keeping the community together.)

Letters of introduction/authority

So how was authority asserted? Actually, we know of a key way it was done. In the early church, authority was asserted by turning up in person and/or by writing letters by named parties. Authority is only possible with provenance. Peter couldn’t turn up in person everywhere. Letters were crucial. If Barnabas turned up in Antioch saying, ‘Peter told me to tell you something,’ it might not work. Hearsay might not be accepted as good enough for a crucial message. If Barnabas turned up in Antioch with a letter of commendation signed by Peter, now you’re talking.

So back to the gospels. You have an important document produced with great labour and expense by one of the important rare people who could write a book, and copied at the cost of more time and money, carried to a church by hand. It is meant to keep church teaching on message, with authoritative provenance, so that it cuts the ice. What is the actual evidence that letters were used that way?

The author of Luke’s Gospel and Acts reveals to us all about letters of commendation, and authority (Acts 18:27, 15:22-23, 9:1-2 - see below). Paul reveals it plainly too. That’s how it was done. Letters gave authority, provenance and approval, to safeguard the message being received by one church from another. The networks of churches were keen on control in the nicest possible sense, as said, even more so when the mother church in Jerusalem still existed and had to be respected as the mother church; and it mattered all the more when the number of Christian voices was multiplying. Maintaining knowledge of the provenance of the gospels - valuable crucial normative material - was one such means of message control. Anonymity undermines control. Provenance assures it. 

We know that letters of commendation (written on papyrus) existed but have not survived, worn out or crumbled to dust after 2,000 years in the middle east climate. But evidence they existed is abundant. Here are examples from Luke’s Acts 18:27, 15:22-23, 9:1-2:

• Acts 18:27: “And when he wished to cross to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him.”
• Acts 15:22-23: “They sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leading men among the brothers, with the following letter: “The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the brothers who are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings...””

It was not a Christian invention, this practice. Luke tells us that it was already a practice known in the Jewish synagogues:

• Acts 9:1-2 “But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus”.

Here are other examples from Paul’s letters:

• 2 Corinthians 3:1 - “do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you?” (So here, we see that Paul was writing to people he knew and so did not want to have to use a letter of approval to give him the right to continue teaching them. Whereas other Christian teachers were clearly travelling with letters of commendation, their passport to a church audience.)
• 1 Corinthians 16:3: “I will give letters of introduction to the men you approve and send them with your gift to Jerusalem.” (This is how money was sent from one church to another.) cf 2 Kings 5:5-6.

And there is obvious evidence that important messages to churches could be circulated by letters:

• Colossians 4:16 – “After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.”
• 1 Thessalonians 5:27 – “I charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers and sisters.”

This was also true in pre-Christian times. See for example Nehemiah 2:7. Letters of authority were part of the modus operandi of church structure and teaching in those times, and the evidence for that is abundant. 

Since Luke, the author of Acts, advertises the importance  of letters of approval and authority (see the quotes from Acts above), it is highly improbable that he (or his fellow church members) would splash around copies of his gospel without using the same method when despatching them, if they were meant to be used authoritatively to control teaching in churches. What we nowadays call "covering letters." Gospels laboriously and expensively copied were far too important for their authority to be left to chance.

Dating the chain

Since Luke’s community was obviously in possession of Mark and Luke’s Gospels, and possibly Matthew too, it is no stretch to picture copies of Mark, Luke, or all three, being made and circulated from that community, with tags to tell them apart and letters of authority citing their provenance and commending them for church use all make sense of the picture. All in the latter half of the first century, note. That dating is significant for the next link in the chain.

Message control doesn't begin and end with the first generation of copies, or the first planting of churches. Control is an ongoing factor. If it was needed in the 60s of the first century, then it was also needed in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. Continuously, in other words.  The early church was a continuous project. The need for control doesn't disappear as time goes on. If anything, the need for it increases, as the number of voices in Christian networks grows.

We have extra evidence that provenance mattered from another witness – at just the right time. Still in the second half of the first century, in the latter part of it, a young man was gathering sayings of Jesus. In the early part of the second century, he wrote up his findings. His name was Papias, and we have his words.

