Otherwise there is little trace of humour in the New Testament.
St. Paul, one would think, would have had little sympathy with
humorists. He was too fiery, too militant, too much preoccupied
with the working out of his ideas, to have the leisure or the
inclination to take stock of humanity. Indeed I have sometimes
thought that if he had had some touch of the quality, he might have
given a different bias to the faith; his application of the method
which he had inherited from the Jewish school of theology, coupled
with his own fervid rhetoric, was the first step, I have often
thought, in disengaging the Christian development from the
simplicity and emotion of the first unclouded message, in
transferring the faith from the region of pure conduct and sweet
tolerance into a province of fierce definition and intellectual
interpretation.
I think it was Goethe who said that Greek was the sheath into which
the dagger of the human mind fitted best; and it is true that one
finds among the Greeks the brightest efflorescence of the human
mind.
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