700-year-old Syriac Jokes

You’d normally expect a book of wise sayings, stories and jokes by a Christian bishop from thirteenth-century Persia to become a best-seller. Unfortunately E.A. Wallis Budge translated into faux-archaic Victorian, and his education does not seem to have included the concept of a “punch line”, or any idea of what it means to set up a joke. So I’ve rewritten his translations.

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_[1] 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 at least eight books in print in Western translations._[2]

Why does a rooster raise 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." replied the moron. "I bought them by the pound and paid for the pits too.”

Perhaps because of the Enlightenment or the rise of modern science, educated Victorian Brits were more prudish than thirteenth-century Jacobite bishops. So Budge translated all the off-color jokes into Latin -- an opportunity there for a young classicist. The following is not one of the off-color jokes:

“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 would 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 Chaldeans, the Medes, the Persians, the pagan Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, and the "Huns" or Mongols. (Another historian of Mongol Persia, Rashid ad-din, wrote histories of China and Western Europe too). A peculiarity of the Chronography is that it uses two dating systems, the Muslim system and a second system which dated events from the foundation of Alexander’s Greek Empire in Persia, which had been defunct for 1400 years. (Presumably because of their Monophysite Christology, the Jacobites did not start their calendar with the birth of Christ).

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 Malthusian plea above was meant to be taken at face value. Or this one either (though perhaps Monophysite Christology has something to do with it):

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 normally thought to have been translated from the Greek, though it would seem more plausible that it was the other way around, as is argued here. (Warning: it’s a pdf, and the author also gives signs of mild looniness).

NOTE: I have been informed by a reader that at least two of these jokes are still current in Iran. However, I think that I've heard them too, so perhaps they are cultural universals or hardwired into the brain. (I hesitate to mention the Monty Python theory that these jokes were brought to this planet by the same aliens in flying saucers who built the pyramids.)

Further Reading

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.

Bar Hebraeus’ History

Life of Bar Hebraeus

The Peshitta

More on the Syriac churches:

http://sua-online.org/?destiny=sub_re.

NOTES

[1] The Jacobites were among the Eastern Christians who survived in the Persian Empire and elsewhere after they were declared heretics by Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.) They are considered Monophysites, like the Copts and the old Christians of Malabar (Kerala), Armenia, and Ethiopia. A considerable number of Eastern Christians of Middle Eastern origin (Jacobites, Nestorians, and Maronites) live in the U.S., especially near Detroit. (It should be noted that at least some Ethiopians reject the Monophysite label.)

Describing the differences between the Trinitarians, Nestorians, Monophysites, Monothelites, and the lesser groups -- with regard to the relationships between the persons of the Trinity, the nature or natures of Christ, the status of Mary, and the real presence in the sacrament -- would take literally forever, since all these doctrines are paradoxes or miracles and thus completely undecidable. In fact, the term “distinction without a difference” seems as if designed to describe the terminology of these debates, and perhaps Occam’s Razor was specifically intended to end them. Many groups of these groups are further fragmented because some subgroups have affiliated with the Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox while still maintaining aspects of their ancient beliefs and practices.

When the Syrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, or Ethiopian Orthodox are spoken of, the word “Orthodox” is being misused, as though it simply meant “Eastern”. All of these non-trinitarian, non-Chalcedonian churches are heretical according to Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant doctrine. The Christology of these churches is in some respects closest to the that of the Unitarians.

[2] These works include The Chronography of Gregory Abu' Faraj, The Laughable Stories, The Book of the Dove, Grammatica linguae syriacae in metro ephraemeo, Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac, Le Livre de l'ascension de l'esprit sur la forme du ciel et de la terre, Scholia in Psalmum Quintum et Decium Octavum, and Jakobitische Sakramententheologie im 13. Jahrhundert.

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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