His interest in provenance is famous. He was writing a book of sayings of Jesus and he knew that it would cut the ice with nobody unless it had provenance for the sayings. Provenance mattered earlier, and it still mattered. Papias sought out oral and written tradition of Jesus’ sayings. He explained his way of getting provenance for them:

‘If, then, any one came, who had been a follower of the elders, I questioned him in regard to the words of the elders — what Andrew or what Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the disciples of the Lord, and what things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say.’

And:

‘This also the presbyter said: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ.

And:

‘So then Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able.’

When Papias was researching, in the second half of the first century, he was in a world where he could research sayings on the basis of provenance. 

So he is provenancing both written and orally transmitted sayings. Why? As indicated, Papias was compiling a five-volume book of Jesus’ sayings (‘logia’ in Greek), and he obviously wanted it to be authoritative. For this purpose, Papias’ interest in gospels was that they were one of the sources (along with oral tradition) from which he could extract sayings of Jesus, and publish them himself. (He possibly thought his compilation of sayings was more important than the gospels!) (I am dealing with the complexities of Papias' evidence in a separate post.)

The point is this: in the second half of the first century, the church employed a system of assuring control by use of letters of authority conveying clear provenance and approval.

Matthew and Mark’s Gospels were research materials for his books. It makes sense that he mentions these two. Here's why. Matthew’s Gospel is partly copied from Mark's. Therefore, Matthew’s community had at least two gospels – Matthew and Mark - so they existed together. And – lo and behold – Papias has got the provenance of two gospels that existed together. Two facts that fit together. 

Conclusion

Historical context: a small pool of known writers in the community, identification of multiple scrolls, the need for authoritative normative message control, control of church direction, meeting the need for provenance, commendation, authority, historical chain – there are multiple sound reasons why the conditions existed for the gospels to have originally been issued with provenance, not anonymously, and for why knowledge of author-identity couldn't just disappear into thin air in no time at all. Every step of this chain indicates things that had to happen as a practical necessity.

Epilogue

In my studies, I have seen entirely speculative scenarios that need not of necessity happened at all, stringing together things that have no obvious causal connection. Are these rival theories about the gospel authors’ names complicated? Oh, yes! But this needs examination, and I will do so in other posts, looking at such cases.

They will examine questions about how a Galilean fisherman could be behind a sophisticated gospel such as John. It’s a good question. And some scholars will muddy the waters by speaking of 'formal anonymity' which is something different from the matters presented above. Further posts will address such things.

See also: Who authored the gospels?

What does Luke reveal about himself in Luke-Acts?

It’s a fascinating thing to read people’s autobiographical revelations about themselves, and to find out what interesting times they have seen as eyewitnesses. That’s of special interest when it comes to the stories of eyewitnesses of the early church. In passing in his eyewitness account, New Testament author Luke gives us glimpses of his life. He makes appearances in the action in the Book of Acts (a history of the early church).

His name has always been associated with this book as its author as far back as anyone knows. Luke was sufficiently known in close-knit circles of co-religionists that people in those circles would know that he was a writer, and very likely some in these circles read his gospel. If scholars are right that literacy levels were low in Christian communities, Luke’s name would be in only a small pool or writers, and the risk of mis-identification would be low in his lifetime.

Anyway, here is a brief summary of what Luke reveals about himself (not intended to be comprehensive), with some of his own words to give a flavour of it. What I would draw attention to is that the self-characterisation of the author as eyewitness is consistent and coherent.

About Luke, as revealed by Luke-Acts in Luke:1-4 and Acts 1:1; Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16

A WRITER

·         Luke was active in the middle of the first century AD, writing about events of that period.

·         He was educated (he could read and write Greek quite well).

·         He was part of circles that included literate co-religionists (e.g. Paul, and others who could write Paul’s letters when he dictated them, and others who could read them to churches). An impression of the type of group we might envisage is in 2 Timothy 4: “Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry. Tychicus I have sent to Ephesus. When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.”

·         Luke’s writing evidences personal knowledge of Old Testament scriptures.

·         He had read Mark’s Gospel and very possibly Matthew too.

·         He wrote a Gospel and Acts: “it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you”; He introduces his second book, Acts, this way: “In the first book… I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach…”

·         He was writing for someone called Theophilus, but for a wider circle too, given that his books were more widely circulated.

·         He personally regarded Mark (and Matthew if he read it) as authorised normative texts for the church, given that he uses and adapts so much of it, and refers to it as material sourced from eyewitnesses and servants of the word”.

·         He was a believer in Jesus, the main subject of his writing, and he was committed to supporting the church, his main subject in Acts.

·         He was fascinated by legal proceedings as a subject to write about in more detail than other things.

PEOPLE HE KNEW

·         He was a trusted member of a travelling group of missionaries in the Jesus-movement.

·         He was widely travelled around Mediterranean regions, including Jerusalem and Rome: “at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly”; “And so we came to Rome”.

·         As part of the travelling group, he was known among close-knit circles of co-religionists in Philippi, Troas, Miletus, Tyre, Ptolemais, Caesarea, Sidon, Puteoli, as well as Jerusalem and Rome (see Acts 16-28).

·         Luke knew the apostle Paul personally, and also met James and other leaders of the Jerusalem church, the mother church of Christianity: “at Jerusalem… Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present”.

·         Luke knew other eyewitnesses of Jesus “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them [material for writing gospels] to us”

·         They evangelised women as well as men: “We sat down and began to speak to the women”.

TRAVEL

·         His location is Troas, when Luke first reveals that he has joined up with the travelling missionaries (Acts 16:8-10).

·         Luke was a frequent traveller by sea with his fellow missionaries.

·         He was strong enough to get from shipwreck to shore by improvised means: “He [the centurion] ordered those who could swim to jump overboard first and get to land. The rest were to get there on planks or on other pieces of the ship. In this way everyone reached land safely.”

·         Places visited – as well as those listed above he passed through Samothrace, Assos, Mitylene, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, Patara, Myra, Malta, Syracuse, and Rhegium.

·         His location is Rome, when Luke ceases to reveal where he is present (Acts 28:16).

FELLOWSHIP

·         He was keen on church unity.

·         Luke, with the other missionaries, would seek Christian company on their travels, meeting up with both men and women. For example:

o   “We sought out the disciples there and stayed with them seven days”

o   “we greeted the brothers and sisters“

o   “at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly”

o   “we found some brothers and sisters who invited us to spend a week with them”

STATUS

He was willing to be part of the unusually class-defying socially-mixed world of Christian communities, from the wealthier circumstances of the house of a cloth dealer where a room could maybe pack in 120 people at a squeeze; to the not-wealthy densely populated urban setting of a third storey flat (the second floor to English readers) where a meeting could squeeze in maybe up to 40 people in a room so packed that people are sat on the window-sill.

RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES

·         Luke kept some Jewish observances and knew about the Jewish calendar:

o   “On the Sabbath we went… where we expected to find a place of prayer”

o   “by now it was after the Day of Atonement”

·         He also kept some Christian observances: “On the first day of the week we came together to break bread”.

·         He was keen on prayer: “on the beach we knelt to pray”.

SUPERNATURAL

·        As was normal for writers of his time, Luke believed in the supernatural. He believed in receiving guidance from God: “we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”

·         He presents himself as a witness to, or believer in, the supernatural:

o   “Paul had seen the vision”

o   “we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future”

o   “we… stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven. He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.”

o   “a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. Coming over to us… said, “The Holy Spirit says…”

o   “we came together to break bread… [the young man] fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “He’s alive!” Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate.”

The scholar Luke Timothy Johnson persuasively argues these points about the authenticity of the “we” passages:

• sometimes the author is without Paul. In some places, “we” excludes Paul, distinguishing Luke’s group from Paul: so it is not as if the narrator is saying “we” just to make an emphatic noise about his relationship to Paul. And it also means that the “we” passages cannot be dismissed as a literary device to give Paul’s perspective.
• the “we” is not ever-present in the book, so it has the ring of truth. For example, the “we” drops off at Philippi and reappears later, in a way that is just matter-of-fact and sporadic – not the mark of someone bigging up his attachment to Paul (Luke Timothy Johnson, cited in Early Christian Writings.)

These are the things that Luke reveals most directly about himself. They go some way to telling us what kind of person he was, and what he saw in the early church. Enough has been said above to give a flavour of what Luke reveals autobiographically about himself.

Postscript: Luke is mentioned by name in these letters: Colossians 4:14; 2 Timothy 4:11; and Philemon 1:24 (setting aside for the moment discussion of who authored these). He may also be alluded to by 2 Corinthians 8:18 and 12:18.

He may also be in view as Lucius in Romans 16:21 (according to Origen’s reading of it). It is not known if this is the same person as Lucius of Cyrene who seems to appear in both Acts 11:19-20; 13:1.

Footnote:

Luke Timothy Johnson makes these points about the authenticity of the “we”, of the author being a companion of Paul:

• sometimes the author is without Paul. In some places, “we” excludes Paul, distinguishing Luke’s group from Paul: so it is not as if the narrator is saying “we” just to make an emphatic noise about his relationship to Paul. And it also means that the “we” passages cannot be dismissed as a literary device to give Paul’s perspective.
• the “we” is not ever-present in the book, so it has the ring of truth. For example, the “we” drops off at Philippi and reappears later, in a way that is just matter-of-fact and sporadic – not the mark of someone bigging up his attachment to Paul (Luke Timothy Johnson, cited in Early Christian Writings.)

From Abraham and Sarah to French and Saunders: Comedy's Ethics

May I let you into a secret? I had a dream. I would be a stand-up comedian, clowning in the limelight, adored by audiences. Their laughter would ripple in waves down to the front row. Then, in front of real audiences, my eyes were opened and I was but a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

I had no shame. I didn’t need the audience to laugh with me, so long as I could at least get them to laugh, even at me. That’ll do nicely. At one gig, my opening joke was met by a room of swelling silence. Quick as a flash in the pan, I quipped, “Okay it was a crap gag but you’ve got to start somewhere”. They loved it. Bolder again, I launched into my rehearsed routines. The laughter disappeared, as if in a puff of magic smoke, leaving me alone on stage.

I'd known the self-deprecating stuff went down well with audiences for some time. I had been in a double act where I loaded the script with self-mockery, only to see it being struck out when my comedy partner marked my drafts studiously. He said very seriously that if we invited people to think we’re rubbish, they would do. Who can you laugh at? What can you laugh at? The ethics of comedy start at home.

Laughter sets our sympathies on a roadmap. Laughter at those less fortunate than ourselves caused the great thinkers of old to spill much ink. Their questions abound. What do we think of someone who laughs at the tottering pensioner inching her paisley trolley to the corner shop? Is it safer to laugh at the drunk who can no longer remember how to act appropriately in front of a policeman? Who decides when it’s okay that something is seen to be funny? Are we embarrassed to laugh at those less fortunate? Why?

Embarrassment at our own laughter is nothing new. Take the father of the Jews, Abraham. Be careful who or what you laugh at, according to the Bible. God told Abraham that his elderly wife Sarah would bear a son, on hearing which “Abraham fell on his face and laughed”! She meanwhile said she didn’t laugh, and God more or less said, “Oh yes, you did!” God delivers the elderly couple a son like a punch-line. Abraham showed that he now knew better, choosing for the son a name that means “he laughs” (Isaac).

The art of humour is to direct laughter in fresh directions.

Life in some places, communist states for instance, while barely a laughing matter, does seem to produce some good jokes aimed at the powerful by the powerless, taking the ruling elite down a peg or two. Laughter is therapy for the powerless, especially when it’s forced underground. It is so potent that the powerful dread it. We all know this. Afraid of the bank manager? - consider him a fat man slipping on a banana skin. Laughter dictates that he won’t command the same fear anymore. Open your mouth to laugh and you’ll swallow a fresh perspective. Laughter is powerful, and derision difficult to recover from. The powerful worry about it, it impinges on their airbrushed image, their controlled PR machine, it upsets their propaganda and their pretensions. Money and power can’t inure them from its potency.

In 1980s Britain a new wave of comedians voiced the ethical concerns of their generation. The ‘alternative’ comedy agenda in the UK, purporting to be a non-sexist and non-racist brand, went off in search of new targets, everything from the children’s books of Enid Blyton to the Thatcher government, even aiming at its own audience when no jokes were to be found elsewhere. Comedians who were deemed sexist (Benny Hill) or racist (Bernard Manning) found that television didn’t want them any more.

In time the new wave of comics found themselves heckled by the ethical thinkers whose aspirations they had previously embodied. No-one judged Britain’s top female duo, French and Saunders, so harshly as feminists. The feminists took as betrayal the sight of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders lampooning women in the day of oppression. The more po-faced that the complaining feminists appeared, the less fashionable they seemed to become in the day of fun. Laughter brought the news with a potent clarity that some feminists seemed taken aback by.

Though the ethical fervour of 1980s comedy dimmed, it changed the comedy landscape, making way for different attitudes and targets, and even paved the way for the Dawn French comedy “The Vicar of Dibley” to publicise the Make Poverty History campaign in quite a serious way.

But we still find it easy to laugh at much the same things as we ever did. We know this because the ancient Greeks left their mark on the comedy landscape. The Greek philosophers were fascinated by the power of laughter. Aristotle famously observed that man is the only animal that laughs. Tickle a giraffe, or play a practical joke on a camel, if confirmation be needed.

The Greek philosophers, like the feminists, became quite worried about public laughter. It presents problems for anyone trying to construct an ideal civilisation.

When the populace was laughing instead of taking its leaders seriously the philosophers fretted. Instead of joining in the laughter, they got more serious. They, like the feminists, sought to legislate the problem by asserting moral authority. They recognised the problem that high spirits and mockery are a potent combination, as unwelcome to them as it is unwelcome to the teacher in the classroom.

Plato had a Platonic relationship with laughter - so far and no further. He was all for refined wit. It had a place in his ideal civilisation. The raucous laughter of the unschooled masses on the other hand did not. He considered unrestrained laughter an enemy of the state, as it could so easily undermine political correctness.

So the Greeks began to strip the object of study, laughter, down to its basic components and then to build it up again to new heights. What is laughter? What is it for? And ought we really to do something about it?

Aristotle took Plato’s ideas and colonised the ancient Greek theatre with them. Theatre up till then had been a happy place for the masses. Lots of crowd participation, lots of noise, frankly rude humour, and laughter at many a target. A bit like pantomime. The afflicted were often the butt of the joke. How the philosophers winced. Aristotle moved in. His influence matured humour into the art of rhetoric. Carefully scripted comedy was performed from a raised stage while the masses were expected to sit quietly and listen to the clever jokes. Nicomachean Ethics anyone?

The invective of much comedy shocked Aristotle. Comedy should not cause real pain to its targets, he taught. The butt of the joke should be able to enjoy it too, taught Plutarch. By all means ridicule faults and failings but don’t go beyond good taste. A bald man with a bent nose was in their sights for ridicule, a blind or deaf person was not. Consider what promotes civil unity, the philosophers insisted. Political correctness to you and me.

We have our own pretensions. Is civilisation itself a tottering statue at which laughter chips away? Is that a clue why we are embarrassed to be caught laughing at the vulnerable?

The classical dichotomy of the safe and the subversive was made concrete by two Latin writers, Horatius and Juvenal. Horatius wrote humorous Odes that suggested he saw the world as a benign but ridiculously funny place, a bit like a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. For Juvenal on the other hand, imperial Rome was a bitter experience to be torn apart by his comic teeth, to such a degree that you wonder if he didn’t enjoy life every much, a bit like the late chain-smoking Bill Hicks.

To this day, that classical split broadly persists in comedy. Which is more ethical? Sharp-edged satire that shows up the status quo as a down-and-out dressed in filthy rags? Or light entertainment that peace-loving citizens do not find disturbing? The unbalanced prophet or the well-mannered wit?

Ironically, in the wake of Aristotle, neither style won in the Greek theatres. Perhaps it was a case of ‘a plague on both your houses’. Ribald, carnival-like fun returned to town. Forget institutionalised ethics, pantomime was back. A new breed, the Mimes, had their finger on the comic pulse. The auteurs of their day, they burst onto the stage with a mission to entertain. Just what the philosophers dreaded.

Next time you are leafing through the TV guide for something to make you laugh, it might strike you that the debates of old are being played out today in the schedules, the safe and the subversive thoughtfully vying for place, only to lose out to the carnival of pantomime. Anyone for Big Brother?

This article was first published in www.sublimemagazine.com